After the seventh century Sparta entered the Greek world with an offering that excluded art and the consciousness of external beauty. This was her mode of life, dedicated to one austere end. The citizens of Sparta were a small body of men, of pure Dorian blood, freed from the cares of self-support by the serfs or helots who were descendants of the original possessors of the soil they tilled. The whole time of the masters could be devoted to the state, and the pivotal demand of the state was for strong, brave and skilful soldiers. All life was a vast system of education directed toward the end of military efficiency. This explains each one of their customs: the exposure of sickly infants on the slopes of Mount Taygetus; the savage training of their boys and the severe training of their girls, who were to be the mothers of soldiers; the repression of personal luxury, the equalizing of rich and poor, the detailed elimination of individual pursuits. Conservatism was the breath of their life. Their institutions were of very ancient origin, although Lycurgus is now regarded as merely a legendary designer, and, once in possession of their imaginations, could not be shaken off or essentially modified. At the crucial period following the Peloponnesian War their inability to use new conditions played havoc with their political opportunities. Exclusiveness and reserve were corollaries of their single purpose. Indifference to the arts of peace was inevitable in a nation consecrated to preparation for war.
The spectacle presented by the Spartans never failed to excite the lively interest of the other Greeks. Men as diverse as Xenophon and Aristotle wrote about their institutions, and popular judgments were always in evidence. An opinion which was probably held by many just before the Peloponnesian War is contained in Thucydides’s rehearsal of a speech made in Sparta by a Corinthian delegate to the conference which the allies had forced upon her. Impatiently he tells the Spartans that they do not know how utterly unlike them the Athenians are:—
“They are revolutionary and swift to plan and to execute whatever they conceive, but you are all for conserving the existing state of things, inventing no new policy and in action not even coming up to what necessity demands. Again, they are daring beyond their strength and run risks contrary to their judgment, and in the midst of terrors they are full of hope. Whereas your way is to act within your strength, to have confidence not even in your best secured plans and, when terrors threaten, to think that you will never be set free from them. Nay, they are energetic and you are laggards; they go abroad while you cling to home.”
The Spartan king, Archidamus, justified his nation in a speech made in a private session:—
“We have ever dwelt in a free and most illustrious state, and this policy of conservative self-control may well be equivalent to sound reason. We have become good warriors and wise in counsel by our careful discipline; good warriors, because self-control best quickens the sense of honour, and from this noble sense of shame springs courage; wise in counsel, because we are too unlettered to be superior to the laws, too severely self-controlled to disobey them.”
A generation earlier Herodotus had paid his tribute to the Spartan loyalty to law in his story of the conversation between Xerxes, meditating his attack on Greece, and Demaratus, the ruined Spartan king who had fled to the court of Darius. Want, the exile tells the monarch, had always been a fellow-dweller in his land, but courage was an ally they had gained by wisdom and laws. “The Lacedæmonians even when fighting man for man are inferior to none, but in a body they are the best of all. For although they are free they are not wholly free, for over them there is a master, Law, whom they fear far more than thine fear thee. At any rate, they always do his bidding.” And that the Athenians, with their reverence for law, were by no means unwilling to attribute to the law-abiding Spartans a love of liberty as passionate as their own is seen in another story of Herodotus. Two young nobles volunteered to go to Xerxes and offer their lives in atonement for the murder of his father’s heralds. On their way to Persia they were entertained by the governor Hydarnes, who, calling attention to his own prosperity, urged them to make their submission to the king. “Hydarnes,” they answered, “thy advice to us is one-sided. Thou hast tried the one side, but art inexperienced in the other. For thou knowest how to be a slave, but liberty thou hast not tried as yet, whether it be sweet or no. Shouldst thou taste it, thou wouldst urge us to fight for it not only with the spear but also with the battle-axe.”
One base alloy historians and poets alike found in the character of the Spartans. This was their corruptibility, their sordid greed of gain, as Aristophanes called it when angered by their rejection of peace. To the same political period belong savage attacks of Euripides on Spartan treachery and dishonesty. He also takes occasion to question the chastity of the daughters of Sparta:—
“No Spartan maiden, even wishing it, were chaste!
Not they. Their homes deserting, with their chitons slit
Along the thigh, with robes loose-girdled, they with youths