The equality of one generation cannot be transmitted to another.

It may be easy to prevent a great accumulation of wealth, but what can prevent poverty?
While the acquisition of lands by purchase was forbidden, no check was imposed on its acquisition by gift or testament; and in the time of Aristotle land had become the monopoly of the few.

Sparta, like other states, had consequently her inequalities--her comparative rich and her positive poor--from an early period in her known history.

As land descended to women, so marriages alone established great disparities of property.

"Were the whole territory," says Aristotle, "divided into five portions, two would belong to the women." The regulation by which the man who could not pay his quota to the syssitia was excluded from the public tables, proves that it was not an uncommon occurrence to be so excluded; and indeed that exclusion grew at last so common, that the public tables became an aristocratic instead of a democratic institution.
Aristotle, in later times, makes it an objection to the ephoral government that poor men were chosen ephors, and that their venality arose from their indigence--a moral proof that poverty in Sparta must have been more common than has generally been supposed [142];--men of property would not have chosen their judges and dictators in paupers.
Land was held and cultivated by the Helots, who paid a certain fixed proportion of the produce to their masters.