[88] See p. 35.
[89] Plutarch, Lycurgus, 6. The document, being in prose and not ambiguous, bears no resemblance to the genuine utterances of the Delphic priestess; and therefore I think not only that it is not an oracle really delivered to Lycurgus but also that it was not composed while the oracle of Delphi was active and the character of its utterances well known: that is to say, before 450 B.C. or 400 B.C. I imagine it to be the work of some antiquarian, who knew the Doric dialect extremely well: such a man might no doubt be found at Alexandria during or after the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus B.C. 285-247: for Alexandria was then the home of all sorts of learning, and was the place in which, about the year 270 B.C., Theocritus the greatest of the Doric poets wrote the best of his Idylls.
[90] The text is uncertain here.
[91] Plutarch, Lycurgus, 6.
[92] Quoted by Pausanias (IV. 6).
[93] Tyrtæus, Fragment 4. As the conquest of Messenia is a rare if not a unique example in Greece after the purely legendary age of a permanent conquest effected in spite of the obstacles interposed by a mountain range, it is worth while to take notice of the geography. The Spartans certainly did not cross Taygetus, whose lowest pass, now known as the Langada Pass, is about five thousand feet above the sea (Neuman und Partsch, Physikalische Geographie von Griechenland, p. 181 note): to the north of Taygetus they could cross without any trouble from the valley of the Eurotas to the valley of the Alpheius (see the page just referred to): but before they could reach Messenia they still had to march three or four miles up a valley with mountains on either side of it and then to cross a barren sparsely wooded ridge which unites Taygetus with Mount Lycæus. The ascent of the ridge takes an ordinary traveller half an hour, so that the height of it will be about five or six hundred feet. See Bædeker's Greece, p. 283.
[94] Plutarch, Lycurgus, 6.
[95] Plutarch, Lycurgus, 6.
[96] For example in 432 B.C. it was the assembly that decided on war against Athens (Thucydides I. 67 and 87). The kings however, until about 500 B.C., still had the right to engage in a foreign war, if they chose, simply on their own responsibility (Herodotus VI. 56).
[97] The passages are from Plutarch, Lycurgus, 7 and Aristotle, Politics V. 11. 2, 3. Bekker, Oxf. 1837. Welldon's translation, p. 392.