Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/460

452 AGIS. tion, that they not only consented, but were ready on all occasions to spur him on to a perseverance, and not only sent to speak on his behalf with the men with whom they had an interest, but addressed the other women also, knowing well that the Lacedsemonian wives had always a great power with their husbands, who used to impart to them their state affairs with greater freedom than the women would communicate with the men in the private business of their families. Which was indeed one of the greatest obstacles to this design ; for the money of Sparta being most of it in the women's hands, it was their inter- est to oppose it, not only as depriving them of those su- perfluous trifles, in which through want of better knowl- edge and experience, they placed their chief felicity, but also because they knew their riches were the main support of their power and credit. Those, therefore, who were of this faction, had recourse to Leonidas, representing to him, how it was his part, as the elder and more experienced, to put a stop to the ill- advised projects of a rash young man. Leonidas, though of himself sufficiently inclined to oppose Agis, durst not openly, for fear of the people, who were manifestly de- sirous of this change ; but underhand he did all he could to discredit and thwart the project, and to prejudice the chief magistrates against him, and on all occasions craft- ily insinuated, that it was as the price of letting him usurp arbitrary power, that Agis thus proposed to divide the property of the rich among the poor, and that the object of these measures for cancelling debts and dividing the lands, was not to furnish Sparta with citizens, but pur- chase him a tyrant's body-guard. Agis, nevertheless, little regarding these rumors, pro- cured Lysander's election as ephor ; and then took the first occasion of proposing through him his Rhetra to the council, the chief articles of which were these : That every