The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [263]
29. Lycurgus was as careful to save his city from the infection of foreign bad habits, as men usually are to prevent the introduction of the plague.
Chapter 14
1. I see no sign of unfairness in the laws of Lycurgus, though some who grant that they make good soldiers, criticise them as lacking in justice.
2. Both Aristotle and Plato had this opinion alike of the lawgiver and his government,
3. And especially the ordinance by which the magistrates secretly dispatched some of the ablest young men into the countryside,
4. Carrying only daggers and some provisions, to hide in the daytime but to come out at night and kill all the Helots they could find;
5. And even sometimes murdering them by daylight, as they worked in the fields.
6. Aristotle, in particular, adds that the ephors, so soon as their office was created, used to declare war against the Helots,
7. That they might be massacred without a breach of law. It is confessed on all hands that the Spartans treated the Helots very badly;
8. For apart from the murders and cruelty committed upon them as just described,
9. It was common to force them to drink to excess, then lead them into their public halls, that the children might see what a sight a drunken man is;
10. They made them perform low dances and sing ridiculous songs, forbidding them expressly to meddle with any of a better kind.
11. And accordingly, when the Thebans invaded Laconia, and captured many Helots, they could by no means persuade them to sing the verses of Terpander, Alcman or Spendon,
12. ‘For,’ said the Helots, ‘the masters do not like it.’ As someone truly observed, in Sparta he who was free was most so, and he that was a slave there, was the greatest slave in the world.
13. I think these outrages on the Helots began at a later time, after the great earthquake, when the Helots made a general insurrection,
14. And, joining with the Messenians, laid the country waste. For I cannot persuade myself that Lycurgus was so barbarous,
15. Judging from his disposition to justice and gentleness in other ways.
16. And yet, is this frightful cruelty to slaves all the criticism that can be offered?
17. Much more criticism might be made: that no one belonged to himself, but to the state only, without personal freedom;
18. That Sparta was preserved in its institutions and manners by a strict limitation of knowledge and an impoverished austerity;
19. That to make a whole society an army is as much as to make it a tribe of ants merely;
20. That the arts of civilisation and philosophy were excluded for what elsewhere they were valued,
21. Namely, their promise of innovation and the expansion both of knowledge and the human character.
22. In short, that though Sparta had the camaraderie and discipline of the military camp, it had little else.
23. And such might even be said in balance with the well-ordering of the state, the health of its citizens,
24. The sensible liberality of its morals and its safety from conquest and enslavement by foreigners.
25. How might a state combine these benefits without the imitations and severity that made Sparta a place, in effect, of self-imposed siege?
26. For who now can imagine being a Spartan?
Chapter 15
1. When Lycurgus saw that his institutions had taken root in the minds of his countrymen, that custom had rendered them familiar, and that his commonwealth was now able to go alone,
2. He planned to make it enduring, and, as far as human forecast could reach, to deliver it unchangeable to posterity.
3. He called an assembly of the people, and told them that as he thought everything was now well established,
4. He desired that they would observe the laws without the least alteration until he returned from a journey he now proposed.
5. They consented readily, and bade him hasten back; and promised to maintain the established polity until he did so.
6. Having taken leave of his friends and family, and to ensure that the Spartans should never be released