[33] Thucy., II, 65, 5 ff.
III
FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE
A curious legend about the Spartans arose in the age that followed the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was then reported that they were the kinsmen of the Jews. According to one version of the story, Judæa was founded by a Spartan named Judæus, who had accompanied the god Dionysus from Thebes on his triumphal progress through Asia. According to another account, the Spartans were descendants of Abraham, the strongest of the children of Israel having migrated to Greece at the time Moses led the remainder out of Egypt to the land of Canaan.[34]
This absurd legend, of which the Greek origin is unmistakable, seems to have been responsible for a certain rapprochement between the two peoples. Despite the first book of the Maccabees, which affirms the contrary, it is, indeed, impossible that Areus I, king of Sparta between 308 and 264 B.C., wrote to Onias I, Jewish high priest, demanding and offering a community of goods, and that Jonathan Maccabæus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, sent greetings to the Spartans, together with the word that the Jews "at all times without ceasing both in their feasts and other convenient days remembered them in the sacrifices which they offered, and in their prayers, as reason was, and as it becameth them to think upon their brethren."[35] Nothing is more unlikely than that the Spartans volunteered to divide their "cattle" and property with the Jews only a short time before they crushed with great bloodshed a communistic movement among their own citizens, unless it be the thought that the prayers and offerings of the Jews went up continually to Jehovah for the prosperity of heathen who were also backsliders. Nevertheless, that communications were actually established between the Judæa of Onias and Jonathan and the Sparta of Areus and Menalcidas, we cannot doubt; and, indeed, we have still other evidences that the alleged community of origin was turned to account by the Jews. There was evidently a considerable Jewish settlement in Sparta.
When we seek to discover the reason for this strange conjunction of the warrior community by the Eurotas and the religious community by the Jordan, we are helped by observing that in another Hellenistic legend the Jews are made the kinsmen of the gymnosophists, or naked philosophers, of India. The Greek mind was at this time fascinated by the great problem of subordinating the species of things to their proper genera, of perceiving the types by means of which individual objects became intelligible parts of a cosmos. It was the age of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Menander and the New Comedy, of idealistic portraiture. Hence the temptation was irresistible to bring into family relationship the various societies of men in which the principle of caste dominated; to regard it as unessential that in Judæa the people were there to support the priests, in Laconia to support the soldiers, in India to support the Brahmans. In each case there was found an odd community, in which, so far at least as the state could accomplish it, all human interests were subordinated to one, be it war and preparation for war, religious practices of a ritualistic character, or theosophical speculation.
Had the Greeks known it, there was a further analogy of an external sort between the Spartans and the Jews which they would have delighted to establish. For at about the same time that a richly diversified national life was narrowed down in Judæa to a single interest under the stress of complete preoccupation with the means of regaining Jehovah's favor for his chosen people, Sparta ruthlessly compressed and crushed a many-sided and progressive culture to the end that her citizens might become trained soldiers, having but one esprit, the esprit de corps of a professional army.
Prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the home of poets and musicians. It was for a chorus of Spartan maidens, the élite of the noble families, that Alcman wrote the exquisite lines on the breathless calm of nature which Goethe has made familiar to all lovers of poetry. In hollow Lacedæmon—a valley rich with vegetation suggestive of bountiful harvests, down which the steel-gray Eurotas runs, swift and turbulent, over its rocky bottom, and over which rise on either side the snow-capped ridges of Taygetus and Parnon, their slopes resonant with the songs of the nightingales in the mating season—in this secluded spot, whose haunting beauty is a joy forever to all who have seen it, there was reared a famous temple of Athena, "Athena of the Brazen House," at a time when in Athens itself the city's protecting goddess had to be content with a crude, primitive sanctuary.