While it effectually served to cramp the effects of emulation--to stint the arts--to limit industry and enterprise--it produced the direct object it was intended to prevent;--it infected the whole state with the desire of gold--it forbade wealth to be spent, in order that wealth might be hoarded; every man seems to have desired gold precisely because he could make very little use of it! From the king to the Helot [143], the spirit of covetousness spread like a disease.

No state in Greece was so open to bribery--no magistracy so corrupt as the ephors.

Sparta became a nation of misers precisely because it could not become a nation of spendthrifts.

Such are the results which man produces when his legislation deposes nature! X.

In their domestic life the Spartans, like the rest of the Greeks, had but little pleasure in the society of their wives.