more means of purchasing foreign goods and small wares; merchants
sent no shiploads into Laconian ports; no rhetoric-master, no
itinerant fortune-teller, or gold or silversmith, engraver, or
jeweler, set foot in a country which had no money; so that luxury,
deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it,
wasted to nothing, and died away of itself. For the rich had no
advantage here over the poor, as their wealth and abundance had no
road to come abroad by, but were shut up at home doing nothing.
And in this way they became excellent artists in common necessary
things; bedsteads, chairs, and tables, and such like staple
utensils in a family, were admirably well made there; their cup,
particularly, was very much in fashion, and eagerly sought for by
soldiers, as Critias reports; for its color was such as to prevent
water, drunk upon necessity and disagreeable to look at, from
being noticed; and the shape of it was such that the mud stuck to
the sides, so that only the purer part came to the drinker's
mouth. For this, also, they had to thank their lawgiver, who, by
relieving the artisans of the trouble of making useless things,
set them to show their skill in giving beauty to those of daily
and indispensable use.

The third and most masterly stroke of this great lawgiver, by
which he struck a yet more effectual blow against luxury and the
desire of riches, was the ordinance he made that they should all
eat in common, of the same bread and same meat, and of kinds that
were specified, and should not spend their lives at home, laid on
costly couches at splendid tables, delivering themselves up into
the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, to fatten them in corners,
like greedy brutes, and to ruin not their minds only but their
very bodies, which, enfeebled by indulgence and excess, would