298 HISTOKY OF GREECE. Thebes, which perhaps may have been part of the scheme of Philolaus, prohibiting exposure of children, and empowering a father, under the pressure of extreme poverty, to bring his new- born infant to the magistrates, who sold it for a price to any citizen-purchaser, taking from him the obligation to bring it up, but allowing him in return, to consider the adult as his slave. 1 From these brief allusions, coming to us without accompanying illustration, we can draw no other inference, except that the great problem of population the relation between the well-being of the citizens and their more or less rapid increase in numbers had engaged the serious attention even of the earliest Grecian legislators. We may, howev-er, observe that the old Corinthian legislator, Pheidon, (whose precise date cannot be fixed) is stated by Aristotle, 2 to have contemplated much the same object as that which is ascribed to Philolaus at Thebes; an unchangeable num- ber both of citizens and of lots of land, without any attempt to alter the unequal ratio of the lots, one to the other. CHAPTER IV. EARLIEST HISTORICAL VIEW .OF PELOPONNESUS. DORIANS IN ARGOS AND THE NEIGHBORING CITIES. WE now pass from the northern members to the heart and head of Greece, Peloponnesus and Attica, taking the former first in order, and giving as much as can be ascertained re- specting its early historical phenomena. The traveller who entered Peloponnesus from Bceotia during the youthful days of Herodotus and Thucydides, found an array (inAuatS be correct, there is good ground for preferring the word Qaheov to Qikohdnv ; since the proceeding described would harmonize better with the ideas of Phaleas (Aristot. Pol. ii. 4, 3). 1 JElian, V. H. ii. 7.
- Aristot. Polit. ii. 3, 7. This Pheidon seems different from Pheidon of
Argos, as far as we are enabled to judge.
