liberations of the public assembly. After this, the discourse fell on valiant deeds, and illustrious men, who praises might rouse the younger hearers to generous emulation. Whatever may have been the origin of this institution, it manifestly answered several important ends, beside that for which it was immediately designed. On the one hand, it maintained a stricter separation between the ruling and the subject classes; it kept alive in the former the full consciousness of their superior station, and their national character: on the other hand, it bound the citizens together by ties of the most endearing intimacy; taught them to look on each other as members of one family; and gave an efficacy to the power of public opinion, which must have nearly superseded the necessity of any penal laws. To this we may add, that it provided a main part of the education of the young. Till they had reached their eighteenth year, the sons accompanied their fathers to the public hall, with the orphans of the deceased. The younger waited at the table; the rest, seated beside the men on a lower bench, received a portion suited to their age, of plainer fare, and listened to the conversation of their elders. They were here under the eye of an officer publicly appointed to superintend them.1 How far, in other respects, the state assumed a direct control over their education, does not appear; but it seems highly probable, that the same officer who watched over their behaviour in public, also enforced the other branches of discipline to which they were subject. They were early inured to hardship and laborious exercises: the same coarse garment served them for summer and winter; and their strength and spirit were proved by frequent combats between rival companies. The intervals of leisure left by this species of training were filled up by some simple lessons in poetry and music, and, in later times at least, in the rudiments of letters. The songs which they learnt, contained the precepts and 1 Пadovóes. Ephorus in Strabo, x. p 483. V VOL. I. maxims enforced by the laws, hymns to the gods, and the praises of the illustrious dead. From the beginning of their eighteenth year they were subjected to a stricter rule. They were now divided into troops 1, each headed by a youth of some noble family, whose pride it was to collect the greatest number he could under his command. He was himself placed under the control of some elder person, generally his father, who directed the exercises of the troop in the chase, the course, and the wrestling-school. On stated days, the rival troops engaged in a mimic fight, with movements measured by the flute and the lyre; and the blows they exchanged on these occasions, were dealt not merely with the hand and with clubs, but with iron weapons, — probably with a view of putting their skill, patience, and self-command, as well as their strength, to the trial, by the necessity of defending themselves without inflicting a dangerous wound.-How long the youths remained in these troops we are not informed. As soon as they quitted them to enter into the society of the men, the law compelled each to choose a bride; who however was not permitted, it is said, to undertake the duties of a matron, until she was found capable of discharging them; that is, probably, she continued for some time to live under the roof of her parents. The Cretan institutions sanctioned, and even enforced, a close intimacy between the men and the youths, which was undoubtedly designed to revive that generous friendship of the heroic ages, which was so celebrated in song, and to add a new motive to the love of glory in the noblest spirits. But the usage, which was singularly regulated by the law 2, degenerated in later times into a frightful licence, which was often mistaken for its primitive form, and consequently attributed to political views, which, if they had even existed, would have been equally odious and absurd.3 · ἀγέλαι. 2 Ephorus in Strabo, x. 483, 3 Aristotle, Pol. ii. 10. 291 CHAP. VIII. THE LEGISLATION OF LYCURGUS. We now return to the Dorians of Peloponnesus, whose history, scanty as is the information transmitted to us concerning its earlier ages, is still somewhat less obscure, and much more interesting, than that of the other Greek tribes during the same period. Our attention will for some time be fixed on the steps by which Sparta rose to a supremacy above the rest of the Dorian states, which was finally extended over the whole of Greece. This is the most momentous event of the period intervening between the Return of the Heracleids and the Persian wars. It was in part an effect of the great addition which Sparta made to her territory, by swallowing up that of her western neighbour. But this conquest may itself be regarded as a result of those peculiar institutions, which, once firmly established, decided her character and destiny to the end of her political existence, and which are in themselves one of the most interesting subjects that engage the attention of the statesman and the philosopher in the history of Greece. Before we attempt to describe the Spartan constitution, it will be necessary to notice the different opinions that have been entertained as to its origin and its author. It has been usual, both with ancient and modern writers, to consider it as the work of a single man as the fruit of the happy genius, or of the commanding character, of Lycurgus, who has generally been supposed to have had the merit, if not of inventing it, yet of introducing and establishing it among his countrymen. Viewed in this light, it has justly excited not only admiration, but astonishment: it appears a - prodigy of art, on which we gaze as on an Egyptian pyramid — a structure wonderful in its execution, but mysterious in its design. We admire the power which the legislator has exerted over his fellow-men: but while we are amazed at his boldness and success, we can scarcely refrain from suspecting that he must have been partly swayed by the desire of raising an extraordinary monument to his own fame. According to the opposite view of the subject, it was not an artificial fabric, but the spontaneous growth of a peculiar nature, which at the utmost required only a few slight touches from the hand of man; and the agency of Lycurgus shrinks into so narrow a compass, that even his personal existence becomes a question of much doubt and of little moment. The truth will perhaps be found to lie midway between these two extremes. The reasons which prevent us from unreservedly adopting either opinion, will be best understood, if we consider first the history of Lycurgus himself, as transmitted to us by the general consent of the ancients, and then the mode in which they describe the scope and character of his institutions. Experience proves that scarcely any amount of ́variation, as to the time and circumstances of a fact, in the authors who record it, can ever be a sufficient ground for doubting its reality. But the chronological discrepancies in the accounts of Lycurgus, which struck Plutarch as singularly great, on closer inspection do not appear very considerable. Xenophon indeed in a passage where it is his object to magnify the antiquity of the laws of Sparta, mentions a tradition, or opinion, that Lycurgus was a contemporary of the Heracleids.1 This however ought not perhaps to be interpreted more literally than the language of Aristotle, in one of his extant works, where he might seem to suppose that the lawgiver lived after the close of the Messenian wars." The great mass of evidence, including that of Aristotle 'and of Thucydides, fixes his legislation in the ninth cen tury before our era; and the variations within this period, if not merely apparent, are unimportant. There was also a disagreement, indicating some uncertainty, as to his parentage. We have already seen, that after the death of Aristodemus, the throne of Sparta was shared by his two sons, Eurysthenes and Procles. The kingly office continued to be hereditary in their lines, which were equal in power, though a certain precedence or dignity was allowed to that of Eurysthenes, grounded on his supposed priority of birth. It was not however from these remote ancestors that the two royal families derived their distinguishing appellations. The elder house was called the Agids, after Agis, son of Eurysthenes; the minor the Eurypontids, from Eurypon, the successor of Sous, son of Procles: a remarkable fact, not very satisfactorily explained from the martial renown of these princes, and perhaps indicating a concealed break in each series. Agis was followed by Echestratus and Labotas; and, according to Herodotus, it was during the minority of the latter, that Lycurgus, his guardian, governing as regent, employed the power thus accidentally placed in his hands, to establish his institutions. This however contradicts both the received chronology, and the better attested tradition, that the lawgiver belonged to the Eurypontid line. He was commonly believed to have been the son of Eunomus, the grandson of Eurypon; though the poet Simonides, following a different genealogy, called him the son of Prytanis, who is generally supposed to have been the father of Eunomus, and the immediate successor of Eurypon. Eunomus is said to have been killed in a fray which he was endeavouring to quell, and was succeeded by his eldest son Polydectes, who shortly after, dying childless, left Lycurgus apparently entitled to the crown. But as his brother's widow was soon discovered to be pregnant, he declared his purpose of resigning his dignity if she should give birth to an heir. The ambitious queen however if we may believe a 1 Dionysius Hal. ii. 49. names Eunomus as the ward. |