11. So that luxury, deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, died away of itself.
12. For the rich had no advantage here over the poor, as their expensive possessions were shut up at home doing nothing.
13. In this way the Spartans became excellent artists in ordinary and necessary things:
14. Beds, chairs and tables, and such staple utensils in a family, were admirably well made there;
15. Their cup, particularly, was much in demand, and eagerly bought up by soldiers, as Critias reports;
16. For its colour was such as to prevent water, drunk upon necessity and disagreeable to look at, from being noticed;
17. And its shape was such that the mud stuck to the sides, so that only the cleaner part came to the drinker’s mouth.
18. For this also, they had to thank their lawgiver, who, by relieving the artisans of the trouble of making useless things,
19. Set them to show their skill in giving beauty to things of daily use.
Chapter 5
1. The third and most masterly stroke of this great lawgiver, by which he delivered a yet more effective blow against luxury and the desire of riches,
2. Was the ordinance he made that they should all eat in common, of the same bread and meat,
3. And should not spend their lives at home, lying on costly couches at splendid tables,
4. Delivering themselves into the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, to fatten like greedy brutes,
5. And to ruin not only their minds but their bodies which, enfeebled by indulgence, would stand in need of long sleep, warm bathing, freedom from work,
6. And, in a word, as much care and attendance as if they were continually sick.
7. It was certainly an extraordinary thing to have brought about such a result,
8. But a greater yet to have taken away from wealth, as Theophrastus observes, not merely the property of being coveted, but its very nature of being wealth.
9. For the rich, being obliged to go to the same table as the poor, could not make use of their abundance, nor so much as please their vanity by looking at or displaying it.
10. The common table ordinance in particular exasperated the wealthier men.
11. They collected in a body against Lycurgus, and from ill words came to throwing stones,
12. So that at length he was forced to run out of the marketplace, and seek sanctuary to save his life.
13. He managed to outrun all except one Alcander, a young man otherwise not ill accomplished, but hasty and violent, who came up so close to him,
14. That when Lycurgus turned to see who was near, Alcander struck his face with a stick, and put out one of his eyes.
15. Lycurgus, so far from being daunted by this accident, stopped short and showed his disfigured face and eye to his countrymen;
16. They, ashamed at the sight, escorted him safely home, and delivered Alcander into his hands to be punished.
17. Lycurgus, having thanked them, dismissed them all, except Alcander;
18. And, taking him with him into his house, neither did nor said anything severely to him, but bade Alcander to wait on him at table.
19. The young man, who was of an ingenuous temper, without murmuring did as he was commanded;
20. And being thus admitted to live with Lycurgus, he had an opportunity to observe in him, besides his gentleness and calmness, an extraordinary sobriety and an indefatigable industry,
21. And so, from an enemy, became one of his most zealous admirers.
Chapter 6
1. The public repast of Sparta had several names in Greek; the Cretans called them ‘andria’, because the men only came to them.
2. The Lacedaemonians called them ‘phiditia’, that is, by changing l into d, the same as ‘philitia’, love feasts, because by eating and drinking together they had opportunity of making friends.
3. Or perhaps from ‘phido’, parsimony, because they were so many schools of sobriety.
4. Or perhaps the first letter is an addition, and the word at first was ‘editia’, from ‘edode’, eating.
5. They met by companies of about fifteen, and each of them stood bound to bring in monthly a bushel of meal, eight gallons of wine, five pounds of cheese, two pounds and a half of figs and a small sum of money for meat or fish.
6. Besides this, when any of them had been hunting, he donated a part of the venison he had killed;
7. For such occasions were the only excuses allowed for supping at home.
8. The custom of eating together was observed strictly for a great while afterwards;
9. Insomuch that King Agis himself, after having vanquished the Athenians, sending for his commons at home, because he desired to eat privately with his queen, was refused by the polemarchs; when he complained they made him pay a fine.
10. The Spartans sent their children to these tables as to schools of temperance;
11. Here they were instructed in state affairs by listening to experienced statesmen;
12. Here they learned to converse with pleasantry, to make jests without scurrility, and to take teasing without ill humour.
13. In this point of good breeding the Lacedaemonians excelled particularly, but if any man were uneasy under it, upon the least hint given, no more was said to him.
14. It was customary also for the eldest in the company to say to each of them, as they came in, ‘Through this’ (pointing to the door) ‘no words go out.’
15. When anyone desired to be admitted into any of these little societies, he was to go through the following probation:
16. Each man in the company took a little ball of soft bread, which they were to throw into a basin carried by a waiter on his head.
17. Those favouring the candidate dropped their ball into the basin without altering its figure;
18. Those who disliked him flattened it between their fingers, and this signified a negative vote.
19. If there were just one of these flattened pieces in the basin, the suitor was rejected, so desirous were they that all the members of the company should be agreeable to each other.
