power, had the same advantages, except in the fertility of the lands where they were situated, in which the two latter carried it extremely. Argos and Messene however did not long preserve their superiority. The haughtiness of the kings, and the disobedience of the people, occasioned their fail from the flourishing condition in which they had been at first ; and their example proved, says Plutarch after Plato, that it was the peculiar favour of the gods which gave the Spartans such a man as Lycurgus, capable of prescribing so wise and reasonable a plan of government. To support it without change, particular care was taken to educate the youth according to the laws and manners of the country, in order that they might become a second nature in them, by being early ingrafted into them, and confirmed by long habitude. The hard and sober manner in which they were brought up, inspired them during the rest of their lives with a natural taste for frugality and temperance, that distinguished them from all other people, and wonderfully adapted them to support the fatigues of war. Plato observes, that this salutary custom had banished from Sparta, and all the territory in its dependence, drunkenness, debauchery, and all their consequential disorders; insomuch that it was a crime punishable by law to drink wine to excess even in the Bacchanalia, which every where else were days of licence, wherein whole cities gave themselves up to the last excesses. They also accustomed the children from their earliest infan cy to an entire submission to the laws, magistrates, and all in authority; and their education, properly speaking, was no more than an apprenticeship of obedience. It was for this reason Agesilaus advised Xenophon to send his children to Sparta, as to an excellent school,† where they might learn the greatest and most noble of all sciences, "to obey and to command,” for the one naturally leads on to the other. It was not only the mean, the poor, and the ordinary citizens, who were subjected in this manner to the laws; but the rich, the powerful, the magistrates, and even kings; and they did not distinguish themselves from the others in any thing but more exact obedience; convinced that such behaviour was the surest means to their being obeyed and respected themselves by their inferiors. Hence came the so much celebrated answers of Demaratus. Xerxes could not comprehend how the Lacedæmonians, who had no master to controul them, should be capaple to confront dangers and death. "They are free and independent of all men," replied Demaratus," but the law is above them, and 66 Plat. 1. i. de leg. p. 637. * Ωςε τὴν παιδείαν εἶναι μελέτην εὐπειθείας. Plut. in Lycurg. p. 58. † Μεθησομένης τῶν μαθημάτων τὸ κάλλισον, ἔρχεσθαι καὶ ἄρχειν. Plut. La Agesil. p. 606. Herod. I. vii. c. 145, 146. 280187 "commands them: and that law ordains that they must con66 quer or die." Upon another occasion, when somebody expressed their surprise, that being king he should suffer himself to be banished: “it is," said he," because at Sparta the "laws are stronger than the kings," This appears evidently in the ready obedience of Agesilaus to the orders of the Ephori, when recalled by them to the support of his country; a delicate occasion for a king and a conqueror; but to him it seemed. more* glorious to obey his Country and the laws, than to command numerous armies, or even to conquer Asia. SECTION II. LOVE OF POVERTY INSTITUTED AT SPARTA. To this entire submission to the laws of the state, Lycurgus. added another principle of government no less admirable, which was to remove from Sparta all luxury, profusion, and magnificence to decry riches absolutely, to make poverty honourable, and at the same time necessary, by substituting a species of iron money for gold and silver coin, which till then had been current. I have explained elsewhere the measures that were used to make so difficult an undertaking succeed, and shall confine myself here to examining what judgment should be passed on it as it affects a government. The poverty to which Lycurgus reduced Sparta, and which seemed to prohibit all conquest, and to deprive it of all means. to augment its force and grandeur, was well adapted to ren dering it powerful and flourishing. Such a constitution of government,, which till then had no example, nor has since been imitated by any state, argues a great fund of prudence and policy in a legislator: and the medium conceived afterwards under Lysander, in continuing individuals in their poverty, and restoring to the public the use of gold and silver coin, was it not a wise amendment of what was too strained and excessive in that law of Lycurgus of which we are speaking ? It seems, if we consult only the common views of human prudence, that it is just to reason in this manner; but the event, which is an infallible evidence and arbiter in this place, obliges me to be of a quite different opinion. Whilst Sparta remained poor, and persisted in the contempt of gold and sil-ver, which continued for several ages, she was powerful and glorious, and the commencement of her decline may be dated from the time when she began to break through the severe prohibi-tion of Lycurgus against the use of gold and silver money. S Plut. in Apoph. Lacon. p 210. Idem in Agesil. p. 603, 604. * Multo gloriosus duxit, si institutis patriæ paruisset, quam si bello superasset Asiam. Cornel. Nep, in Agesil. c. iv.. The education which he instituted for the young Lacedæmonians, the hard and sober life which he recommended with so much care, the painful and violent exercises of the body prescribed by him, the abstraction from all other application and employment; in a word, all his laws and institutions show, that his view was to form a people of soldiers, solely devoted to arms and military functions. I do not pretend to justify absolutely this scheme, which had its great inconveniences, and I have expressed my thoughts of it elsewhere. But admitting it good, we must confess that legislator showed great wisdom in the means he took for its execution. The almost inevitable danger of a people solely trained up for war, who have always arms in their hands, and what is most to be feared, is injust, violence, ambition, the desire of increasing their power, of taking advantage of their neighbour's weakness, of oppressing them by force, of invading their land under false pretexts, which the lust of dominion never fails to suggest, and of extending their bounds as far as possible; all vices and extremes, which are horrid in private persons, and the ordinary commerce of life, but which men have thought fit to applaud as grandeur and glory in the persons of princes and conquerors. * The great care of Lycurgus was to defend his people against this dangerous temptation. Without