Each found that the
existing system required very important alterations to check its
excesses and supply its defects. Numa's reforms were all in favour of
the people, whom he classified into a mixed and motley multitude of
goldsmiths and musicians and cobblers; while the constitution introduced
by Lykurgus was severely aristocratic, driving all handicrafts into the
hands of slaves and foreigners, and confining the citizens to the use of
the spear and shield, as men whose trade was war alone, and who knew
nothing but how to obey their leaders and to conquer their enemies. In
Sparta a free man was not permitted to make money in business, in order
that he might be truly free.
Each thing connected with the business of making money, like that of
preparing food for dinner, was left in the hands of slaves and helots.
Numa made no regulations of this kind, but, while he put an end to
military plundering, raised no objection to other methods of making
money, nor did he try to reduce inequalities of fortune, but allowed
wealth to increase unchecked, and disregarded the influx of poor men
into the city and the increase of poverty there, whereas he ought at the
very outset, like Lykurgus, while men's fortunes were still tolerably
equal, to have raised some barrier against the encroachments of wealth,
and to have restrained the terrible evils which take their rise and
origin in it.
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