20. The basin was called ‘caddichus’, and the rejected candidate had a name thence derived.
21. The most famous dish of the common table was black broth, which was so much valued that the older men fed only upon that, leaving the meat to the younger men.
22. After drinking moderately, every man went home without lights,
23. For the use of them was forbidden, so that they might accustom themselves to march boldly in the dark.
Chapter 7
1. Lycurgus would never put his laws into writing; there is a Rhetra expressly forbidding it.
2. For he thought that the most material points, being imprinted on the hearts of the youth by a good discipline, would be sure to remain, and would find a stronger security there.
3. It was his design that education should effect every end and object of the law.
4. And as for things of lesser importance, as pecuniary contracts and such like, the forms of which have to be changed as occasion requires,
5. He thought it best to prescribe no positive rules, willing that they should be alterable according to circumstances, as determined by men of sound judgement.
6. One of the Rhetras was, that their laws should not be written;
7. Another was particularly levelled against luxury, for by it was ordained that the ceilings of the houses should only be wrought by the axe, and their gates and doors smoothed only by the saw.
8. Epameinondas’ famous dictum about his own table, that ‘Treason and a plain dinner like this do not keep company together,’ may be said to have been anticipated by Lycurgus, for luxury and a plain house could not well be companions.
9. He would lack sense who would furnish simple rooms with silver-footed couches, purple coverlets and gold plate.
10. Doubtless Lycurgus had good reason to think that they would proportion their beds to their houses, and their coverlets t
o their beds, and the rest of their goods and furniture to these.
11. It is reported that King Leotychides, the first of that name, was so little used to the sight of any kind of decorated work,
12. That, being entertained at Corinth in a stately room, he was much surprised to see the timber and ceiling so finely carved, and asked his host whether the trees grew so in his country.
13. A third ordinance of Rhetra was, that they should not make war often, or long, with the same enemy,
14. Lest they should train and instruct them in war, by habituating them to defend themselves.
15. And this is what Agesilaus was blamed for, a long time after; it being thought that, by his continual incursions into Boeotia, he made the Thebans a match for the Spartans;
16. And therefore Antalcidas, seeing him wounded one day, said that he was well paid for making the Thebans good soldiers despite themselves.
17. For the good education of the youth, which Lycurgus thought the most important and noblest work of a lawgiver,
18. He went so far back as to take into consideration their very conception and birth, by regulating marriages.
19. Aristotle is wrong in saying that, after Lycurgus had tried all ways to reduce the women to more modesty and sobriety, he was at last forced to leave them as they were,
20. Because in the absence of their husbands, who spent the best part of their lives away at war, their wives, whom they had to leave absolute mistresses at home,
21. Took great liberties and assumed the superiority; and were treated with overmuch respect and called by the title of lady or queen.
22. The truth is, Lycurgus took in their case, also, all the care that was possible;
23. He ordered the maidens to exercise themselves with wrestling, running, throwing the discus and casting the dart,
24. To the end that the fruit they conceived might, in strong and healthy bodies, take firmer root and find better growth,
25. And that with this greater vigour, might better undergo the pains of childbearing.
26. And to take away their excessive tenderness and all acquired womanishness, he ordered that the girls should go naked in the processions, as well as the young men,
27. And dance, too, in that condition, at feasts, singing certain songs, while the young men stood around, seeing and hearing them.
28. On these occasions the maidens now and then made, by jests, a reflection on those youths who had misbehaved themselves in the wars;
29. And again sang encomiums upon those who had acted gallantly, and by these means inspired the younger men with an emulation of their glory.
30. Those that were thus commended went away proud, elated and gratified with their honour among the maidens;
31. And those who were rallied were as sensibly touched as if they had been formally reprimanded;
32. So much the more, because the kings and the elders, as well as the rest of the city, saw and heard all that passed.
33. Nor was there anything shameful in this nakedness of the girls; modesty attended them, and all wantonness was excluded.
34. It taught them simplicity and a care for good health, and gave them some taste of higher feelings, admitted as they thus were to the field of noble action and glory.
35. Hence it was natural for them to think and speak as Gorgo, for example, the wife of Leonidas, is said to have done,
36. When some foreign lady told her that the women of Lacedaemon were the only women in the world who could rule men;
37. ‘With good reason,’ Gorgo replied, ‘for we are the only women who bring forth men.’
