Plutarch closes his paired biography of Rome's second king and Sparta's lawgiver with a formal synkrisis, weighing how each man's rule and legislation held up over time.
This short comparison essay is the capstone to Plutarch's paired Lives of Numa Pompilius and Lycurgus. Rather than narrating new events, Plutarch sets the two lawgivers side by side and works through a series of contrasts: Numa received his kingship unasked while Lycurgus voluntarily gave his up; Numa relaxed a warlike Rome while Lycurgus tightened a soft Sparta; one man's constitution courted the common people with trades like goldsmithing and flute-playing, the other's was austere and aristocratic, reserving citizenship for war and pushing commerce onto slaves and Helots.
The comparison moves systematically through the two men's institutions -- treatment of slaves and Helots, marriage customs and the sharing of wives for begetting children, the modesty or openness of unmarried women, the age at which girls were married, and above all the education of the young. Plutarch keeps returning to one verdict: Lycurgus built education into the structure of Spartan life so thoroughly that his laws held firm for more than five centuries, while Numa's peace died with him, and the temple of Janus that he kept closed was thrown open to war almost immediately after his death.
Historically, this synkrisis form -- capping parallel biographies with a formal comparison -- is a distinctive Plutarchan device that shaped how later readers thought about statecraft, education, and national character. It also preserves specific Roman antiquarian data unavailable elsewhere, such as the naming of Spurius Carvilius as the first Roman to divorce his wife, two hundred thirty years after the city's founding, and the poetic quotations from Ibycus, Euripides, and Sophocles describing Spartan maidens' dress.
“But of the merits proper to each individually, the first is that Numa received his kingship while Lycurgus gave his up.”
— Comparison Of Numa With Lycurgus
“In the second place, just as musicians tuning a lyre, the one tightened Sparta, which had grown slack and soft, while the other relaxed the vehement tension of Rome”
— Comparison Of Numa With Lycurgus
“the Romans record that the first man to divorce a wife was Spurius Carvilius, a full two centuries and thirty years after Rome's founding, nothing of the kind having occurred before that time”
— Comparison Of Numa With Lycurgus
“the fear of oaths would have been a small thing, had he not, through education and training, so to speak steeped the laws in the characters of the children, and made the citizens' zeal for the constitution at home with their upbringing, with the result that across more than five centuries the principal and most important features of his legislation held firm”
— Comparison Of Numa With Lycurgus
“And after his death, the double-doored shrine, which he himself had kept closed, as though truly taming and confining war within it, they threw open from both sides, and filled Italy with blood and corpses”
— Comparison Of Numa With Lycurgus
A synkrisis is a formal comparison essay Plutarch appended to certain pairs of parallel Lives, weighing the two subjects' virtues and institutions against each other. This piece caps the biographies of Numa and Lycurgus, moving through kingship, education, marriage customs, and legislation to judge how each man's legacy actually held up over time.
Plutarch does not deliver a single flat verdict, but he repeatedly favors Lycurgus on durability: because Lycurgus 'steeped the laws in the characters of the children,' his constitution held firm for over five centuries, whereas Numa's peace 'perished immediately along with him' and Rome returned to war right after his death.
Numa was a foreigner and private citizen who received the Roman kingship without asking for it. Lycurgus was already a king in Sparta and voluntarily gave up his throne. Plutarch treats both choices as admirable expressions of virtue, just in opposite directions.
Plutarch argues Numa was 'by far the more Greek-spirited lawgiver' toward slaves, since he let them feast alongside their masters at the festival of the Kronia as a reminder of equality under Kronos. Lycurgus's Sparta, by contrast, pushed all commerce and menial work onto Helots and resident aliens so that citizens could devote themselves entirely to war.
In Rome, a husband with enough children could, if persuaded, give his wife to another man in need of offspring and take her back later. In Sparta, the wife stayed at home and the marriage continued unbroken while she was shared with another man for begetting children. Plutarch calls the Roman version a 'bashful modesty' and the Spartan version a 'strong and unmixed indifference' to jealousy.
He cites Ibycus, who calls Spartan maidens 'thigh-showers,' and Euripides, who describes them leaving home 'with naked thighs and unbound robes,' plus Sophocles on the bride Hermione's unfastened tunic. Plutarch uses these lines as evidence for how open and unfeminine Spartan girls' dress and training looked compared to the more modest, veiled upbringing of Roman women under Numa.
Lycurgus married Spartan brides when they were physically mature, reasoning that their bodies needed the strength to bear conception and labor. Romans, per Numa's arrangement, gave girls in marriage at twelve years or younger, on the theory that both body and character would come to the husband more pure and untouched. Plutarch reads the first as oriented toward nature and childbearing, the second toward character and shared life.
He raises the question directly -- whether Rome advanced to something better through war -- and answers it depends on whether one values wealth, luxury, and dominion or safety, gentleness, and justice. He notes that Rome's power grew once it departed from Numa's peaceful order, but also that Sparta collapsed once it departed from Lycurgus's arrangement, so military success alone does not settle which lawgiver was wiser.
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