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Gay young Englishmen of twenty thousand a year, accustomed to liberty and luxury, would not easily submit to these Spartan restraints. The King could not venture to keep them in order as he kept his own subjects in order. Situated as he was with respect to England, he could not well imprison or shoot refractory Howards and Cavendishes.
Accustomed to look upon the virgin but as the future mother of a race of warriors, the Spartans saw beauty only in those proportions which promised a robust and stately progeny, and the reader may remember the well-known story of the opprobrious reproaches, even, it is said, accompanied with stripes, which the Ephors addressed to a Spartan king for presuming to make choice of a wife below the ordinary stature.
The share of Themistocles in this business is not, however, so much to his discredit as to that of the Spartan Eurybiades. We cannot but observe that no system contrary to human nature is strong against actual temptation. The Spartan law interdicted the desire of riches, and the Spartans themselves yielded far more easily to the lust of avarice than the luxurious Athenians.
“Glaucon was right,” she said,—their lips were very close,—“Zeus and Athena are greater than Mazda and Mithra. The future belongs to Hellas. But we have naught for shame. We have fought as Aryans, as the children of conquerors and kings. We shall be glad together in Garonmana the Blessed, and what is left to dread?” A quiver passed through her. The Spartan spear-line was close.
The kitten grew suddenly uneasy, as if some intuition warned it of treachery, and tried valiantly to escape from his grasp, and never did Spartan boy with wolf concealed beneath his tunic suffer more tortures than Morrow with the wretched little creature clawing at his hands. Would Emily Brunell never come? What could be keeping her to-night, of all nights?
But this intractable old Spartan, with his dictation of party principles that meant the loss of policy, power, and profits, had angered him to his marrow. He was ready to declare himself now, Thornton or mo Thornton. He turned on the Duke. "Perhaps you can lick me that's the only way you can get it!" he declared. "But you needn't expect me to stand here and grin and hand it over."
The Spartan state, then, justified itself according to its own ideal; but how limited that ideal was will be clear from our sketch. The individual, if it cannot be said that he was sacrificed to the state for he recognised the life of the state as his own was at any rate starved upon one side of his nature as much as he was hypertrophied upon the other.
He was for retreat to the Isthmus; he was for defending the Peloponnese, because in the Peloponnesus was the unsocial selfish Sparta, and leaving the rest of Hellas to the armament of Xerxes. Themistocles spoke against the ignoble counsel; the Spartan raised his staff to strike him. Ye know the Spartan manners. 'Strike if you will, but hear me, cried Themistocles.
I cannot endure to see Greece enslaved." During the night Pausanias withdrew his army to a new position in front of the town of Platæa, water being wanting where they were. One Spartan leader, indeed, refused to move, and when told that there had been a general vote of the officers, he picked up a huge stone and cast it at the feet of Pausanias, crying, "This is my pebble.
Cleonice turned pale, and the large tears that had gathered in her eyes fell slowly down her cheeks; but she did not withdraw her hand from his clasp, or avert her countenance from his eyes. "I do not fear thee," said she, in a very low voice. "Ah, no, no," cried the delighted Spartan, detaining her, "do not fear to trust to thine own heart. Talk not of dishonour.
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