Aurum irrepertum, et sic melius situm Cum terra celat, spernere fortior Quam cogere humanos in usus, Omne sacrum rapiente dextrâ. There can be no doubt that the introduction of a large sum of coined gold and silver into Sparta was in itself a striking and important phenomenon, when viewed in conjunction with the peculiar customs and discipline of the state. It was likely to raise strong antipathies in the bosom of an old fashioned Spartan, and probably king Archidamus, had he been alive, would have taken part with the opposing ephors. But Plutarch and others have criticised it too much as a phenomenon by itself; whereas, it was really one characteristic mark and portion of a new assemblage of circumstances, into which Sparta had been gradually arriving during the last years of the war, and which were brought into the most effective action by the decisive success at Ægospotami. The institutions of Lykurgus, though excluding all Spartan citizens, by an unremitting drill and public mess, from trade and industry, from ostentation, and from luxury,—did not by any means extinguish in their bosoms the love of money;[404] while it had a positive tendency to exaggerate, rather than to abate, the love of power. The Spartan kings, Leotychides and Pleistoanax, had both been guilty of receiving bribes; Tissaphernes had found means (during the twentieth year of the Peloponnesian war) to corrupt not merely the Spartan admiral Astyochus, but also nearly all the captains of the Peloponnesian fleet, except the Syracusan Hermokrates; Gylippus, as well as his father Kleandrides, had degraded himself by the like fraud; and Anaxibius at Byzantium was not at all purer. Lysander, enslaved only by his appetite for dominion, and himself a remarkable instance of superiority to pecuniary corruption, was thus not the first to engraft that vice on the minds of his countrymen. But though he found it already diffused among them, he did much to impart to it a still more decided predominance, by the immense increase of opportunities, and enlarged booty for peculation, which his newly-organized Spartan empire furnished. Not merely did he bring home a large residue in gold and silver, but there was a much larger annual tribute imposed by him on the dependent cities, combined with numerous appointments of harmosts to govern these cities. Such appointments presented abundant illicit profits, easy to acquire, and even difficult to avoid, since the decemvirs in each city were eager thus to purchase forbearance or connivance for their own misdeeds. So many new sources of corruption were sufficient to operate most unfavorably on the Spartan character, if not by implanting any fresh vices, at least by stimulating all its inherent bad tendencies. [404] Aristotel. Politic. ii, 6, 23. Ἀποβέβηκε δὲ τοὐνάντιον τῷ νομοθέτῃ τοῦ συμφέροντος· τὴν μὲν γὰρ πόλιν πεποίηκεν ἀχρήματον, τοὺς δ᾽ ἰδιώτας φιλοχρημάτους.