The Polity of Lacedæmon
and
the Polity of Athens
were two of Xenophon's short treatises. In
the Polity of Lacedæmon
the Spartan code of law and social discipline is, as Mr. Mure says in his
Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece
,
'indiscriminately held up to admiration as superior in all respects to all others. Some of its more offensive features, such as the Cryptia, child murder, and more glaring atrocities of the Helot system, are suppressed; while the legalized thieving, adultery, and other unnatural practices, are placed in the most favourable or least odious light.'