Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Concerning Lycurgus the lawgiver, nothing at all can be said that is beyond dispute, since his lineage, his travels abroad, his death, and above all his work on the laws and the constitution have been given differing accounts, and on no point is there less agreement than on the era to which the man belongs. According to one tradition he was a contemporary of Iphitus and worked jointly with him to set up the Olympic truce, and Aristotle the philosopher is among those who hold this view, citing as evidence the Olympia discus bearing an inscription that preserves Lycurgus's name.
Others, reckoning the time by the succession of the kings who reigned at Sparta, as Eratosthenes and Apollodorus do, show him to be older by not a few years than the first Olympiad. But Timaeus suspects that, since there were two men named Lycurgus at Sparta and not at the same time, the deeds of both were attributed to the one on account of his fame, and that, of the two, the older man belonged to an era close to Homer's own — indeed some say he even met Homer face to face.
Xenophon too gives grounds for supposing his antiquity, in the passage where he says the man lived in the time of the Heraclidae. For by birth, of course, even the most recent of the Spartan kings were Heraclidae, but Xenophon seems to mean, when he wishes to call those first and earliest ones Heraclidae, those nearest to Heracles himself. Nevertheless, though the history is so confused, we shall try, by following the accounts that have the least contradiction or the most reputable witnesses, to give our narrative of the man.
For Simonides the poet says that Lycurgus's father was not Eunomus but Prytanis, and that Prytanis was father to both Lycurgus and Eunomus alike; but most writers trace the genealogy differently, not so, but say that from Procles son of Aristodemus came Soüs, from Soüs Eurypon, from him Prytanis, from this man Eunomus, from Eunomus Polydectes by an earlier wife, and Lycurgus, the younger son, by Dionassa, as Diëutychidas has recorded — the sixth in descent from Procles, and the eleventh from Heracles.
Of his ancestors the most admired was Soüs, in whose time the Spartans made the Helots slaves and acquired a great deal of land, cutting it off from the Arcadians. It is said that Soüs, besieged by the Cleitorians in a difficult and waterless spot, agreed to give up the conquered land to them if he and all who were with him
should drink from the nearby spring; and when the oaths had been sworn, he gathered those with him and offered the kingship to whoever would not drink. But no one held out, and all drank; then he himself went down last of all and, though the enemy were still present, merely sprinkled himself, and then went away and kept possession of the land, on the ground that not all had drunk. But although they admired him for this, they did not name the house after him but after his son, calling it the Eurypontidae, because Eurypon seems to have been the first to relax the too monarchical character of the kingship, courting the people and indulging the many.
From this sort of relaxation the people grew bolder, while the later kings, on the one hand incurring hatred by using force against the many, and on the other yielding either out of a wish to please or out of weakness, lawlessness and disorder held Sparta for a long time, by which it also came about that the father of Lycurgus, while reigning, met his death. For while trying to check some brawl, he was struck by a butcher's cleaver and died, leaving the kingship to his elder son Polydectes.
When this man too died not long afterward, it was expected by all that Lycurgus would be king; and indeed he did reign, until it became clear that his brother's wife was pregnant. As soon as he learned this, he declared that the throne belonged to the child if a boy were born, and he himself merely managed affairs in the capacity of guardian. Those who guarded orphaned kings the Lacedaemonians called prodikoi.
But when the woman sent to him secretly and opened negotiations, wishing to destroy the infant so that she might marry him while he was king of Sparta, he loathed her character, yet did not openly oppose her proposal, but pretending to approve and accept it, said that she ought not to harm her body by inducing miscarriage and taking drugs and risking her life, for he himself would take charge of the matter and, the moment the infant came into the world, would arrange for it to be disposed of.
Having in this way led the woman along right up to her time of delivery, when he learned she was in labor he sent attendants and guards to be present at the birth, with orders that a female child should be turned over to the women, whereas a male child should be brought to him, whatever he happened to be doing. It happened that he was dining with the magistrates when a male child was born, and the servants came bringing the little boy to him,
and he, taking the child, said, as the story goes, to those present, "A king has been born to you, Spartans," and laid him down in the royal seat and named him Charilaus, because of the general joy at his own high-mindedness and justice. He had reigned in all eight months, but was also otherwise held in high regard by the citizens, and more people obeyed him out of admiration for his virtue than obeyed him merely as guardian of the king and holder of royal authority, being ready to do whatever he ordered.
But there was also envy, which as he grew, being still young, tried to stand in his way — chiefly the relatives and kinsmen of the king's mother, who felt she had been slighted, and her brother Leonidas, who once even railed at Lycurgus rather boldly, hinting that he knew well enough that Lycurgus intended to become king, giving grounds for suspicion and preparing in advance, by slander, to make Lycurgus appear, should anything happen to the king, to have plotted against him. Such talk also went about, spread by the woman herself, and Lycurgus, taking this hard and fearing the uncertainty of it, decided to escape the suspicion by going into exile, and to wander abroad until his nephew, having come of age, should beget a successor to the kingship.
Setting out in this way, he came first to Crete; and having studied the constitutions there and associated with the men of highest repute, some of their laws he admired and adopted, intending to take them home and make use of them, but some he disdained. One of those there reputed wise and skilled in statecraft he persuaded, by kindness and friendship, to go to Sparta — Thales, who passed for a poet of lyric songs and made that art his outward pretext, but in fact was doing the work of the ablest lawgivers
at heart. For his odes were speeches urging obedience and concord, set to melodies and rhythms possessing much order and composure, by listening to which men's characters were imperceptibly softened, and they were drawn into fellow-feeling with what was noble, away from the ill-will then prevailing among them toward one another, so that in a way this man paved the road for Lycurgus toward the education of the Spartans.
From Crete Lycurgus sailed to Asia, wishing, it is said, by comparing the Cretan way of life, which was frugal and austere, with the extravagance and luxury of the Ionians — as a physician compares healthy bodies with sickly and diseased ones — to observe the difference between the two ways of life and the two constitutions.
There too he first met, it seems, the poems of Homer, preserved among the descendants of Creophylus, and observing in them, mixed in with the entertainment devoted to pleasure and self-indulgence, a political and educational element worth no less serious attention, he eagerly copied them out and gathered them together, meaning to bring them here. For there was already some dim fame of the epics among the Greeks, but only a few possessed scattered portions of the poetry, which was passed around haphazardly as chance would have it; and it was Lycurgus above all who first made it widely known.
The Egyptians, for their part, believe that Lycurgus came to them too, and that he admired above all their separation of the military class from the other classes, and transferred this to Sparta, and by setting apart the vulgar craftsmen and manual laborers made the citizen body truly refined and pure. This much, then, some of the Greek writers also
attest on the Egyptians' behalf; but that Lycurgus also visited Libya and Iberia, and, wandering about near India, conversed with the Gymnosophists, we know of no one who has said this except Aristocrates son of Hipparchus, a Spartan.
The Lacedaemonians missed Lycurgus while he was away and sent for him many times, on the ground that their kings had the name and the honor but nothing else beyond the rest, whereas in him there was a commanding nature and a power to lead men. Nor indeed was the man's presence unwelcome to the kings themselves, but they hoped that with him present the people would be less insolent toward them.
