The Good Book (91 page)

21. Sometimes the Iren did this in the presence of the older men and magistrates, that they might see whether he punished them justly and proportionately,

22. And when he did amiss, they would not reprove him before the boys, but afterwards called him to account and corrected him.

Chapter 11

  1.   The boys’ lovers and favourers, too, had a share in their honour or disgrace;

  2. There goes a story that one of them was fined by the magistrates, because the lad he loved cried out effeminately when fighting.

  3. And though this sort of love was approved among them, yet rivalry did not exist,

  4. And if several men’s fancies met in one person, it was rather the beginning of an intimate friendship,

  5. In which they all jointly conspired to render the object of their affection as accomplished as possible.

  6. They taught them, also, to speak with a natural and graceful raillery, and to comprehend much matter of thought in few words.

  7. For Lycurgus disapproved of discourse which did not contain its matter in few words.

  8. Children in Sparta, by habits of silence, came to give brief, just and sententious answers.

  9. King Agis, when an Athenian laughed at the Spartans’ short swords, and said that the jugglers on the stage swallowed them with ease, answered,

10. ‘We find them long enough to reach our enemies.’ As their swords were short and sharp, so were their sayings;

11. They reach the point and arrest the attention of hearers better than any.

12. Lycurgus spoke thus, as appears by his answer to one who would set up a democracy in Lacedaemon;

13. ‘Begin, friend,’ said he, ‘and set it up in your family.’

14. When a man named Hecataeus was criticised for speaking not one word all suppertime, Archidamidas answered in his vindication,

15. ‘He who knows how to speak, knows also when.’

Chapter 12

  1. When they were at war the Spartans’ exercises were generally more moderate, their fare not so hard, nor the rule of their officers so strict,

  2. So that they were the only people in the world to whom war gave repose.

  3. When their army was drawn up for battle, and the enemy near, the soldiers set their garlands on their heads, the pipers began to play and the king began the paean of advance.

  4. It was both a magnificent and a terrible sight to see them march to their flutes, without any disorder in their ranks,

  5. Without any discomposure in their minds, or change in their countenances; but calmly moving with the music towards the deadly fight.

  6. Men, in this temper, were not likely to be afraid or furious, but deliberate in valour and assurance.

  7. After they had routed an enemy, they pursued till they were assured of victory,

  8. And then sounded a retreat, thinking it unworthy of Grecians to kill men who had yielded.

  9. This manner of dealing with enemies not only showed magnanimity, but policy;

10. For, knowing that they killed only those who resisted, and gave quarter to the rest,

11. Opponents generally thought their best safety was surrender.

Chapter 13

  1. The discipline of the Spartans continued after they were full-grown men.

  2. No one was allowed to live after his own fancy; the city was a camp, in which every man had his share of provisions and business,

  3. And looked upon himself as born to serve not himself but his country.

  4. Therefore if they had no other duties, they went to see the boys exercising, to teach them something useful or to learn it better themselves.

  5. Indeed, one of the highest blessings Lycurgus procured his people was the abundance of leisure which proceeded from his forbidding them to follow any mean or mechanical trade.

  6. Of the money-making that depends on troublesome going about and doing business, they had no need in a state where wealth had no honour.

  7. The Helots tilled their ground for them, and paid them yearly the appointed quantity, without any trouble of theirs.

  8. Upon the prohibition of gold and silver, all lawsuits immediately ceased,

  9. For there was now neither avarice nor poverty among them, but equality, where everyone’s wants were supplied,

10. And independence, because those wants were so small.

11. All their time, except when at war, was taken up by the choral dances and festivals,

12. In hunting, and in attendance on the exercise-grounds and places of public conversation.

13. Those who were under thirty years were not allowed in the marketplace,

14. But had the necessaries of their family supplied by their relations and lovers;

15. Nor was it to the credit of older men to be seen too often in the marketplace;

16. It was esteemed more suitable for them to frequent the exercise-grounds and places of conversation, not money-making and watching market prices.

17. Thus Lycurgus bred up his citizens in such a way that they neither would nor could live by themselves;

18. They were to make themselves one with the public good.

19. To inure the young to the sight of death, Lycurgus allowed the citizens to bury their dead within the city,

20. So that their youth might be accustomed to such spectacles, and not be afraid to see a dead body,

21. Or fear to touch a corpse or to tread on a grave. The time appointed for mourning was eleven days and no more.

22. Thus Lycurgus cut off all superfluity, so in things necessary there was nothing so trivial which did not express a homage to virtue or scorn of vice.

23. He filled Lacedaemon with examples of good conduct; with the constant sight of which, from their youth upwards, the people could hardly fail to be formed and advanced in virtue.

24. And this was the reason why he forbade them to travel abroad and go about acquainting themselves with foreign rules of morality, the habits of ill-educated people and different views of government.

25. And he banished from Lacedaemon all strangers who would not give good reason for coming there;

26. Not because he was afraid that they should learn anything to their good, but rather lest they should introduce something bad in example or teaching.

