The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [259]
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