38. These public processions of the maidens, and their appearing naked in their exercises and dancings, were incitements to marriage,
39. Operating upon the young with the rigour and certainty, as Plato says, of love, if not of mathematics.
40. But besides all this, to promote it yet more effectually, those who continued bachelors were partly disfranchised by law;
41. For they were excluded from the public processions in which the young men and maidens danced naked,
42. And, in wintertime, the officers compelled them to march naked themselves round the marketplace,
43. Singing a song to their own disgrace, that they justly suffered this punishment for disobeying the law to marry and have children.
44. Moreover, they were denied the respect paid by younger men to their elders;
45. No man, for example, found fault with what was said to Dercyllidas, though so eminent a commander;
46. Upon whose approach one day a young man, instead of rising, retained his seat, remarking, ‘No child of yours will make room for me.’
Chapter 8
1. In their marriages, the brides were never of tender years, but in their full bloom and ripeness.
2. After being carried off by her man, the bride had her hair clipped close, dressed in man’s clothes, and lay on a mattress in the dark;
3. Afterwards came the bridegroom, in his everyday clothes, sober and composed, as having supped at the common table,
4. And, entering privately into the room where the bride lies, untied her virgin girdle, and took her to himself;
5. And, after staying some time together, he returned composedly to his own apartment, to sleep as usual with the other young men.
6. And so he continued to do, spending his days and nights with the young men, visiting his bride in secret, and with circumspection;
7. She, for her part, using her wit to find favourable opportunities for their meeting, when company was out of the way.
8. In this manner they lived a long time, insomuch that they sometimes had children by their wives before ever they saw their faces by daylight.
9. Their interviews, being thus difficult and rare, served not only for continual exercise of self-control,
10. But brought them together with their bodies healthy and vigorous, and their affections unsated and undulled by easy access and long continuance with each other;
11. While their partings were always early enough to leave unextinguished in each of them some remaining fire of longing and mutual delight.
12. After guarding marriage with this modesty and reserve, Lycurgus was equally careful to banish jealousy.
13. For this object, excluding all licentious disorders, he made it honourable for men to agree to their wives consorting with those they thought fit, that so they might have children by them;
14. Ridiculing those in whose opinion such favours are so wrong as to shed blood and go to war about it.
15. Lycurgus allowed a man who was advanced in years and had a young wife to recommend some virtuous and approved young man,
16. That she might have a child by him, who might inherit the good qualities of the father, and be a son to himself.
17. On the other side, an honest man who had love for a married woman upon account of her modesty and the well-favouredness of her children,
18. Might, without formality, beg her company of her husband, that he might raise, as it were, from this plot of good ground, worthy and well-allied children for himself.
19. And indeed, Lycurgus was of the view that children were not so much the property of their parents as of the whole commonwealth,
20. And therefore would not have his citizens begot by the first-comers, but by the best men that could be found;
21. The laws of other nations seemed to him absurd and inconsistent, where people would be so solicitous for their dogs and horses as to exert interest and pay money to procure fine breeding,
22. And yet kept their wives shut up, to be made mothers only by themselves, who might be foolish, infirm or diseased;
23. As if it were not apparent that children of a bad breed would prove their bad qualities first upon those who were rearing them,
24. And well-born children, in like manner, their good qualities.
25. These regulations, founded on natural and social grounds, were certainly so far from that scandalou
s liberty which was afterwards charged upon Spartan women,
26. That they knew not what was meant by the word adultery.
Chapter 9
1. Nor was it in the power of the father to dispose of a newborn if he thought it unfit;
2. He had to carry it before assessors, whose business it was carefully to examine the infant;
3. If they found it healthy and vigorous, they gave order for its rearing, and allotted to it one of the nine thousand shares of land for its maintenance,
4. But, if they found it misbegotten, they ordered it to be taken to the chasm called Apothetae,
5. Thinking it neither for the good of the child itself, nor in the public interest, that it should be brought up.
6. The women did not bathe the newborn children in water, as in other countries, but in wine, to prove the temper of their bodies,
7. From a notion that weakly children faint away upon their being thus bathed, while those who are strong acquire firmness by it.
8. Much care and art was used by the nurses; they had no swaddling bands;
9. The children grew up free and unconstrained in limb, not dainty about their food,
10. Not afraid in the dark, or of being left alone, and without peevishness or crying.
11. On this account Spartan nurses were valued in other countries.
12. Lycurgus would not have teachers bought out of the slave market, nor those who charged fees;
13. Nor could fathers themselves educate their children after their own fancy;
14. But when seven years old they were enrolled in companies where they lived under the same order and discipline, doing their exercises and playing together.
15. Of these, the one who made the best showing was made captain; they kept their eyes upon him, obeyed him and patiently accepted his discipline,
16. So that their whole education was one continued exercise of ready and perfect obedience.
17. The older men were spectators of their performances, and often stirred disputes among them,
18. To find out their different characters, and see which would be valiant, which a coward, in real conflicts.
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