Returning, then, to a people so disposed, he set at once about changing the present order and transforming the constitution, on the ground that particular laws were of no use or benefit unless, as with a body that is diseased and full of every kind of sickness, one melts down and changes the existing constitution by drugs and purgings and begins a wholly new regimen.
Having resolved on this, he first went abroad to Delphi; and having sacrificed to the god and consulted the oracle, he returned bringing that famous response, in which the Pythia declared him beloved of the gods, more divine than mortal, and pronounced that the deity had granted and sanctioned the constitution he sought, and that it would prove by far the finest of all constitutions.
Encouraged by this, he brought over the best men and called on them to join with him, conversing secretly with his friends first, and then in this way gradually reaching more people and organizing them for the undertaking. When the moment came, he ordered thirty of the leading men to go out armed into the marketplace at dawn, for the sake of striking terror and fear into those who opposed him. Of these Hermippus recorded the names of the twenty most distinguished; but the one who shared most fully in all of Lycurgus's works and helped him labor over the laws they call Arthmiadas.
When the disturbance began, King Charilaus, frightened that the whole undertaking was being organized against him, took refuge in the sanctuary of the Bronze-House Athena; then, being persuaded and receiving oaths, he rose up and took part in what was being done, being naturally mild — as indeed it is said that when Archelaus, who shared the kingship with him, said to those praising the young man, "How could Charilaus be a good man, seeing he is not even harsh to the wicked?"
Of the many innovations made by Lycurgus, the first and greatest was the establishment of the council of elders, which Plato says, being mixed with the fevered power of the kings and made equal to it in voting, provided salvation together with moderation for the most important matters. For the constitution, swaying and inclining now toward the kings into tyranny, now toward the multitude into democracy,
by placing the office of the elders in the middle, like ballast, and balancing it, achieved the safest arrangement and order, since the twenty-eight elders were always added to the kings' side just enough to resist democracy, but in turn strengthened the people against the coming into being of tyranny. Aristotle says that so many elders were established because, of the thirty leading men who were with Lycurgus at first, two lost heart and abandoned the undertaking out of cowardice.
But Sphaerus says that from the beginning that many took part in the plan. There might also be something in the fact that the number results from seven multiplied by four, and that, since it equals the total of its own divisors, it ranks as a perfect number next after six. But to me it seems most likely that he made the elders that number so that the whole would be thirty, with the twenty-eight added to the two kings.
Lycurgus was so intent on establishing this office that he brought back an oracle from Delphi concerning it, which they call the Rhetra. It runs thus: "Having founded a temple of Zeus Syllanius and Athena Syllania, having divided into tribes and formed into obes, having established a council of thirty elders together with the founder-kings, they shall hold assemblies from time to time in the ground between Babyca and Cnacion, bringing measures forward and withdrawing them in this fashion, and the people are to have the final
authority and power." In this, to have divided into tribes and formed into obes means to divide and distribute the multitude into groups, some of which he called tribes and others obes; and by "founder-kings" are meant the kings, and "to hold assembly" means to convene the assembly, because he attached the origin and the authority of the constitution to the Pythian god. The Babyca they now call Cheimarrus, and the Cnacion they now call Oenus; but Aristotle says the Cnacion is a river, and the Babyca a bridge.
Between these two they held their assemblies, there being no porticoes or any other structure, for he thought these things contributed nothing to good counsel, but rather did harm, making foolish and puffing up with empty conceit the minds of those assembled, whenever, in holding assembly, they gazed upon statues and paintings or the elaborately worked proscenia of theaters or the roofs of council-chambers ornamented beyond need. When the multitude had gathered, no one of the rest was permitted to offer an opinion, but the people had authority to decide on the motion put forward by the elders and the kings,
but later, when the many, by taking away and adding to the motions, distorted them and did violence to them, the kings Polydorus and Theopompus added the following to the Rhetra: "But if the people should choose a crooked measure, the elders and the founder-kings are to be setters-aside" — that is, not to ratify it, but altogether to dissolve the assembly and disperse the people, on the ground that they were perverting and altering the motion contrary to what was best. And they persuaded the city that the god himself commanded this, as Tyrtaeus somewhere recalls in these words: "Having heard the voice of Phoebus, they brought home from Pytho the oracle of the god and his words of fulfillment: the god-honored kings, to whom the lovely city of Sparta is dear, are to begin the counsel, and the elder elders, and after them the men of the people, answering back with straight rhetras."
Though Lycurgus had thus mixed the constitution, still those who came after him, seeing the oligarchy still unmixed and strong, seething and full of passion, as Plato says, threw upon it, like a bridle, the power of the ephors, about one hundred and thirty years after Lycurgus, when the first of the ephors around Elatus were established, in the reign of Theopompus.
They say that when he was reproached by his own wife for being about to hand over to his sons a kingship smaller than the one he had received, he replied, "No — greater, insofar as it will last longer." And indeed, by casting off excess along with the envy it breeds, he escaped the danger of suffering what the Messenian and Argive kings suffered at the hands of their own peoples, who were unwilling to yield or relax any of their power in favor of the common people. This above all made Lycurgus's wisdom and foresight evident, when one looks at the factions and misgovernment that afflicted the Argive and Messenian peoples and their kings, Sparta's own kin and neighbors,
who, having received equal shares from the start, and having in the division seemed even to have more than the Spartans, did not prosper for long, but through the arrogance of their kings and the disobedience of their masses, threw their institutions into confusion, and showed that it was truly a divine stroke of fortune for the Spartans to have the one who fitted together and blended their constitution for them. But that belongs to a later time.
The second and boldest of Lycurgus's political measures was his redistribution of the land, since a shocking inequality prevailed, and many propertyless and destitute people were becoming a burden on the city, while wealth had flowed together entirely into the hands of a few; and wishing to drive out arrogance, envy, wrongdoing, luxury, and the still older and greater diseases of a state, wealth and poverty,
he persuaded them to pool all the land together and redistribute it from the start, and to live with one another as equals in their possessions, all alike in their way of life, seeking the first place through virtue alone, on the ground that nothing else set one man apart in worth from another, except the disgrace attaching to base conduct and the honor attaching to noble conduct.
Putting action behind his words, he distributed the rest of Laconia among the perioikoi in thirty thousand allotments, and the land belonging to the city of Sparta itself in nine thousand: for that many allotments were made for the Spartiates. Some say that Lycurgus distributed six thousand, and that Polydorus later supplemented this with a further three thousand; still others hold that Polydorus gave out half of the nine thousand himself, with Lycurgus accounting for the remaining half.
Each allotment was of such a size as to yield seventy medimnoi of barley as return for a man, and twelve for a woman, with the liquid produce in proportion. For he thought that this much would be enough for them, since it was sufficient for good bodily condition and health, and they would need nothing further. It is said that some time later, passing through the countryside on returning from a journey abroad, just after the harvest, he saw the heaps of grain lying side by side and equal in size, and smiled, and said to those present that all Laconia looked like the estate of many brothers who had just divided their inheritance.