27. With strange people, strange words must be admitted; these novelties produce novelties in thought;

28. And on these follow views and feelings whose discordant character destroys the harmony of the state.

29. Lycurgus was as careful to save his city from the infection of foreign bad habits, as men usually are to prevent the introduction of the plague.

Chapter 14

  1. I see no sign of unfairness in the laws of Lycurgus, though some who grant that they make good soldiers, criticise them as lacking in justice.

  2. Both Aristotle and Plato had this opinion alike of the lawgiver and his government,

  3. And especially the ordinance by which the magistrates secretly dispatched some of the ablest young men into the countryside,

  4. Carrying only daggers and some provisions, to hide in the daytime but to come out at night and kill all the Helots they could find;

  5. And even sometimes murdering them by daylight, as they worked in the fields.

  6. Aristotle, in particular, adds that the ephors, so soon as their office was created, used to declare war against the Helots,

  7. That they might be massacred without a breach of law. It is confessed on all hands that the Spartans treated the Helots very badly;

  8. For apart from the murders and cruelty committed upon them as just described,

  9. It was common to force them to drink to excess, then lead them into their public halls, that the children might see what a sight a drunken man is;

10. They made them perform low dances and sing ridiculous songs, forbidding them expressly to meddle with any of a better kind.

11. And accordingly, when the Thebans invaded Laconia, and captured many Helots, they could by no means persuade them to sing the verses of Terpander, Alcman or Spendon,

12. ‘For,’ said the Helots, ‘the masters do not like it.’ As someone truly observed, in Sparta he who was free was most so, and he that was a slave there, was the greatest slave in the world.

13. I think these outrages on the Helots began at a later time, after the great earthquake, when the Helots made a general insurrection,

14. And, joining with the Messenians, laid the country waste. For I cannot persuade myself that Lycurgus was so barbarous,

15. Judging from his disposition to justice and gentleness in other ways.

16. And yet, is this frightful cruelty to slaves all the criticism that can be offered?

17. Much more criticism might be made: that no one belonged to himself, but to the state only, without personal freedom;

18. That Sparta was preserved in its institutions and manners by a strict limitation of knowledge and an impoverished austerity;

19. That to make a whole society an army is as much as to make it a tribe of ants merely;

20. That the arts of civilisation and philosophy were excluded for what elsewhere they were valued,

21. Namely, their promise of innovation and the expansion both of knowledge and the human character.

22. In short, that though Sparta had the camaraderie and discipline of the military camp, it had little else.

23. And such might even be said in balance with the well-ordering of the state, the health of its citizens,

24. The sensible liberality of its morals and its safety from conquest and enslavement by foreigners.

25. How might a state combine these benefits without the imitations and severity that made Sparta a place, in effect, of self-imposed siege?

26. For who now can imagine being a Spartan?

Chapter 15

  1. When Lycurgus saw that his institutions had taken root in the minds of his countrymen, that custom had rendered them familiar, and that his commonwealth was now able to go alone,

  2. He planned to make it enduring, and, as far as human forecast could reach, to deliver it unchangeable to posterity.

  3. He called an assembly of the people, and told them that as he thought everything was now well established,

  4. He desired that they would observe the laws without the least alteration until he returned from a journey he now proposed.

  5. They consented readily, and bade him hasten back; and promised to maintain the established polity until he did so.

  6. Having taken leave of his friends and family, and to ensure that the Spartans should never be released from the promise they had made, he resolved, of his own act, now to end his life.

  7. He was then at an age when life is still tolerable, yet might be quitted without regret.

  8. This latter he did by fasting, thinking it a statesman’s duty to make his very death, if possible, an act of service to the state, and even at the end of life to give some example of virtue.

  9. He was not deceived in his expectation that he would secure to his countrymen the advantages he had spent his life obtaining for them,

10. For Sparta continued the chief city of Greece for five hundred years, in strict observance of his laws, during the reign of fourteen kings down to the time of Agis son of Archidamus.

11. And even then, the creation of ephors made in Agis’ day was so far from diminishing, that it much heightened the balanced character of the government,

12. So that it continued Lycurgus’ monument afterwards, until the Pyrrhic victory of its defeat of Athens in that war which Thucydides later recorded.

Chapter 16: Solon of Athens

  1. Solon the lawgiver and teacher of Athens was the son of Execestides, a man of moderate wealth and influence in the city, but of noble stock; his mother was cousin to the mother of Pisistratus.

  2. He and this latter were at first great friends, partly because they were kin, and partly because of Pisistratus’ noble qualities and beauty.  

  3. They say Solon loved him; which is the reason that when afterwards they differed about the government,

  4. Their enmity never produced any violent passion, for they remembered their old kindnesses, and retained, though in its embers, the once strong fire of their love.

  5. As this shows, Solon was not proof against beauty, nor did he lack courage to stand up to passion and meet it.

  6. Solon’s father ruined the family estate by his benefits and kindnesses to others,

  7. So Solon applied himself to trade, though he had friends enough willing to help him;

  8. But as one descended from a family who were accustomed to do kindnesses rather than receive them, he preferred independence.