After the Peloponnesian War, the ephor Epitadeus had passed a law authorising citizens to dispose of their property and land. The effects of this rhetra were so prompt to appear that Aristotle was given cause to write: “The land has passed into the hands of a few.” In the time of Agis IV the entire territory was owned by a hundred Spartans. Thus the government had become more and more oligarchical. All the national affairs were carried on by the ephors and the senate, even the general assembly was rarely consulted, and in consequence the rulers, being few in number, were all the more jealous of the privileges of their station and less disposed to suffer them to be curtailed. To open their ranks, moreover, for the readmission of families that poverty had driven forth would have been to expose themselves, by relinquishing the majority, to some territorial reform tending toward a fresh division of the immense domains now concentrated in the possession of a few. Public interest might point this way but private interest decidedly opposed it, and private interest won. There resulted from this a violent hatred between the privileged and the lower classes; the latter being formed of Spartans degraded from their ranks, enfranchised helots, Laconians to whom had been accorded certain rights, and the children of Spartan fathers of the higher order and alien mothers. These classes were given denominations that kept them separate and distinct; there was doubtless also a wide difference in conditions. Below the Equals, who formed a restricted oligarchy, were the Inferiors, or Spartans, who were excluded from the public tables, and the _neodamodes_ or helots enfranchised for services rendered the state, and lastly the _periœci_. Though they had no share in the actual government of their country these men estimated highly the value of their services to the state; and at different times many prominent figures, sons of Spartan fathers and helot mothers, such as Lysander, Gylippus, and Callicratidas had issued from this class. In a vindictive address against Lacedæmon the Thebans at Athens declared that the Spartans recruited their military governors from among men who had helot blood in their veins; and indeed many of these people had amassed competencies that gave them the ambition to leave the inferior station in which custom held them. When Cleomenes III promised liberty to those among the helots who could pay into the public treasury the sum of five minæ [£21 or $108], six thousand presented themselves.