Having also undertaken to divide up movable property, so as to eliminate inequality and unevenness altogether, since he saw that people would resist an outright confiscation, he went about it by another route and put down the greed connected with such possessions by political means. First, he invalidated all gold and silver coinage and ordered that only iron currency be used; and even to this he gave, for a great weight and bulk, only a small value, so that ten minas' worth required a large storeroom in the house and a yoke of oxen to carry it,
and once this was established, many kinds of wrongdoing vanished from Lacedaemon. For who was going to steal, or take bribes, or defraud, or plunder something that could neither be hidden nor be worth owning, and that could not even profitably be cut up? For the iron, while still glowing hot, was quenched in vinegar, as they say, which destroyed its temper and took away its usefulness and strength for any other purpose, making it brittle and unworkable.
After this he brought about the expulsion of useless and superfluous trades. Even without his driving them out, most of these would have vanished along with the common currency, since their products had no market: for the iron money could not be exported to the other Greeks, nor did it have any value, being mocked, so that there was nothing available with which to buy any foreign or trivial goods, nor did merchant cargo sail into the harbors, nor did any teacher of rhetoric set foot in Laconia, nor any wandering fortune-teller, nor any keeper of courtesans, nor any maker of gold or silver ornaments, since there was no currency.
But in this way luxury, gradually deprived of what kindled and nourished it, withered away of itself: and those who possessed much gained no advantage from it, since their abundance had no outlet into the public sphere but lay shut up and idle at home. That is why the everyday and necessary furnishings — beds, chairs, and tables — were made among them with the greatest skill, and the Laconian drinking-cup, they say, was especially prized for military campaigns, as Critias says,
for the water they were forced to drink, unpleasant to look at, was hidden by its color, and as the murky part struck against the inside of the cup and clung to its rim, the drink reached the mouth in a purer state. And the lawgiver was responsible for this too: for the craftsmen, freed from useless work, displayed their skill on necessary things.
Wishing to attack luxury still further and to strip away the eagerness for wealth, he introduced his third and finest political measure, the establishment of the common messes, so that they would come together and dine with one another on shared and fixed meats and grains, and not live at home, reclining on expensive couches at expensive tables, fattened in the dark by the hands of servants and cooks, like gluttonous animals,
and thereby corrupting their bodies along with their characters, letting themselves go to every desire and to satiety, which requires long sleep, warm baths, much rest, and a kind of daily nursing. This alone was a great achievement, but greater still was that, as Theophrastus says, he made wealth something not to be envied and, in effect, not wealth at all, through the common sharing of the meals and the simplicity of the diet,
for there was no use to be made of it, no enjoyment, no display or show at all of great possessions, since the poor man walked to the very same dinner as the rich man. So that this famous thing — visible only in Sparta among all the cities under the sun — came about, that wealth was blind and lay there like a lifeless and motionless picture. For it was not permitted to dine at home beforehand and then go to the common messes already full, but the rest kept careful watch on anyone who did not drink or eat with them, and reproached him as undisciplined and as growing soft against their common way of life.
This is why, they say, the wealthy became especially hostile to Lycurgus over this measure, and banding together against him they cried out and grew angry, and in the end, pelted by many of them, he fled the marketplace at a run. He outran the rest and took refuge in a temple, but one young man, not otherwise untalented, but quick-tempered and hot-blooded, Alcander, pressing close and pursuing him, when Lycurgus turned around, struck him with his staff and knocked out his eye.
Lycurgus, in no way giving way to his suffering, but standing and facing them, showed the citizens his bloodied face and ruined eye; and great shame and dejection seized those who saw it, so that they handed Alcander over to him and escorted him all the way to his house, sharing in his indignation. Lycurgus, having thanked them, let them go, but took Alcander into his own house; he did him no harm and said nothing harsh, but dismissed his usual attendants and servants and ordered Alcander to serve him instead.
Alcander, not being of ignoble nature, carried out what was ordered in silence, and staying constantly with Lycurgus and sharing his life, in observing his gentleness and the imperturbability of his soul and the austerity of his way of living and his unbending endurance of hardship, was himself remarkably affected in his feelings toward the man, and used to say to his companions and friends that Lycurgus was not harsh or self-willed at all, but was the only one who was gentle and mild toward others.
In this way, then, Alcander was disciplined and paid such a penalty — becoming out of a wicked and self-willed youth the most well-mannered and moderate of men — and Lycurgus, as a memorial of what he had suffered, founded a temple of Athena, whom he named Optilitis; for the Dorians there call the eyes 'optiloi.' Some, however — Dioscorides, author of a work on the Laconian constitution, among them — claim that Lycurgus was struck but did not lose the eye, and that he built the shrine to the goddess in gratitude for the cure he received. In any case, after that misfortune, the Spartans, when they held assembly, gave up the practice of carrying a staff.
The common messes the Cretans call andreia, but the Lacedaemonians call them phiditia, either because the word implies friendship and goodwill, with a d substituted for an l, or because such gatherings train men toward frugality and plain living. Nothing prevents the initial sound also being an outside addition, as some say, the word being derived from editia, referring to diet and eating,
They came together in groups of about fifteen, a little more or a little fewer. Each of the mess-members brought per month a medimnos of barley meal, eight choes of wine, five minas of cheese, five half-minas of figs, and in addition to these a small sum of money for relishes; and besides this, anyone who had made a sacrifice or gone hunting sent a portion to the common mess. For it was permitted to dine at home whenever someone was delayed by a sacrifice or by hunting, but the rest had to be present.
And for a long time they kept strict watch over attendance at the common meals. At any rate, when King Agis, on returning from a campaign in which he had defeated the Athenians, wished to dine with his wife and sent for his portions, the polemarchs did not send them; and when the next day, in anger, he failed to offer the sacrifice he was required to make, they fined him.
Even boys attended the common messes, as if brought to schools of self-discipline, and there they listened to political discussion and saw models of freedom, and they themselves grew accustomed to joking and being mocked without vulgarity, and to not taking offense at being mocked. For it was thought to be especially characteristic of Sparta to be able to endure a joke; but if one could not bear it, it was permitted to ask to be let off, and the one joking would stop.
As each man entered, the eldest present would point to the doors and say, "Through these no word goes outside." And it is said that a man wishing to be admitted to a mess was tested in this way: each of the mess-members took a bit of bread in his hand, and when the attendant carried the vessel on his head, cast it in silently as if it were a ballot — the one approving simply, the one rejecting pressing it hard with his hand.
For the pressed piece has the effect of the pierced one. And if they find even a single one like this, they do not admit the candidate, wishing all the members to be pleased with one another. The man rejected in this way is said to have been "kaddichos'd": for the vessel into which they cast the bits of bread is called a kaddichos. Among their dishes the most highly esteemed was the black broth, so much so that the older men had no need even of a bit of meat, but yielded it to the young men, while they themselves feasted, pouring the broth over themselves.
One of the kings of Pontus, it is reported, went so far as to purchase a Laconian cook on account of this broth; but then, having tasted it, found it disagreeable. And the cook said, "O king, this broth needs to be relished by men who have first bathed in the Eurotas." After drinking moderately, they went away without a torch, for it was not permitted to walk by torchlight, either on this occasion or any other, so that they might grow accustomed to walking confidently and fearlessly in darkness and at night. Such, then, was the arrangement of the common messes.
