(M127) Property in land could also be accumulated in the hands of individuals not necessarily of princely station. Odysseus tells a tale of how he took a wife of “men with many κλῆροι” (πολυκλήρων ἀνθρώπων) by reason of his valour.(277) The κλῆρος must therefore at that time have been at any rate roughly of some recognised area. Perhaps the tendency, so fatal to Sparta, for the possession of the original shares or allotments of many families to accumulate in the hands of the powerful or rich, had already set in. In later colonisations and assignments of new land the κλῆροι were often equally divided,(278) and the gift of citizenship, as has been already mentioned, was sometimes accompanied by a grant of a _half-kleros_ (ἡμικλήριον). Did the κλῆρος then represent in theory an area of cultivated ground capable of sustaining a single household? § 5. Early Evidence _continued_: The Κλῆρος And The Maintenance Of The οἶκος. (M128) There are signs in Homer of the existence, already insisted upon for later times, of the connection of the ownership of property with the headship of a household. It follows that if the head of a family was the only owner of land, the desire of establishing a family and thereby preserving at the same time the acquired property and the name of the possessor, made the acquisition of a wife a real necessity for the owner of land. Eumaios, the swineherd, says that Odysseus would have given him a property (κτῆσις), both an οἶκος and a κλῆρος and a shapely wife.(279) And Odysseus in one of his many autobiographies speaks of taking a wife as if it were the necessary sequel to coming into his inheritance.(280) Even Hesiod, the son of a poor settler, without much property to keep together, if we can take Aristotle’s reading of the line, gives the necessary outfit for a peasant farmer in occupation of a small κλῆρος, as a house, a wife, and a plough-ox.(281) Aristotle quotes this line of Hesiod, in his argument that the οἶκος was the association formed to supply the wants of each day,(282) its members being called by Charondas, he says, ὁμοσίπυοι (sharers in the mealbin), and by Epimenides the Cretan ὁμόκαποι (sharers of the same plot of ground).(283) And he might have added that Pindar uses the word ὁμόκλαροι to mean “twins.”(284) (M129) A household, according to Aristotle, consisted thus partly of human beings, partly of property.(285) So closely is the idea of livelihood bound up that of the house or οἶκος, that Telemachos can say without incongruity that his house is being _eaten_ by the wooers:— ἐσθίεταί μοι οἶκος, ὄλωλε δὲ πίονα ἔργα.(286) The sanctity shared by the hearth and its sustenance may be illustrated by Odysseus’ oath, which occurs three times in the _Odyssey_: “Now be Zeus my witness before any god, and the hospitable board and the hearth of blameless Odysseus whereunto I am come.”(287)