The Spartans of military age now numbered only about two thousand. War had done its part in reducing them to this handful. Close intermarriage had done even more. In the case of large families, the subdivision of lots which then occurred impoverished sons so greatly that they could no longer stand the expense of the military clubs, upon membership in which, however, citizenship depended. So far did the evil implicit in this condition go that brothers refused to divide their inheritance, and possessed not only one house, but one wife in common. Men could neither buy land nor sell it, but they might acquire it by marriage or by gift; and since the rich, then as always, tended to marry among themselves, property, and with it citizenship, remained eventually in the possession of a very few. Much of the land, which was the only wealth, came into the hands of women. A plutocracy thus developed in Sparta as the number of the Spartans diminished; and in this way the domestic situation became still further ominous by the growth in the city of a considerable body of disfranchised and discontented "inferiors" and half-breeds. The perils which attended this situation are revealed by the following incident as described by Xenophon in his _Hellenica_:[41]-- "Now Agesilaus (401-360 B.C.) had not been seated on the throne one year when, as he sacrificed one of the appointed sacrifices in behalf of the city, the soothsayer warned him, saying: 'The gods reveal a conspiracy of the most fearful character'; and when the king sacrificed a second time, he said: 'The aspect of the victims is now even yet more terrible'; but when he had sacrificed for the third time, the soothsayer exclaimed: 'O Agesilaus, the sign is given to me, even as though we were in the very midst of the enemy.' Thereupon they sacrificed to the deities who avert evil and work salvation, and so barely obtained good omens, and ceased sacrificing. Nor had five days elapsed after the sacrifices were ended, ere one came bringing information to the ephors of a conspiracy, and named Cinadon as the ringleader; a young man robust of body as of soul, but not one of the peers. Accordingly, the ephors questioned their informant: 'How say you the occurrence is to take place?' and he who gave the information answered: 'Cinadon took me to the limit of the market-place, and bade me count how many Spartans there were in the market-place; and I counted--king, and ephors, and elders, and others, maybe forty. _But tell me, Cinadon_, I said to him, _why have you bidden me count them?_ and he answered me: _Those men, I would have you know, are your sworn foes; and all those others, more than four thousand, congregated there are your natural allies_. Then he took and showed me in the streets, here one and there two of our enemies, as we chanced to come across them, and all the rest our natural allies; and so again running through the list of Spartans to be found in the country districts, he still