Lycurgus did not set down written laws, but one of the so-called rhetrai is this. For the things that were most authoritative and most important for a city's happiness and virtue, he thought, once fixed as elements in the characters and habits of the citizens, would remain unmoved and secure, since deliberate choice provides a stronger bond than compulsion, the kind that education instills in the young, producing in each of them the disposition of a lawgiver.
But small matters, contracts concerning money, and things that shift with changing needs from one time to another, it was better not to bind by written rules or fixed customs, but to leave to be settled according to circumstance, taking on additions and subtractions as those who were educated should approve. For the whole and entire work of his legislation he made hinge upon education.
One of the rhetrai, then, as has been said, was not to use written laws. Another, in turn, was against extravagance, that every house should have its roof worked only with the axe, and its doors made only with the saw and no other tool — for the remark later attributed to Epaminondas, spoken at his own table, that a dinner of this sort leaves no room for treachery — Lycurgus was the first to grasp this idea, namely that such a house does not admit luxury and extravagance,
nor is there anyone so lacking in taste and so foolish as to bring into a plain and common house couches with silver feet and purple coverlets and golden cups and the extravagance that follows these, but of necessity he must fit and match his couch to his house, his clothing to his couch, and the rest of his furnishings and equipment to that,
and from this habit, they say, Leotychidas the Elder, dining in Corinth, on seeing the costly and coffered ceiling of the house, asked his host whether trees grow square-shaped where he lived. A third rhetra of Lycurgus is remembered, the one forbidding them to campaign often against the same enemies, so that the enemy, growing used to defending itself repeatedly, should not become skilled in war.
And this above all they charge against King Agesilaus later, that his repeated raids and expeditions, launched again and again against Boeotia, trained the Thebans into worthy opponents of the Lacedaemonians; wherefore Antalcidas, seeing him wounded, said, "A fine tuition fee you are collecting from the Thebans, having taught them to fight when they neither wished nor knew how." Such enactments, then, he called rhetrai, as being brought from the god and being oracles.
As for education, which he held to be the greatest and finest work of the lawgiver, he began far back, looking first to matters of marriage and childbearing. For it is not true, as Aristotle says, that after attempting to make the women modest he gave up, unable to master their great license and the rule of women brought on by the men's many campaigns, in which they were forced to leave their wives as mistresses of the household, and for this reason paid them more deference than was fitting and addressed them as "mistresses" — no, he gave to these matters too all the care that circumstances allowed.
The bodies of the girls he trained hard with runs and wrestling and throwing the discus and javelin, so that the offspring they would conceive, taking root in strong bodies, might grow better from a strong beginning, and so that the girls themselves, enduring their labors with strength, might contend well and easily against the pains of childbirth. Doing away with softness and shade-rearing and all effeminacy, he made the girls no less than the boys accustomed to march naked in processions, and to dance and sing at certain sacred rites with the young men present and watching.
There were times when, speaking bantering words to each young man, they took hold usefully of his faults, and again, reciting praises composed with song for those who deserved them, they created great ambition and rivalry in the young men. The youth praised for manly courage and given renown before the girls would leave the scene puffed up by the compliments he had earned, and the stinging remarks delivered in play and jest cut no less deeply than admonitions meant in earnest, since the kings and elders too walked along together with the other citizens to watch the spectacle.
The nakedness of the maidens held nothing shameful in it, since modesty was present and lack of self-control absent; rather it produced a simple habit and a zeal for fitness, and gave the female sex a taste of no ignoble pride, as having a share, no less than men, in virtue and ambition. Hence it came to them to speak and think in the manner recorded of Gorgo, wife of Leonidas: when a certain foreign woman, it seems, remarked to her, "Only among you Spartans do the women hold sway over the men," she answered, "Yes, for we are the only ones who give birth to men."
These practices, then, were also incentives toward marriage — I mean the processions of the maidens, and their undressing, and the contests held in view of the young men, who were led on not by any geometric necessity but, as Plato says, by erotic necessity. And yet he attached a certain dishonor to those who remained unmarried. They were shut out from watching the Gymnopaidiai; while in the winter season the officials directed them to circle the marketplace unclothed,
and as they walked around they sang a certain song composed about themselves, saying that they suffered justly, since they disobeyed the laws. They were also deprived of the honor and service which the young paid to their elders. Hence no one blamed what was said to Dercyllidas, distinguished general though he was. As he approached, one of the younger men did not yield his seat to him, saying, "You have fathered no one who will yield his seat to me."
They married by abduction, and not girls who were small or unripe for marriage, but ones in their prime and mature. The woman who had been seized was taken in hand by the so-called "bridesmaid," who cropped her head close to the skin, dressed her in a man's cloak and sandals, and laid her down on a pallet, alone, without light. The bridegroom, not drunk nor unmanned by indulgence but sober, as always, having dined in the common messes, would slip in, loosen her belt, and lift her and carry her to the bed.
After spending a short time with her, he would go off discreetly, as was his custom before, and rest among his fellow young men. And thereafter he continued in this way, spending his days and resting with his age-mates, but visiting his bride in secret and with caution, ashamed and afraid that someone in the house might notice, while his bride for her part contrived and helped devise ways that they might come together at the right moment without being seen.
This practice went on well beyond a brief span, so much so that some men fathered children before ever setting eyes on their wives in the light of day. Such intercourse was not only a practice of self-restraint and moderation but also brought them together for procreation still fertile in body and, in their love, always fresh and newly desiring one another, never sated or worn thin as those are who indulge in unrestrained intercourse, but always leaving behind in each other some remnant and kindling spark of longing and grace.
Having established such reverence and order about marriage, he nonetheless banished empty and womanish jealousy just as thoroughly, by making it honorable to exclude all outrage and unworthy behavior from marriage while sharing children and their begetting with worthy men, and by making men laugh at those who pursue such things as unmixable and unshareable, avenging them with murders and wars.
For it was permitted for an older man with a young wife, if he admired and approved some fine young man, to bring him in to her, and having filled her with noble seed, to make the child born his own. And again it was permitted for a good man who admired some other man's wife for her fine children and her modesty, to persuade her husband to let him consort with her, as it were planting in fruitful soil and producing good children who would be kin and of the same blood as good men.
To begin with, Lycurgus refused to regard children as the private property of their fathers, treating them instead as belonging jointly to the city, and for this reason he wished the citizens to be born not from random men but from the best. Then too he saw much foolishness and conceit in the legislation of other peoples on this subject, who have their dogs and horses covered by the finest studs, persuading the owners by favor or by payment, while they lock up and guard their wives, insisting that they bear children by themselves alone, even if they are foolish, or past their prime, or sickly —
as though children born of bad stock were not first of all bad for those who possess and raise them, if they come from bad parents, and, on the contrary, good, should they happen upon such a birth from good ones. And these practices, so conducted for reasons both natural and civic, were then so far removed from what is later said to have become licentiousness among women that adultery was altogether unheard of among
them. And a story is remembered of a certain Geradas, one of the Spartans of very ancient times, who, when asked by a foreigner what punishment adulterers suffered among them, said, "Stranger, there is no adulterer among us." And when the other took him up, saying, "But if there were one?" Geradas said, "He would pay a bull so large that, standing over Taygetus, it could drink from the Eurotas." And when the man wondered and said, "How could there be an ox so large?", Geradas laughed and said, "How could Sparta ever produce an adulterer?" This, then, is what is recorded about marriages.
