CHAP. it with him, by destroying the embryo hopes of Sparta. Stifling his indignation, he affected to emB. C. 884. brace her offer; but, as if tender of her health, bad her do no violence to the course of nature: - The infant, when born, might be easily despatched. As the time drew near, he placed trusty attendants round her person, with orders, if she should be delivered of a son, to bring the child immediately to him. He happened to be sitting at table with the magistrates, when his servants came in with a new-born prince. Taking the infant from their arms, he placed it on the royal seat, and in the presence of the company proclaimed it king of Sparta, and named it Charilaus, to express the joy which the event diffused among the people. Travels of Lycurgus, his return to Sparta, actions, and death. Though proof against such temptation, Lycurgus had the weakness, it seems, to shrink from a vile suspicion. Alarmed lest the calumnies propagated by the incensed queen-mother and her kinsmen, who charged him with a design against the life of his nephew, might chance to be seemingly confirmed by the untimely death of Charilaus, he determined, instead of staying to exercise his authority for the benefit of the young king and of the state, to withdraw beyond the reach of slander, till the maturity of his ward, and the birth of an heir, should have removed every pretext for such imputations. Thus the prime of his life, notwithstanding the regret and the repeated invitations of his countrymen, was spent in voluntary exile, which however he employed in maturing a plan already conceived, for remedying the evils under which Sparta had long laboured, by a great change in its constitution and laws. With this view he visited many foreign lands, observed their institutions and manners, and conversed with their sages. Crete and the laws of Minos are said to have been the main object of his study, and a Cretan poet CHAP. VILI. one of his instructors in the art of legislation; but the Egyptian priests likewise claimed him as their disciple; and reports were not wanting among the B. C. 884. later Spartans, that he had penetrated as far as India, and had sat at the feet of the Bramins. On his return he found the disorders of the state aggravated, and the need of a reform more generally felt. Having strengthened his authority with the sanction of the Delphic oracle, which declared his wisdom to transcend the common level of humanity, and having secured the aid of a numerous party among the leading men, who took up arms to support him, he successively procured the enactment of a series of solemn ordinances or compacts 1 (Rhetras), by which the civil and military constitution of the commonwealth, the distribution of property, the education of the citizens, the rules of their daily intercourse and of their domestic life, were to be fixed on a hallowed and immutable basis. Many of these regulations roused a violent opposition, which even threatened the life of Lycurgus; but his fortitude and patience finally triumphed over all obstacles; and he lived to see his great idea, unfolded in all its beauty, begin its steady course, bearing on its front the marks of immortal vigour. His last action was to sacrifice himself to the perpetuity of his work. He set out on a journey to Delphi, after having bound his countrymen, by an oath, to make no change in his laws before his return. When the last seal had been set to his institutions by 1 On the proper meaning of the word phrpa see Nitzsch, De Hist. Hom. i. p. 52., who adopts the interpretation of the Greek grammarians, ῥήτρα, ἡ ἐπὶ ῥητοῖς συνθήκη. Suscepta Toù nтoû, i. e. dicti quod obliget, notione þýτрav scitum percommoda interpretatione reddi videbimus: and proceeds to point out the historical connection between the ideas of law and compact: adding (p. 54.), Quod quum ita sit, multum mirarer, si quis vel tantillum amplius tribueret Plutarcho qui Lyc. 6. init. et 13. extr. rhetras a Lycurgo appellatas interpretatur ŵs rapà тoû leoû voμÇóμeva καὶ χρησμοὺς ὄντα, Schoemann ad Plutarch. Ag. 5. (p. 106.) observes: Proprie nihil nisi ῥῆμα ῥῆσιν λόγον esse apparet. In an earlier work, Antiquitates Juris Publici Græcorum, he had said (p. 120. n. 6.), referring to Plutarch's interpretation: Significat hæc vox apud Dorienses et olenses etiam pactum vel decretum humanum, nulla divinæ auctoritatis significatione adjuncta. CHAP. B. C. 884. Antiquity of the stitutions. the oracle, which foretold that Sparta should flourish as long as she adhered to them, having transmitted this prediction to his fellow-citizens, he resolved, in order that they might never be discharged from their oath, to die in a foreign land. The place and manner of his death are veiled in an obscurity befitting the character of the hero: the sacred soils of Delphi, of Crete, and of Elis, all claimed his tomb: the Spartans honoured him, to the latest times, with a temple and yearly sacrifices, as a god. Such are the outlines of a story which is too famiSpartan in- liar to be cast away as an empty