Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But since we have gone through the lives of Numa and Lycurgus, both now set out before us, it is a hard task, yet one we must not shrink from, to bring together their points of difference. Their common traits are plain in their actions — the moderation of the men, their piety, their statesmanship, their devotion to education, the fact that both received the single foundation of their legislation from the gods. But of the merits proper to each individually, the first is that Numa received his kingship while Lycurgus gave his up.
The one, without asking, received it; the other, having it, gave it back. Numa was made master of himself by others, though he was a private citizen and a foreigner; Lycurgus made himself a private citizen out of a king, by his own act. It is a fine thing to gain a kingship through justice, but it is also fine to prefer justice to a kingship — for virtue made the one man so renowned that he was deemed worthy of a kingdom, and made the other so great that he came to despise one.
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 — so the harder task belongs to Lycurgus. For he was not persuading his citizens to strip off their breastplates and lay down their swords, but to give up gold and silver, and to throw out their expensive dining-couches and tables; his aim was not that they should abandon warfare in order to keep festivals and offer sacrifices, but rather that, abandoning feasts and drinking-parties, they should toil and drill themselves under arms and in the wrestling-grounds.
Hence the one man accomplished everything through goodwill and honor, persuading; the other, facing danger and being struck at, barely prevailed. Yet Numa's muse was gentle and humane, refashioning his citizens toward peace and justice, and softening them out of their unrestrained and fiery ways. But if someone should force us, on account of the matter concerning the Helots,
a most savage and most lawless deed, to place it within Lycurgus's constitution, we shall say that Numa was by far the more Greek-spirited lawgiver, seeing that he gave even acknowledged slaves a taste of free honor, accustoming them to feast together with their masters, mingled among them, at the festival of the Kronia. Indeed they say this too is one of Numa's ancestral institutions, since he brought in his fellow-workers to share in the yearly enjoyment of the crops; and some tell the story that this is preserved as a reminder of that equality under Kronos, when neither slave nor master was recognized, but all were reckoned kinsmen and equals in honor.
Altogether, both men appear alike to have led their peoples toward self-sufficiency and moderation; but of the other virtues, the one cherished courage the more, the other justice — unless, by Zeus, it was because of the underlying nature or custom of each polity, which, being unlike, required unlike preparation.
For Numa did not put a stop to warfare out of cowardice, but so as not to commit wrong; nor did Lycurgus train his people for war so as to commit wrong, but so that they might not be wronged. So then, in removing excesses and filling up deficiencies among their citizens' resources, both were compelled to make great changes.
And indeed, as to the ordering and division of their constitutions, that of Numa is thoroughly popular and courts the multitude, making the people a motley and much-variegated body out of goldsmiths and flute-players and cobblers, whereas that of Lycurgus is austere and aristocratic, purging out the vulgar crafts into the hands of servants and resident aliens, and gathering the citizens themselves to shield and spear, craftsmen of war and servants of Ares, knowing and practicing nothing else than to obey their rulers and to overcome their enemies.
For it was not permitted to free men to make money, so that they might be free wholly and once for all; but the business of money was given over to slaves and Helots, just as the service of dinner and relish was. Numa, however, made no such distinction; although he brought an end to the plundering habits of soldiers, he left other forms of profit-seeking untouched, and did nothing to settle the inequality that followed from it,
but allowed wealth to proceed without limit, and neglected the poverty that was gathering and seeping into the city, though he ought, right at the beginning, while inequality was not yet great or extensive but lives were still level and much alike, to have set himself against greed, as Lycurgus did, and guarded against the harms arising from it — harms that proved not small, but that furnished the seed and origin of most of the greatest evils that later came together.
The redistribution of land, in my judgment, neither makes Lycurgus blameworthy for having carried it out, nor Numa for not having done so. For Lycurgus this equality furnished a seat and foundation for the constitution, whereas for Numa, since the allotment was still fresh, nothing pressed him to introduce another redistribution or to disturb the first division, which, it is reasonable to think, remained in place.
As to the community established over marriage and childbearing, both men rightly and in statesmanlike fashion instilled freedom from jealousy in their husbands, yet they did not come together entirely in the same way about it: the Roman husband, if sufficiently provided with children, being persuaded by another man in need of offspring, would withdraw from his wife, having authority to give her away and give her away again; whereas the Spartan, with his wife remaining at home with him and the marriage continuing on its original terms, shared her with the man who persuaded him, for the begetting of children.
And many, as has been said, would even invite in men from whom they thought their children were most likely to turn out fair and good. What then is the distinction between the two customs? Is it that the one is a strong and unmixed indifference toward one's own wife and toward the things that trouble and inflame most men with jealousy, while the other is a kind of bashful modesty, drawing the marriage-bond over itself as a veil, and confessing how hard it is to endure such a sharing?
