AND ON ONE OF MR GROTE'S CANONS OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM. 429 



finder ; his scheme in this introductory chapter does not in any wise require 

 that he should give a perfect account of the rise and growth, and complete 

 development of the Spartan commonwealth, but only that he should show how, 

 in the result, it has found itself very far removed from the model commonwealth, 

 which Xenophon, Plato, and other anti-Athenian laudators upheld it to be. 

 " By their fruits ye shall know them." If the harvest has brought forth rotten 

 apples, the spring may have been genial, — we are not careful to inquire about 

 that ; but there must have been something wrong somewhere, either in the seed 

 or in the summer. And not only does the philosopher content himself with indi- 

 cating what time has shown to be rotten in the Spartan constitution, but he 

 incidentally drops a remark, which receives its full significance only on the sup- 

 position of an original state of things altogether different from that which he is 

 criticising. For, while discussing the point of the undue accumulation of landed 

 property in his time, he blames the legislator for forbidding or discouraging the 

 sale of lands by the hereditary holder, while at the same time, he allowed them 

 freely to pass from family to family by testamentary conveyance — a liberty by 

 which his prohibition was rendered in a great measure nugatory. Now, this 

 remark plainly implies the existence, in ancient times, of a state of things in 

 which every Spartan citizen, like the old Hebrew yeoman, had his own ancestral 

 allotment of a certain moderate size — for there is no need of supposing mathe- 

 matical equality — which, through the operation of an ill-regulated law of succes- 

 sion, as Aristotle thought, had in the course of time produced the monstrous 

 accumulation of property in a few hands which he considers so pernicious. 



The evidence of the great Encyclopsedic philosopher being thus placed, as it is 



hoped, in perfect harmony with the testimonies of Plutarch and Polybius, the 



other witnesses, on whom the English historian founds his sceptical views, may 



be shortly dismissed. Their weight in the present question in fact amounts to 



nothing more than this, that certain authors, who might have been expected to 



allude to the Agrarian laws of Sparta, say nothing about them. But this sort of 



evidence, or rather want of evidence, in the case of writers who are not writing 



formal treatises on the Spartan polity, proves nothing. A modern writer, for 



instance, might say many true things of the social state of modern France, and 



yet not once allude to the very important matter of the compulsory division of 



j landed property in that country after the demise of the holder. Not a few things 



in ancient writers about ancient matters are not mentioned, simply because they 



, were so well known as not to require to be spoken about. A striking proof of 



, this occurs, I think, in the Panathenaic oration of Isocrates, which contains a 



I detailed comparison of Sparta and Athens, but where the Agrarian laws are 



alluded to only incidentally in a Isingle clause, which Mr Grote has somewhat 



strangely overlooked : nay, rather he quotes a passage from the oration which, 



next to the evidence of Aristotle, seems to make most in favour of his sceptical 



VOL. XXIII. part III. 6 A 