The father who had begotten a child was not the one with authority to raise it; instead he carried it to a certain place called the Lesche, where the eldest men of the tribe sat and examined the infant. When it was found sound of frame and vigorous, they directed that it be reared, and assigned to it one of the nine thousand allotments; but if it was ill-born and misshapen, they sent it away to the place called the Apothetae, a chasm-like spot by Taygetus,
reasoning that such a life would benefit neither the child itself nor the community if, from the very beginning, it was not well constituted for health and strength. For this reason the women did not bathe their newborns in water but in wine, making a kind of test of their constitution. It is said that infants prone to seizures or frailty are thrown into convulsions and lose their senses from the undiluted wine, whereas the sturdy ones only grow tougher and more robust from it.
There was also a kind of careful skill among the nurses, so that they raised infants without swaddling bands, making their limbs and figures free, and further making them easygoing in their habits, not fussy about food, unafraid of darkness, unafraid of being left alone, and free of the ignoble ill temper and whimpering of children. On this account some foreigners bought Laconian nurses for their own children; and they say that Amycla, who nursed the Athenian Alcibiades, was a Spartan woman.
But upon Alcibiades, as Plato says, Pericles set as tutor Zopyrus, who differed in no way from the other slaves; whereas Lycurgus did not put the sons of Spartans under bought or hired tutors, nor was it permitted for each father to raise and educate his son as he wished. Rather, as soon as they turned seven, he took them all himself and enrolled them in companies, making them live and be reared together, and accustomed them to play and study together.
Over each company he set as leader the boy who excelled in judgment and was most spirited in fighting; and toward him the others looked, obeying his commands and enduring his punishments, so that their whole education was a practice in ready obedience. The elders watched over them at their play, and by continually setting them at various contests and rivalries, they observed carefully what each boy's nature was in daring and in refusing to shrink from a fight.
Letters they learned only so far as was useful; the rest of their whole education was directed toward learning to obey well, to endure hardship, and to conquer in battle. So as they grew older, they intensified their training, cropping their hair close, accustoming them to go barefoot, and to spend most of their play unclothed. When they turned twelve they went about already without a tunic, receiving one cloak for the whole year, unwashed in body and unacquainted with baths and ointments, except for a few days each year when they were allowed such indulgence.
They slept together, by troop and company, on pallets which they gathered for themselves, breaking off with their bare hands, without iron, the tips of the reed growing along the Eurotas. In winter they added the so-called "wolf's-foot" plant and mixed it into their bedding, since this material was thought to have some warming quality.
By this age, lovers from among the men of good repute would already associate with the fine young men, and the elders paid attention, coming more often to the gymnasia and being present when the boys fought and jested with one another, not carelessly but as though all felt themselves in some sense fathers and tutors and rulers of all, so that there was no occasion and no place left free from someone to admonish the wrongdoer and punish him.
Moreover a boy-herder was appointed from among the finest men, and over each company they set in charge, from among the so-called eirenes, always the most temperate and the most warlike. They call "eirenes" those who are already in their second year out of boyhood, and "mell-eirenes" the oldest of the boys still. This eiren, then, a young man of twenty, commands those under him in their mock battles, and at home uses them as attendants for his dinner.
He orders the sturdier ones to fetch wood, the smaller ones vegetables, and they fetch them by stealing — some going to the gardens, others slipping in among the men's common messes very craftily and cautiously. If one is caught, he receives many blows of the whip, on the ground that he stole carelessly and without skill. They also steal whatever food they can, learning cleverly to attack those who are asleep or keep careless watch.
For the one caught the penalty is blows and hunger. For their dinner is meager by design, so that fighting off want by their own efforts they may be forced to be bold and resourceful. This is the direct purpose of the scant food; a side benefit, they say, is the growth of their bodies. For growth in height comes, they say, when the vital breath is not much occupied and taken up, pressed down into depth and breadth by an abundance of food, but travels upward freely, the body yielding easily and readily as it grows.
This same cause seems also to make them handsome; for lean and spare frames respond better to the shaping of the joints, while heavy and overfed frames resist because of their weight — just as, indeed, the infants of women who are purged during pregnancy are born thin but well-formed and shapely, the lighter material being more easily mastered by that which shapes it. But let the explanation of this phenomenon be left open for consideration.
The boys steal so deliberately that a certain one, they say, having stolen a fox cub and hidden it under his cloak, endured being torn at the belly by the beast's claws and teeth, even to death, rather than be discovered. And this is not incredible even from what we see of the ephebes of our own day, many of whom we have seen dying under the lash at the altar of Orthia.
After dinner the eiren, reclining, would direct one of the boys to perform a song, and put to another some question requiring a carefully considered answer — for instance, who was the best of men, or what was such-and-such a man's deed. In this way they were trained, from the very start, to judge what is fine and to be inquisitive about their fellow citizens; for if a boy, asked which citizen was good or which was not well regarded, was at a loss for an answer, they took this as a sign of a sluggish soul with no ambition toward virtue.
The answer had to include both a reason and a proof compressed into a brief and terse statement; and whoever answered poorly was punished by receiving a bite on the thumb from the eiren. Often, too, with elders and magistrates present, the eiren would punish the boys, giving proof whether he punished with reason and as he should; and while punishing he was not hindered, but once the boys had left he was called to account if he had disciplined more harshly than was fitting, or on the contrary too laxly and feebly.
The lovers shared in the boys' reputation for good or ill alike; and it is said that once, when a boy let out an ignoble cry while fighting, his lover was fined by the magistrates. And loving was so far approved among them that even the noble and good women loved the maidens; but there was no rivalry in this love — rather, those who loved the same person made this the beginning of friendship with one another, and continued zealously in common to make their beloved as excellent as possible.
They also taught the boys to use speech that had bitterness mixed with charm, and much reflection packed into few words. For just as Lycurgus, as has been said, made the iron currency of small value despite its great weight, so, in the opposite way, he fashioned the currency of speech to yield, from cheap and scant wording, a rich and abundant meaning, contriving through much silence to make the boys pointed in speech and well trained in their answers. For just as the seed of those given over to excess in intercourse is for the most part barren and unfruitful, so licentiousness in talking makes speech empty and senseless.
Now King Agis, when a certain Athenian mocked the smallness of the Spartan daggers and said that jugglers in the theaters swallowed them easily, replied, "And yet we reach our enemies with these very daggers best of all." And I observe that the Laconic style of speech, though it seems terse, in fact gets at the matter most precisely and takes hold of the minds of its hearers.
For Lycurgus himself seems to have been a man of few words and given to pithy sayings, if one may judge by the anecdotes remembered of him: such as his answer about constitutions to the man who urged him to set up a democracy in the city — "You," he said, "first make a democracy in your own household." And about sacrifices, to one who asked why he had ordained them so small and cheap, he said, "So that we may never leave off honoring the divine."