Further, the guarding of maidens is kept much more modest and decorous under Numa toward the feminine and orderly, whereas that of Lycurgus, being entirely thrown open and unfeminine, has given the poets occasion for talk. For they call them 'thigh-showers,' as Ibycus does, and revile them as man-mad, as Euripides does, saying: 'who with young men leave their homes empty, with naked thighs and unbound robes.'
For indeed the flaps of the maiden's tunic were not sewn together at the bottom, but would open and, in walking, bare the whole thigh together. And Sophocles has stated the fact most clearly in these lines: 'and the newly-wed Hermione, whose unfastened tunic still folds about the outer thigh.'
For this reason they are said to have become bolder, and, toward their own men first of all, mannish, inasmuch as they ruled their households with full authority, and in public affairs took a share of counsel and free speech about the greatest matters; whereas Numa preserved for wedded wives the standing and honor which they had before their husbands, which they had held ever since being cared for after their seizure under Romulus, but he set over them much modesty, and took away meddlesomeness, and taught them sobriety, and accustomed them to silence, keeping them altogether from wine, and, in speech, not even venturing to speak of necessary matters without their husbands.
At any rate it is said that once, when a woman had pleaded her own case in the marketplace, the senate sent to consult the god, inquiring what, then, the occurrence portended for the city. And a great proof of the general obedience and gentleness of Roman women is the record kept of the worse cases. For just as our own historians write of those who were first to commit kindred murder, or to make war on brothers, or to become slayers of their own father or mother,
so too 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; and the first woman to do so was Thalaea, wife of Pinarius, who quarreled with her mother-in-law Gegania during the reign of Tarquinius Superbus — so well, so decorously, had the lawgiver arranged the affairs of marriage.
In the rest of the training of maidens, the matter of giving them in marriage agrees as well: Lycurgus gave brides in marriage when they were mature and ripe, so that their union, since nature now required it, might be the beginning of affection and friendship rather than of hatred and fear from being forced against nature, and so that their bodies might have the strength to bear conception and the pains of labor, on the ground that they were married for nothing else than the work of childbearing; whereas the Romans gave girls in marriage at twelve years or younger, for in this way, they thought, both body and character would come to the husband especially pure and untouched.
It is clear, then, that the one practice looks more to nature for the sake of childbearing, the other more to character for the sake of living together. But surely, in the oversight and herding-together of children, in their upbringing and their fellowship, in matters of meals and exercises and the ordered arrangement of their games, Lycurgus shows Numa to have been no better than any ordinary lawgiver, since he shaped the training of the young according to the desires or needs of the fathers,
whether one wished to make his son a farmer, or to teach him shipbuilding or smithing or flute-playing — as though they ought not from the start to be led and turned together in their characters toward one single end, but, like passengers coming aboard a ship each from a different occupation and purpose, join together for the common good only out of fear for their own safety in dangers, and otherwise each look out for himself alone.
And most lawgivers are not to be blamed for falling short, either through ignorance or through weakness; but for a wise man who took over a kingship of a people newly formed and offering no resistance, what ought he to have made his first concern, if not the rearing of children and the training of the young, so that they might not become discordant or turbulent in character, but, being molded and shaped from the very beginning toward one common trace of virtue, might come into agreement with one another?
This indeed benefited Lycurgus, both in other respects and for the preservation of his laws. For 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, as if set fast by a pure and potent dye.
But for Numa, that very thing which was the end of his statesmanship — that Rome should exist in peace and friendship — perished immediately along with him. 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; nor did the fairest and most just order of things remain even a short time, seeing that it did not have within itself the bond that holds things together — education.
'What then,' someone will say, 'did not Rome advance to something better through its wars?' He asks a question requiring a long answer, addressed to men who set the better in wealth and luxury and dominion rather than in safety and gentleness and self-sufficiency joined with justice. Not but that this too will seem, somehow, to help Lycurgus's case — that the Romans, having exchanged the order established under Numa, so greatly increased their power,
while the Lacedaemonians, as soon as they first departed from Lycurgus's arrangement, fell from being the greatest to being the most humbled, and, having lost the leadership of the Greeks, ran the risk of utter ruin. Yet that which is truly great and divine in Numa remains — that though a foreigner sent for from abroad, he changed everything by persuasion, and gained mastery over a city not yet breathing as one, needing neither arms nor any force, unlike Lycurgus, who led the best men against the common people, but by wisdom and justice won all of them over and fitted them together.