mentioning the other means he made use of, he employed two which could not fail of producing their effect. The first was to prohibit all navigation and war at sea to his citizens. The situation of his city, and the fear lest commerce, the usual source of luxury and depravation, should corrupt the purity of the Spartan manners, might have a share in this decree. But his principal motive was to put it out of his citizens' power to project conquests, which a people shut up within the narrow bounds of a peninsula could not carry very far without being masters at sea. The second means, still more efficacious, was to forbid all use of gold or silver money, and to introduce a species of iron coin in its stead, which was of great weight and small value, and could only be current at home. How with such money should foreign troops be raised and paid, fleets fitted out, and numerous armies kept up either by land or sea? So that the design of Lycurgus, in rendering his city warlike, and putting arms into their hands, was not, as + Polybius observes, and Plutarch after him, to make them illustrious conquerors, who might carry war into remote regions, and subject great numbers of people. His sole end was, that, shut * Ατείργετο δὲ αὐτοῖς ναυταις εἶναι, καὶ ναυμαχεῖν. Plut. in Instit Lacon. p. 239. † Polyb. 1. vi. p. 491. Plut. in Lycurg. p. 59. up within the extent of the lands and dominions left them by their ancestors, they should have no thoughts but of maintaining themselves in peace, and defending themselves successfully against such of their neighbours as should have the rashness to invade them; and for this they had occasion for neither gold nor silver, finding in their own country, and still more in their sober and temperate manner of life, all that was sufficient for the support of their armies, when they did not quit their own, or the lands of their neighbours. Now, says Polybius, this plan once admitted, it must be allowed that there is nothing more wise nor more happily conceived than the institutions of Lycurgus, for the maintaining a people in the possession of their liberty, and to secure to them the enjoyment of peace.⚫d tranquillity. In effect, let us imagine a little republic, like that of Sparta, of which all the citizens are inured to labour, accustomed to live on a little, warlike, courageous, intrepid; and that the fundamental principle of this small republic is to do no wrong to any one, nor to disturb its neighbours, nor invade their lands or interests, but, on the contrary, to declare in favour of the oppressed against the injustice and violence of oppressors; is it not certain that such a republic, surrounded by a great number of states of equal extent, would be generally respected by all the neighbouring people, would become the supreme arbiter of all their quarrels, and exercise an empire over them, by so much the more glorious and lasting as it would be voluntary, and founded solely in the opinion those neighbours would have of its virtue, justice, and valour? *This was the end Lycurgus proposed to himself. Convinced that the happiness of a city, like that of a private person, depends upon virtue, and upon being well within itself, he regulated Sparta so as it might always suffice to its own happi. ness, and act upon principles of wisdom and equity. From thence arose that universal esteem of the neighbouring people and even of strangers for the Lacedæmonians, who asked of them neither money, ships, nor troops, but only that they would lend them a Spartan to command their armies; and when they had obtained their request, they paid him entire obedience, with every kind of honour and respect. In this manner the Sicilians obeyed Gylippus, the Chalcidians Brasidas, and all the Greeks of Asia, Lysander, Callacratidas, and Agesilaus; regarding the city of Sparta as a model for all others in the arts of living and governing. The epocha of the declension of Sparta begins with the open violation of Lycurgus's laws. I do not pretend that they had *Plut. p. 58. † Πρὸς σύμπασαν τὴν τῶν Σπαρτιατῶν πόλιν, ὥσπερ παιδαγωγὸν ἢ διδάσα καλον ευχήμονος βία καὶ τεταγμένης πολιτείας ἀποβλέποντες, always been exactly observed till that time, which was far from the case; but the spirit and genius of those laws had almost always prevailed with the majority of the persons who governed. No sooner had the ambition of reigning over all Greece inspired them with the design of having naval armies, and foreign ́troops, and that money was necessary for the support of those forces, than Sparta, forgetting her ancient maxims, saw herself reduced to have recourse to the barbarians, which till then she had detested, and basely to make her court to the kings of Persia, whom she had formerly vanquished with so much glory; and that only to draw from them some aids of money and troops against their own brethren, that is to say, against people born and settled in Greece like themselves. Thus had they the imprudence and misfortune to recal with gold and silver into Sparta all the vices and crimes which the iron money had banished, and to prepare the way for the changes which ensued, and were the cause of their ruin. And this infinitely exalts the wisdom of Lycurgus, in having foreseen, at such a distance, what might strike at the happiness of his citizens, and provided salutary remedies against it in the form of government he established at Sparta. Another legislator, who had preceded him several ages, has a right to share this glory with him. SECTION II. LAWS ESTABLISHED BY MINOS IN CRETE. ALL the world knows, that Lycurgus had formed the plan of most of his laws upon the model of those observed in the island of Crete, where he passed a considerable time for the better studying of them. It is proper I should give some idea of them here, having forgot to do it in the place where it would have been more natural, that is, when I spoke for the first time of Lycurgus and his institutions. Minos, whom fable calls the son of Jupiter, was the author of these laws. He * lived about 100 years before the Trojan war He was a powerful, wise, and gentle prince, and still more estimable for his moral virtues than his military abilities. After having conquered the island of Crete, and several others in its neighbourhood, he applied himself to strengthen by wise laws the new state, of which he had possessed himself by the force of arms. The end which he proposed in the establish ment of these laws, was to render his subjects happy by making them virtuous. He banished idleness and voluptuousness from his states, and, with them, luxury and vicious pleasures, the fruitful sources of all vice. Well knowing that liberty was justly regarded as the most precious and greatest good, and Ant. J. C. 1284.. + Strab. I. x. p. 480. * A. M. 2720. K |