And about athletic contests, he permitted the citizens to compete only in those in which the hand is not raised against another. Letters of his are also preserved containing such answers to the citizens. How should we ward off an invasion of enemies? "By remaining poor, and by none of you desiring to be greater than another." And again about walls: "A city is not without walls which is crowned with men and not with bricks." Concerning these letters and others like them it is neither easy to disbelieve nor easy to believe them.
Of the slander against the length of their speeches, such specimens as these of their sayings are proof. King Leonidas, when someone spoke at an inopportune time on matters not without use, said, "Stranger, you use what is needed at a time it is not needed." And Charilaus, the nephew of Lycurgus, when asked about the fewness of his laws, said that men who do not use many words have no need of many laws either.
And Archidamidas, when some found fault with Hecataeus the sophist because, though admitted to the common mess, he said nothing, replied, "Whoever has skill in speaking also has skill in judging the fitting moment." And of the sort of biting anecdotes I said were not without charm, such are these. When Demaratus was being pestered by a worthless fellow with untimely questions, and in particular being repeatedly asked, "Who is the best of the Spartans?" he said, "The one least like you."
And Agis, when some were praising the Eleans for conducting the Olympic games well and justly, said, "And what great thing is it, if the Eleans practice justice for one day every five years?" And Theopompus, when a certain stranger displayed his goodwill and said that among his own citizens he was called a "friend of Sparta," replied, "It would be finer, stranger, to be called a friend of your own citizens."
And Pleistoanax, son of Pausanias, when an Athenian orator called the Lacedaemonians ignorant, said, "You speak rightly: for we alone of the Greeks have learned no evil from you." And Archidamidas, to one who asked how many Spartans there were, said, "Enough, stranger, to keep away the wicked."
One can also judge their habit of mind from what they said in jest, for they were accustomed never to use speech carelessly, nor to let fall a word that did not somehow contain a thought worth pondering. For one man, when invited to hear someone imitate the nightingale, said, "I have heard the bird itself." And another, reading this inscription — "These men, once quenching tyranny, were seized by bronze Ares; and around the gates of Selinus they died" — said, "They died justly; for they ought to have let it burn to the ground entirely."
And a young man, to one who promised to give him fighting-cocks that died in battle, said, "Not those — but give me instead ones that kill in battle." And another, seeing men seated on stools during a retreat, said, "May I never sit in a place from which one cannot rise to make way for an elder." Such, then, was the character of their sayings, so that some not unreasonably say that among the Spartans loving wisdom was practiced more than loving exercise.
The training in songs and melodies was pursued no less earnestly than the purity and correctness of speech; indeed their melodies had a sting that roused the spirit and inspired an eager and effective impulse, and the diction was plain and unaffected, dealing with grave and character-forming matters. For the songs were mostly hymns of praise for men who had given their lives on Sparta's behalf, pronouncing them blessed, alongside reproaches of those who had played the coward, saying that they lived a painful and ill-fated life, and promises and boasts of valor befitting each age.
Of these it will do no harm to bring forward one example. For when three choruses were formed according to the three ages at the festivals, the chorus of old men began by singing: "We once were valiant young men." Then the chorus of men in their prime answered: "We are that now — look, if you will, and see." And the third, the chorus of boys, said: "But we shall be far mightier still."
And indeed, if one should attend closely to the Laconic poems, some of which survive still to our own day, and take up the marching rhythms which they used with the flute when advancing on the enemy, one would not judge wrongly in thinking that Terpander and Pindar joined courage together with music. For the one has written of the Lacedaemonians: "There where the spear of youths flourishes, and the clear-voiced Muse, and Justice of the broad streets—"
and Pindar says: "Where the counsels of elders and the spears of young men excel, and choruses and the Muse and splendor." For they show them to be at once most musical and most warlike: "for playing the lyre well weighs equal against the sword," as the Laconian poet has said. And indeed in battles the king first sacrificed to the Muses, reminding them, it seems, of their training and their judgments, so that they might be ready in the face of danger and might render the deeds of the fighters worthy of being told.
At that time, too, in relaxing the harshest features of the training for the young, they did not prevent them from adorning themselves as to their hair and the ornament of their weapons and cloaks, taking pleasure, as with horses, in their preening and prancing before contests. Hence, letting their hair grow from the age of youth onward, they took special care, especially before dangers, that their hair should appear sleek and well-parted, recalling a certain saying of Lycurgus about hair, that it makes handsome men more attractive and ugly men more terrifying.
They also used gentler exercises during their campaigns, and allowed the young men's other manner of living to be less strict and less subject to scrutiny, so that for them alone of men war was a rest from the training for war. Now when their phalanx was already drawn up and the enemy present, the king would sacrifice the she-goat and command all to crown themselves with garlands and order the flute-players to play the tune of Castor;
and at the same time he would lead off the marching paean, so that the sight was at once solemn and awe-inspiring, as they marched in step to the flute, neither breaking ranks in the phalanx nor being thrown into confusion in spirit, but being led on to danger calmly and cheerfully by the music. For it is not likely that either excessive fear or excessive rage arises in men so disposed, but rather a steady confidence joined with hope and boldness, as though the god were present with them.
The king advanced against the enemy having with him one who had won a crown in the games. And they say that a certain man, when much money was offered him at the Olympic games, refused it, and instead, after a great struggle, threw down his opponent; and when someone said to him, "What good has come to you, Spartan, from your victory?" he said, smiling, "I shall fight the enemy stationed before the king."
When they had routed and defeated the enemy, they pursued only so far as to confirm the victory by the enemy's flight, and then withdrew at once, thinking it neither noble nor Greek to cut down and slaughter men who had given up and yielded ground. This was not only honorable and magnanimous, but also useful. For those fighting against them, knowing that they killed those who stood firm but spared those who gave way, judged that flight was more profitable than standing fast.
As for Lycurgus himself, Hippias the sophist says that he was most warlike and experienced in many campaigns; and Philostephanus attributes to Lycurgus even the division of the cavalry into squadrons, the squadron, as he organized it, being a body of fifty horsemen arrayed in a square formation. But Demetrius of Phalerum says that he laid down the constitution in a time of peace, having had no part in any warlike action.
And indeed the idea of the Olympic truce seems to belong to a man of gentle temper and one naturally inclined to peace, although some say, as Hermippus records, that Lycurgus had no connection at all with Iphitus and did not share in the matter at the outset, but happened to be present there and a spectator by chance, and heard a voice as of some man behind him rebuking him and expressing surprise that he did not urge his own citizens to take part in the festival; and when he turned around and the speaker was nowhere to be seen, he judged it to be divine, and so turned to Iphitus, and by joining in arranging the festival made it more renowned and more secure.
Their education extended even to grown men. For no one was permitted to live as he pleased, but the city was, as it were, a single camp, in which they had a fixed regimen and a fixed occupation with public affairs, and altogether they went on believing that they belonged not to themselves but to their fatherland — unless some other duty had been assigned to them — overseeing the boys, teaching them something useful, or themselves learning from their elders.
