When two Greek law-givers, Lycurgus and Solon, imposed their laws upon the Greek nation, they both had the same purpose--to establish the equal right of all men to the use of land and other properties. Plutarch, speaking of Lycurgus, observes that at that time “some were so poor that they had no inch of land, and others, of whom there were but few, so wealthy that they possessed all”. Lycurgus persuaded the citizens to restore the land to common use, and they did so. Solon had no other end in giving laws to the Athenians but to set up justice among all his fellow-citizens. He says that ambition of the rich knows no bounds, that they respect neither sacred property nor public treasure, plundering all in defiance of the holy laws of justice. “I had commanded the wealthiest and most powerful to refrain from harming the weak,” says he further, “I had protected great and humble with a double buckler, equally strong both sides, without giving more to one than to the other. My advice has been disdained. Today they are punished for it”[50]. Taken as a whole this doctrine of Lycurgus and Solon is not in accordance with Tolstoy’s teaching on laws and property. But nevertheless it shows clearly that law and property are two indivisible civil institutions which can not exist separately[51]. Tolstoy is in opposition to both of them, law and property, because they offend against humanity, especially against the commandment not to resist evil by force. Under the term of property here must be understood private or individual property. The notion of property, however, is not clear either in ancient or modern writers. In the course of human evolution property has many times changed its form and its substance, its meaning and its scope. In the societies that preceded ours, property embodied itself in a form of oppression which has been definitely abolished once for all. As it is known slavery was one of the forms of private property[52]. In Greece and Rome there were public slaves, _i.e._ slaves of the city, and slaves of the state; but most of the slaves were simply a part of the patrimony of the citizens. Masters had the right to use them for cultivation of land, or to give them away as presents, or to sell them, or to leave them to their heirs. They had the legal right of imprisoning and fettering the slaves, or separating them from their wives, or forbidding them to marry. The slaves were part of the master’s private ownership, and he disposed of them as he pleased. In the Roman laws, and also in the laws of Athens, we find that a father could sell his son. This was because the father might dispose of all the property of the family, and the son might be looked upon as property, since his labor was a source of income[53]. The best Greek and Roman philosophers saw nothing unlawful in that. Their conceptions of the respective rights and duties of masters and slaves would not clash in the least with the ideas even now in equatorial