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The Arcadians were considered (probably rightly, cf. the survival of the Iberian Basques in the Pyrenees) as of the race of the aboriginal Pelasgians (viii. 73. 1 n.); hence the epithet ‘acorneating’, which implies a primitive civilization (cf. Lucr. v. 939) before the days of agriculture. Cf. the epithet προσέληνοι, Plut. Mor. 282; Quaes. Rom. 76; Schol. ad Arist. Nub. 398.

Tegea lay in the southern part of the great eastern plain of Arcadia. Being surrounded with hills (Frazer, P. iv. 422), it is compared to an ὀρχήστρα: so Epaminondas called the Boeotian plain ὀρχήστρα πολέμου (Plut. Mor. 193 E; Apoph. Imper. 18).

σχοίνῳ. The reference to allotments is proof of land assignment as an early Spartan institution. The later story that the land was divided equally by Lycurgus (cf. Plut. Lyc. 8) is a manifest fiction; but the poem of Tyrtaeus, quoted by Aristotle (Pol. v. 7. 4, 1307 A 2), refers to the fact that ἠξίουν ἀνάδαστον ποιεῖν τὴν χώραν. Early Sparta, like early Rome, had agrarian troubles, and solved them in the same way—at the expense of its neighbours.

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