The Comparison of Numa with Lycurgus   

to slaves and helots. But Numa made none of these distinctions; he
only suppressed military rapacity, allowing free scope to every other
means of obtaining wealth; nor did he endeavour to do away with inequality
in this respect, but permitted riches to be amassed to any extent,
and paid no attention to the gradual and continual augmentation and
influx of poverty; which it was his business at the outset, whilst
there was no great disparity in the estates of men, and whilst people
still lived much in one manner, to obviate, as Lycurgus did, and take
measures of precaution against the mischiefs of avarice, mischiefs
not of small importance, but the real seed and first beginning of
all the great and extensive evils of after-times. The re-division
of estates, Lycurgus is not, it seems to me, to be blamed for making,
nor Numa for omitting; this equality was the basis and foundation
of the one commonwealth; but at Rome, where the lands had been lately
divided, there was nothing to urge any re-division or any disturbance
of the first arrangement, which was probably still in existence.
With respect to wives and children, and that community which both,
with a sound policy, appointed, to prevent all jealousy, their methods,
however were different. For when a Roman thought himself to have a
sufficient number of children, in case his neighbour who had none
should come and request his wife of him, he had a lawful power to
give her up to him who desired her, either for a certain time, or
for good. The Lacedaemonian husband, on the other hand, might allow
the use of his wife to any other that desired to have children by
her, and yet still keep her in his house, the original marriage obligation
still subsisting as at first. Nay, many husbands, as we have said,
would invite men whom they thought likely to procure them fine and
good-looking children into their houses. What is the difference, then,
between the two customs? Shall we say that the Lacedaemonian system
is one of an extreme and entire unconcern about their wives, and would
cause most people endless disquiet and annoyance with pangs and jealousies?
the Roman course wears an air of a more delicate acquiescence, draws
the veil of a new contract over the change, and concedes the general
insupportableness of mere community? Numa's directions, too, for the
care of young women, are better adapted to the female sex and to propriety;
Lycurgus's are altogether unreserved and unfeminine, and have given
a great handle to the poets, who call them (Ibycus, for example) Phoenomerides,
bare-thighed; and give them the character (as does Euripides) of being
wild after husbands-
"These with the young men from the house go out,
With thighs that show, and robes that fly about." For in fact the
skirts of the frock worn by unmarried girls were not sewn together
at the lower part, but used to fly back and show the whole thigh bare
as they walked. The thing is most distinctly given by Sophocles-
"-She, also, the young maid,
Whose frock, no robe yet o'er it laid,
Folding back, leaves her bare thigh free,
Hermione." And so their women, it is said, were bold and masculine,
overbearing to their husbands in the first place, absolute mistresses
in their houses, giving their opinions about public matters freely,
and speaking openly even on the most important subjects. But the matrons,
under the government of Numa, still indeed received from their husbands
all that high respect and honour which had been paid them under Romulus
as a sort of atonement for the violence done to them; nevertheless,
great modesty was enjoined upon them; all busy intermeddling forbidden,
sobriety insisted on, and silence made habitual. Wine they were not
to touch at all, nor to speak, except in their husband's company,
even on the most ordinary subjects. So that once when a woman had
the confidence to plead her own cause in a court of judicature, the
senate, it is said, sent to inquire of the oracle what the prodigy
did portend; and, indeed, their general good behaviour and submissiveness
is justly proved by the record of those that were otherwise; for as
the Greek historians record in their annals the names of those who
first unsheathed the sword of civil war, or murdered their brothers,