fiction, even if it should be admitted that no part of it can bear the scrutiny of a rigorous criticism. But the main question is, whether the view it presents of the character of Lycurgus as a statesman, is substantially correct : and in this respect we should certainly be led to regard him in a very different light, if it should appear that the institutions which he is here supposed to have collected with so much labour, and to have founded with so much difficulty, were in existence long before his birth; and not only in Crete, but at Sparta, nor at Sparta only, but in other Grecian states. And this we believe to have been the case with every important part of these institutions. to most of those indeed which were common to Crete and Sparta, it seems scarcely to admit of a doubt, and is equally evident, whether we acknowledge or deny that some settlements of the Dorians in Crete preceded the conquest of Peloponnesus. It was at Lyctus, a Laconian colony, as Aristotle informs us, that the institutions which Lycurgus was supposed to have taken for his model, flourished longest in their original purity and hence some of the ancients contended that they were transferred from Laconia to Crete; an argument which Ephorus thought to confute, by remarking, that Lycurgus lived five genera As CHAP. VIII. tions later than Althæmenes, who founded one of the Dorian colonies in the island. But unless we imagine that each of these colonies produced its Minos, or its B. c. 884. Lycurgus, we must conclude that they merely retained what they brought with them from the mother country. Whether they found the same system already established in Crete, depends on the question whether a part of its population was already Dorian. On any other view, the general adoption of the laws of Minos in the Dorian cities of Crete, and the tenacity with which Lyctus adhered to them, are facts unexplained and difficult to understand. We suspect indeed that the contrary opinion rests on a false notion of the omnipotence of human legislators, which has been always prevalent among philosophers, but has never been confirmed by experience. It may be reasonably doubted, whether the history of the world furnishes any instance of a political creation such as that attributed to Minos or Lycurgus. No parallel is afforded by a legislation in which, as in that of Moses, religion is not merely the basis, but the main element of the system. Without some such extraordinary aid, that union of absolute power and consummate prudence which Plato thought necessary for the foundation of his commonwealth, might still be found incapable of moulding and transforming a people at the will of an individual. We lay no stress however on these general grounds: it is the contemplation of the Spartan institutions themselves that seems to justify the conclusion, that they were not so much a work of human art and forethought, as a form of society, originally congenial to the character of the Dorian people, and to the situation in which they were placed by their new conquests; and in its leading features, not even peculiar to this, or to any single branch of the Hellenic nation. CHAP. VIII. Lycurgus a This view of the subject may seem scarcely to leave room for the intervention of Lycurgus, and to B. C. 884. throw some doubt on his individual existence: so that Hellanicus, who made no mention of him, and real person. referred his institutions to Eurysthenes and Procles1, would appear to have been much more correctly informed, or to have had a much clearer insight into the truth, than the later historians, who ascribed every thing Spartan to the more celebrated lawgiver. But remarkable as this variation is, it cannot be allowed to outweigh the concurrent testimony of the other ancient writers; from which we must at least conclude, that Lycurgus was not an imaginary or symbolical person, but one whose name marks an important epoch in the history of his country. Through all the conflicting accounts of his life, we may distinguish one fact, which is unanimously attested, and seems independent of all minuter discrepancies, that by him Sparta was delivered from the evils of anarchy or misrule, and that from this date she began a long period of tranquillity and order. But the origin and the precise nature of the disorders which effected by he found existing, and consequently the real aim and spirit of the remedies which he applied to them, are no where distinctly described, and can only be gathered by a difficult and uncertain process of combination and inference. Herodotus and Thucydides use only very general and vague language in describing the state of Sparta previous to the legislation of Lycurgus. The former says, that it was the worst ordered country in Greece, both as regarded the mutual relations of the citizens, and their inhospitable treatment of foreigners: a singular remark; since, in her most flourishing state, Sparta was celebrated for the jealousy with which she excluded foreigners from Nature of the revo lution him. 1 Strabo, viii. p. 366. |