[124:1] The makeshift of boarding-schools was unknown to the ancients, but at Sparta, young men were kept together even in their hours of leisure, and away from their homes, so that we must here admit a qualified exception. But what we know of this separate life is rather that of a barrack than of a school.
[126:1] Seventh Edition. It had been formerly the last chapter of my Rambles and Studies in Greece.
[127:1] It was an artistic device, to make this paternal despot a foreign prince, living in a bygone age, of the same kind as the device of Æschylus to narrate the Persian war from the Oriental side, and make Darius a capital figure. No Greek or contemporary person could have sustained the figure of Cyrus in Xenophon's book. I need only remind the reader that the tract on the Athenian State now preserved among Xenophon's works is by an unknown author, and therefore an authority independent of Xenophon.
[130:1] Grote's Plato and the other Companions of Socrates, 3 vols. (Murray, London.) His Aristotle is posthumous and fragmentary, and does not include the Politics. Mr. Jowett's expected Essays on the Politics may perhaps supply this deficiency.
CHAPTER VII.
Practical Politics in the Fourth Century.
The practical politicians.
§ 54. Let us now pass on to the practical politicians of the day, or to those who professed to be practical politicians, and see what they had to propose in the way of improving the internal condition of Greek society, as well as of saving it from those external dangers which every sensible man must have apprehended, even before they showed themselves above the political horizon.