For indeed this too was one of the good and blessed things which Lycurgus provided for his own citizens: an abundance of leisure, since they were altogether forbidden to touch any menial trade, and had no need at all to gather wealth, with all its laborious business, since wealth had become entirely without envy and without honor.
The Helots worked their land for them, paying the assessed rent. And it is told that a Spartan, staying in Athens during a sitting of the law-courts, and learning that a certain man had been convicted for idleness and was walking away in low spirits, escorted by friends who shared his grief and took it hard, asked those present to point out to him the man convicted of the charge of "freedom" — so slavish did they consider a preoccupation with trades and money-making.
Lawsuits, as one would expect, disappeared along with money, since neither greed nor want was present among them, but equality prevailed in their plenty, and ease of life owing to their simple way of living. Choruses and festivals and banquets and pastimes concerning hunting and gymnastics and conversations occupied all their time whenever they were not on campaign.
Those younger than thirty years did not go down into the marketplace at all, but managed their necessary household business through their relatives and lovers. And for the older men it was shameful to be seen continually occupying themselves with such matters, rather than spending the greater part of the day around the gymnasia and the so-called "lounges." For when they gathered at these places they passed their leisure fittingly together, mentioning nothing at all pertaining to money-making or marketplace business;
but the greatest part of such occupation was to praise some fine deed, or to censure some shameful one, with playfulness and laughter, lightly carrying the hearer along toward admonition and correction. For Lycurgus himself was not unrelentingly severe; indeed Sosibius records that he set up a little statue of Laughter, having introduced playfulness, like a seasoning of toil and of daily life, in due season into their banquets and such gatherings.
On the whole he shaped the citizens so that they possessed neither the desire nor the ability to lead a private, self-centered life, but instead, like bees, to be grown together with the community, always clustering about their ruler together with one another, all but beside themselves with enthusiasm and ambition, and to belong wholly to their fatherland: as one may indeed perceive their cast of mind from certain sayings of theirs.
For Paedaretus, when he was not chosen among the Three Hundred, went away quite cheerful, as though rejoicing that the city had three hundred men better than himself. And Polycratidas, sent as ambassador with others to the king's generals, when they asked whether they had come in a private capacity or as public envoys, said, "If we succeed, as public envoys; if we fail, in a private capacity."
And Argileonis, the mother of Brasidas, when some men from Amphipolis, having arrived at Lacedaemon, came in to see her, asked whether Brasidas's death had been noble and fitting for a Spartan; and when they praised him highly and declared there was no man in Sparta like him, she said, "Say not so, strangers: for Brasidas was indeed a good and noble man, but Lacedaemon has many men mightier than he."
The Elders he himself, as has been said, first appointed from among those who had shared in his design; but afterward he ordained that, in place of one who died, the man judged best in virtue among those over sixty years of age should be appointed, and this seemed to be the greatest and most keenly contested of all contests among men. For the winner was not decided by who ran fastest or who had the greatest bodily strength, but rather it was whoever, among men both good and disciplined, proved best and most self-controlled among the good and self-controlled who was to be judged and to hold, as the prize of virtue for the whole of his life, what one might call the supreme power in the state, having authority over life and death and disfranchisement and, in general, over the greatest matters. And the judgment took place in the following manner.
When the assembly had gathered, chosen men were shut up nearby in a building, seeing neither the faces of those in the assembly nor being seen by them, but hearing only the shouting of those in assembly. For as in other matters, they judged the competitors by shout, not all together, but each brought in separately by lot and passing through the assembly in silence.
Now those who were shut in held writing tablets, and for each contestant they recorded how loud the acclaim was, without knowing in whose favor the noise rose, except that he was first or second or third or whatever number among those brought in. Whoever received the greatest and loudest shout, him they proclaimed victor. He then, crowned, made his round of the gods' shrines; many young men followed him, admiring and extolling him, and many women too, praising his virtue in song and calling his life blessed.
Each of his friends, setting a meal before him, would say that the city was honoring him with this table. Having made his round he went off to his mess-hall; there everything else proceeded as usual, but when a second portion was set before him, he kept it, taking it up; and after dinner, at the doors of the phiditium, with the women of his household present, he would summon whichever of them he happened to hold in highest honor, and giving her the portion he would say that he himself had received it as a prize of excellence and was giving it to her, so that she too, envied by the other women, was escorted home.
Moreover he arranged their burial customs in the best way. First, doing away with all superstition, he did not prevent them from burying their dead within the city, nor from having the graves near the temples, making the young familiar and accustomed to such sights, so that they would not be disturbed nor dread death as something that defiles those who touch a corpse or walk among tombs. Next, he allowed nothing to be buried with the body, but they wrapped it in a red cloak and olive leaves and laid it out.
It was not permitted to those who buried the dead to inscribe the name on the tomb, except for a man who died in war or a woman who died in the service of the sacred rites; and he set a short period of mourning, eleven days, and on the twelfth they had to sacrifice to Demeter and put an end to their grief. For nothing was left idle or unregulated, but he mixed into all necessary things some incitement to virtue or reproach of vice, and filled the city densely with examples, so that those who constantly encountered and were reared among them were necessarily led and molded as they went toward what is good.
For this reason he did not allow those who wished to travel abroad and wander, gathering foreign customs and imitations of uneducated ways of life and different constitutions, but he even drove out those who crowded into the city to no useful end and poured in upon it — not, as Thucydides says, out of worry that these visitors would copy the Spartan order and pick up something valuable for virtue, but rather so that no such person would end up teaching the Spartans some vice.
For along with foreign persons foreign words must necessarily come in too; and new words bring in new judgments. From these many passions and inclinations at odds with the established constitution are bound to spring up, as with a musical harmony. He therefore thought it more necessary to guard the city so that it would not be filled with corrupt characters, than to guard against diseased bodies entering from outside.
In these things, then, there is no trace of injustice or of grasping greed, which some charge against the laws of Lycurgus, as being adequate for courage but deficient in justice. As for the so-called krypteia, if it truly counts among Lycurgus's arrangements, as Aristotle claims it did, this may well be the practice that shaped Plato's own judgment about the constitution and about the man. It was of this sort:
From time to time the magistrates would send out into the countryside, in a different fashion, those of the young men who seemed to have the best sense, equipped with daggers and necessary provisions but nothing else. By day they scattered into obscure places, hid themselves and rested, but by night they would come down to the roads and slaughter any helot they caught.
Often too, going out over the fields, they would kill the strongest and most capable of them. Just as Thucydides also records in his history of the Peloponnesian War, that those helots singled out by the Spartans for courage, as having become free men, were crowned and made a round of the temples of the gods, but a little later all of them, more than two thousand in number, vanished, so that neither at the time nor afterward could anyone say by what manner they had perished.
Aristotle in particular says that the ephors, as soon as they entered upon their office, would declare war on the helots, so that killing them would involve no religious pollution. And in other respects too they treated them harshly and cruelly: they would force them to drink much unmixed wine and bring them into the common messes, displaying to the young what drunkenness looks like. They would command them to perform vulgar, laughable songs and dances, while barring them from those fitting for free men.
