Share in the foot-race and—a thing I can’t endure—
In wrestling bouts.”
Probably this exactly expressed the sentiment of the average Athenian theatre-goer, accustomed to identify the virtue of women with their obedience to conventional restrictions, which men in the fifth century insisted upon as well as the husband in Menander’s play:—
“You’re overstepping, wife, a married woman’s bounds,
The front door passing; for to ladies of good birth
The house door is the limit by convention set.
This chasing and this running out into the street,
Your billingsgate still snapping, Rhode, is for dogs!”
Men possessed of these ideas could not appreciate that in Sparta, in the great periods, freedom and sobriety went hand in hand. Aristotle, in his arraignment of the license and luxury of the Spartan women as one of the defects of the Spartan system, may have been dealing with some special facts of his own day. In the fourth century Sparta had in certain ways deteriorated.
But this deterioration could not do more than blur the outlines of a system of life which for three centuries had stood before the world, a “whole serene creation.” Comic writers might show up the boorishness of the unlearned Spartans, and irritable tragic poets might vent their spleen on their country’s enemy, but in the end Spartan institutions had to be respected and admired. Indeed, many Athenians affected a special predilection for qualities unlike their own and “laconized” in dress, manner, and speech. Philosophy flourished in Sparta, Plato tells us, and with it a rare skill in conversation. The typical Spartan, after pretending that he could not talk, would throw into the discussion, “like a clever javelin-thrower,” a remark “worth listening to, brief, compressed.”