surprise anyone who is familiar with early Greek life. Every Spartan could give this repast when he pleased; but the usual custom in the town was to give it “at the festival called Tithenidia, celebrated to secure the health of children;” and the nurses used to bring the little boys to it. The description of Athenæus is perfectly clear. M. Viollet has committed the error of mistaking a private and religious meal for a common meal, and of supposing that he sees in it a sign of community in land. There still remain the true common meals, which took place daily or almost daily at Sparta, and which were called συσσίτια. M. Viollet says at once that they are evidence of community. It seems reasonable to argue: “If men eat the fruits of the earth in common, it is because in primitive times the earth itself was common;” but we think that M. Viollet ought to have distrusted this apparently logical process of reasoning. If he had studied this institution of common meals at Sparta in the original writers, he could not have failed to notice four circumstances: 1. It does not date from the earliest period of the city; and far from being connected with a time when land may have been common, it is later than the institution at Sparta of private property.[211] 2. These common meals did not constitute a common life; for in the first place the men alone partook of them, not the women nor the children;[212] and in the second place, the men did not take all the meals of the day together, but only one, that of the evening. 3. The expenses of the meal were not defrayed by the community, by the State, but each man had to bring his contribution, which was fixed at a _medimnus_ of flour a month, eight _congii_ of wine, some fruit, and a sum of money for the purchase of meat.[213] This is something very different from citizens being fed in common by the State; they had to eat in common, but each ate at his own expense, because each was the owner of property. 4. The common meals were so far from representing community in goods, that poor Spartans were not admitted to them; a fact which is distinctly mentioned by Aristotle, who goes on to say that these meals were the least democratic things in the world.[214] It is the greatest mistake to imagine all the Spartans eating of the same dishes at the same table. The so-called common meals were taken in small groups of fifteen members each, in separate houses. Every one was free to choose the group which he wished to join; but he was not admitted except by the unanimous vote of the members composing it.[215] We also know that the meals were somewhat luxurious, and that the famous black broth, μελάς ζῶμος, was merely the prelude to them.[216] It is, then, very evident that these common repasts, whose meaning or object we need not here try to discover, have not the slightest connection with a common life and certainly not with community in land.[217]