That is why they say that later, during the Theban invasion of Laconia, the captured helots, when ordered to sing the songs of Terpander and Alcman and Spendon the Laconian, refused, saying that their masters did not wish it. So those who say that in Lacedaemon the free man is most free and the slave most a slave were not observing the difference badly.
I myself think that such harshness developed among the Spartans later, especially after the great earthquake, when accounts tell that the helots banded with the Messenians against them, inflicting immense damage on the countryside and placing the city itself in gravest peril. Speaking for myself, I would not lay so ugly a practice as the krypteia at Lycurgus's door, judging his character from the rest of his gentleness and justice, to which the divine also bore witness.
Now when the most important matters had already been secured by him through custom, and the constitution had been sufficiently reared and was able to sustain and preserve itself by its own strength — just as Plato says that god rejoiced when the universe had come into being and had received its first motion — so Lycurgus, admiring and cherishing the beauty and greatness of his legislation now in operation and proceeding on its way, desired, so far as was possible from human foresight, to leave it immortal and unshaken for the future. He therefore gathered everyone into an assembly,
and said that the other matters were adequately and sufficiently arranged for the happiness and virtue of the city, but that the most important and greatest matter he could not disclose to them before he had consulted the god. They were therefore to keep to the laws already set down, altering or changing nothing, until he came back from Delphi; for upon his return he would do whatever seemed good to the god.
When all agreed and bade him go, he exacted oaths, first from the kings and the elders, then from the remaining citizens, binding them to keep and follow the constitution as it stood until Lycurgus came back; and he set out for Delphi. Arriving at the oracle and having sacrificed to the god, he asked whether the laws were well and sufficiently established for the happiness and virtue of the city.
When the god answered that the laws were well established, and that the city would remain most glorious as long as it kept to the constitution of Lycurgus, he wrote down the oracle and sent it to Sparta. He himself, having sacrificed once more to the god and embraced his friends and his son, resolved never to release the citizens from their oath, but to end his own life by his own choice, being at an age when it is fitting for one who wishes both to have lived and to have ceased, and when his affairs seemed to be sufficiently disposed toward happiness.
He therefore died by starving himself, holding that even the death of a statesman ought not to be without political purpose nor an idle end to his life, but should come as part of virtue and action. For to him, having accomplished the noblest deeds, his end would truly be the completion of his happiness; and for the citizens, he would leave his death as a guardian of the good things he had provided for them through his life, since they had sworn to abide by the constitution until he returned.
And he was not deceived in his reckoning: so far did the city outstrip the rest of Greece in good order and repute, keeping Lycurgus's laws in force across five centuries, which none of the fourteen kings who followed him down to Agis son of Archidamus tampered with. For the establishment of the ephors was not a relaxation but a tightening of the constitution, and though it seemed to have arisen in favor of the people, it made the aristocracy stronger.
In the reign of Agis, coined money first flowed into Sparta, and along with money came greed and a passion for wealth, brought about through Lysander, who, though himself incorruptible by money, filled his homeland with love of riches and luxury, bringing back gold and silver from the war and undermining the laws of Lycurgus,
under whose earlier prevalence Sparta had the way of life not of a city's constitution but of a single ascetic and wise man; or rather, just as the poets tell in myth that Heracles, wearing a lion-skin and carrying a club, went about the inhabited world, punishing lawless and beastly tyrants, so this city, ruling with a single scytale-staff and a single cloak, ruled Greece willingly and gladly, put down unjust dynasties and tyrannies in the various states, arbitrated wars and quelled factions, frequently accomplishing this without lifting even one shield, merely by dispatching a lone envoy, whose every command they obeyed at once, just as bees, when their leader appears, rush together and fall into order around him. So great was the city's superiority in good order and justice.
Hence I myself am amazed at those who say that the Lacedaemonians knew how to be ruled but did not know how to rule, and who praise the saying of King Theopompus, who, when someone said that Sparta was preserved because its kings knew how to command, replied, "Rather because the citizens know how to obey."
For men do not endure listening to those who are unable to lead; but obedience is a lesson taught by the ruler, for the one who leads well produces the willingness to follow well. And just as the achievement of the horseman's art is to render the horse gentle and obedient, so the task of royal skill is to work obedience into men; and the Lacedaemonians produced in others not mere obedience, but a positive desire to be ruled and to submit to them,
for they asked of them neither ships nor money nor sending of hoplites, but a single Spartan commander; and once they got him they treated him with honor and awe, as the Sicilians did Gylippus and the Chalcidians Brasidas, and as all the Greeks living in Asia treated Lysander and Callicratidas and Agesilaus, calling these men harmosts and correctors of the peoples and rulers everywhere, while they looked upon the whole city of the Spartans as a tutor or teacher of a decorous life and an ordered constitution,
at which Stratonicus too seems to have jested, when in play he laid down a law bidding the Athenians conduct the mysteries and processions, the Eleans hold the games, since they did these things most excellently, and the Lacedaemonians, if these others erred, be whipped. This was said in jest; but Antisthenes the Socratic, seeing the Thebans exulting greatly after the battle of Leuctra, said they were no different from schoolboys proud at having beaten up their tutor.
This, however, was not Lycurgus's chief aim at the time, to leave his city as leader over the greatest number; but, believing that happiness comes to the life of a single man and to a whole city alike from virtue and from concord with itself, he arranged and fitted everything toward this, so that, becoming free, self-sufficient, and self-controlled, they might continue so for as long a time as possible.
This aim Plato too took up as the foundation of his Republic, as did Diogenes and Zeno and all who have attempted to say anything worthwhile on these matters and are praised for it — though they left behind only writings and words. But he left behind not writings and words, but in deed brought into the light a constitution beyond imitation, and, to those who suppose that the disposition spoken of concerning the wise man does not exist in reality, he showed a whole city practicing philosophy; and so he rightly surpassed in fame all who ever governed among the Greeks.
For this reason Aristotle says he received lesser honors than were fitting for him to have in Lacedaemon, although he holds the greatest ones. For there is a shrine of his, and they sacrifice to him every year as to a god. And the story goes that once his remains were carried back, lightning struck his tomb — a thing which did not easily happen to any other famous man afterward except Euripides, who died and was buried in Macedonia near Arethusa. So it stands as a great vindication and testimony for those who love Euripides, that alone among men after death this same thing befell him which had earlier befallen the most god-beloved and most holy of men.
As for the death of Lycurgus, some say it occurred at Cirrha; Apollothemis says he was carried off to Elis; Timaeus and Aristoxenus say he lived out his life in Crete, and Aristoxenus says his tomb is shown by the Cretans of Pergamia near the foreign road. It is said he left a single son, Antiorus, and when this son died childless, his line died out with him.
His companions and household set up a kind of ongoing fellowship and gathering that persisted for many years, naming the occasions on which they met the Lycurgides. Aristocrates son of Hipparchus reports that after Lycurgus died in Crete, his foreign friends cremated the corpse and cast the remains into the sea, doing so at his own request and out of foresight, lest, if his remains were ever brought to Lacedaemon, people might suppose that he had returned and that the oaths had been released, and so change the constitution. So much, then, concerning Lycurgus.