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Updated: May 10, 2025
Lycurgus was of another mind; he would not have masters bought out of the market for his young Spartans, nor such as should sell their pains; nor was it lawful, indeed, for the father himself to raise his children after his own fancy; but as soon as they were seven years old they were to be enrolled in certain companies and classes, where they all lived under the same order and discipline, doing their exercises and taking their play together.
Lycurgus began by an agrarian law. He abolished all professions except that of arms; he made the whole of his community a standing army, every member of which had a common right to the services of a crowd of miserable bondmen; he secured the state from sedition at the expense of the Helots.
"Revolutions that have no definite objects made clear by the positive experience of history; revolutions, in a word, that aim less at substituting one law or one dynasty for another, than at changing the whole scheme of society, have been little attempted by real statesmen. Even Lycurgus is proved to be a myth who never existed. Read them as you would read poets, and they are delightful.
Before Solon lived, Lycurgus had given laws to the Spartans. This lawgiver, one of the descendants of Hercules, was born, according to Grote, about eight hundred and eighty years before Christ, and was the uncle of the reigning king. There is, however, no certainty as to the time when he lived; it was probably about the period when Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians.
"I now took up the trade of politics," he continued, "and went about the country, making speeches and demolishing everything that came in my way. I had ideas enough for any number of speeches, no matter what the length might be; but the evil was how to put the sentences together. I could make points such as Cicero and Lycurgus never thought of; as for patriotism, there was no trouble about that.
Lycurgus, having thanked them for their care of his person, dismissed them all, excepting only Alcander; and, taking him with him into his house, neither did nor said anything severe to him, but dismissing those whose place it was, bade Alcander to wait upon him at table.
It was not till he had reached his sixtieth year that he was released from the public discipline and from military service. The public mess called SYSSITIA is said to have been instituted by Lycurgus to prevent all indulgence of the appetite. Public tables were provided, at which every male citizen was obliged to take his meals.
Cicero writes without any strong feeling of his own, explaining to his friend that he had been at first a very Lycurgus in the affair, but that he is now tamed down.
I wished for something more than just the common course of what is called the tour of Europe, and Corsica occurred to me as a place where nobody else had been. It may have been suggested to him by Rousseau, who had been engaged in some vague scheme of philandering philanthropy by which the wild philosopher was to play the Solon and the Lycurgus of the distressed islanders, and establish a fresh code of laws upon the basis of his new fraternity, but with which 'this steady patriot of the world alone, as Canning styles him, 'the friend of every country but his own, managed to mix in a much more practical way some not very honourable, if characteristic, intrigues for the surrender of the island to France.
Morpher to Lycurgus, to whom M'liss's answer had afforded boundless satisfaction. "You're getting to be just as bad as her, and mercy knows you never were a seraphim!" "What's a seraphim, mother, and what do they do?" asked Lycnrgus, with growing interest.
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