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Updated: May 10, 2025
The account which Plutarch gives of these regulations asserts that Lycurgus first established a senate of thirty members, chosen for life, the two kings being of the number, and that the former shared the power of the latter.
I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone. Induced by these feelings, I was of course led to admire peaceable lawgivers, Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus, in preference to Romulus and Theseus.
Lycurgus next made a division of the lands, for here he found great inequality existing, as there were many indigent persons who had no lands, and the wealth was centered in the hands of a few.
Do you know," added he, "that Lycurgus could never have rendered the Republic of Sparta more excellent than other States if he had not made it his chief care to incline the citizens most exactly to observe the laws? This, too, is what all good magistrates aim at, because a Republic that is obedient to the laws is happy in peace, and invincible in war.
In the course of their conversation they fell to discussing what they call State-craft and systems of government, correcting this abuse and condemning that, reforming one practice and abolishing another, each of the three setting up for a new legislator, a modern Lycurgus, or a brand-new Solon; and so completely did they remodel the State, that they seemed to have thrust it into a furnace and taken out something quite different from what they had put in; and on all the subjects they dealt with, Don Quixote spoke with such good sense that the pair of examiners were fully convinced that he was quite recovered and in his full senses.
When he perceived that his more important institutions had taken root in the minds of his countrymen, that custom had rendered them familiar and easy, that his commonwealth was now grown up and able to go alone, then, as Plato somewhere tells us the Maker of the world, when first he saw it existing and beginning its motion, felt joy, even so Lycurgus, viewing with joy and satisfaction the greatness and beauty of his political structure, now fairly at work and in motion, conceived the thought to make it immortal too, and as far as human forecast could reach, to deliver it down unchangeable to posterity.
If to have founded institutions which could last, be the test of statesmanship, he was even a statesman; for many of his institutions have resisted the pressure of three centuries. But those of Charlemagne fell as soon as his hand was cold, while the works of many ordinary legislators have attained to a perpetuity denied to the statutes of Solon or Lycurgus.
For his glorious poetry was not yet fully known in Greece; only some particular pieces were in a few hands, as they happened to be dispersed. Lycurgus was the first that made them generally known.
By abuse of trust; 11. By games and lotteries. This second species was encouraged by the laws of Lycurgus, in order to sharpen the wits of the young. It is the kind practised by Ulysses, Solon, and Sinon; by the ancient and modern Jews, from Jacob down to Deutz; and by the Bohemians, the Arabs, and all savage tribes.
The old "legislators," Lycurgus and Solon and the like, were supposed to have created the institutions which were really the products of a slow growth.
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