Honour, friendship, loyalty to the ideal of the [233] past, himself as a work of art! There was much of course in his answer. Yet still, after all, to understand, to be capable of, such motives, was itself but a result of that exacting discipline of character we are trying to account for; and the question still recurs, To what purpose? Why, with no prospect of Israel's reward, are you as scrupulous, minute, self- taxing, as he? A tincture of asceticism in the Lacedaemonian rule may remind us again of the monasticism of the Middle Ages. But then, monastic severity was for the purging of a troubled conscience, or for the hope of an immense prize, neither of which conditions is to be supposed here. In fact the surprise of Saint Paul, as a practical man, at the slightness of the reward for which a Greek spent himself, natural as it is about all pagan perfection, is especially applicable about these Lacedaemonians, who indeed had actually invented that so "corruptible" and essentially worthless parsley crown in place of the more tangible prizes of an earlier age. Strange people! Where, precisely, may be the spring of action in you, who are so severe to yourselves; you who, in the words of Plato's supposed objector that the rulers of the ideal state are not to be envied, have nothing you can really call your own, but are like hired servants in your own houses,— qui manducatis panem doloris?+
Another day-dream, you may say, about those [234] obscure ancient people, it was ever so difficult really to know, who had hidden their actual life with so much success; but certainly a quite natural dream upon the paradoxical things we are told of them, on good authority. It is because they make us ask that question; puzzle us by a paradoxical idealism in life; are thus distinguished from their neighbours; that, like some of our old English places of education, though we might not care to live always at school there, it is good to visit them on occasion; as some philosophic Athenians, as we have now seen, loved to do, at least in thought.
NOTES
198. +Transliteration: Gnôthi sauton . . . Mêden agan. E-text editor's translation: "Know thyself . . . nothing too much." Plato, Protagoras 343b.
200. +Transliteration: mousikê. Liddell and Scott definition: "any art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung to music…."
205. +Transliteration: hoi gerontes, hê gerousia. Liddell and Scott definitions: "the old . . . a Council of Elders, Senate, esp. at Sparta, where it consisted of 28."
206. +Transliteration: paraleipomenon. Pater's translation: "oversights." The verb paraleipô means, "to leave on one side . . . leave unnoticed."
207. +Transliteration: koilê Spartê. Pater's translation: "hollow Sparta."
207. +Transliteration: polichnia. Pater's translation: "hamlets."
214. +Transliteration: ophrya te kai koilainetai. E-text editor's translation: "craggy and hollowed out." Strabo cites this proverb about Corinth. Strabo, Geography, Book 8, Chapter 6, Section 23.