Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
eye. Some authors, however, of whom Dioscorides is one (who wrote a
treatise on the commonwealth of Sparta), say that he was wounded indeed,
but did not lose his eye with the blow; and that he built the temple in
gratitude for the cure. Be this as it will, certain it is, that, after
this misadventure, the Lacedaemonians made it a rule never to carry so
much as a staff into their public assemblies.
But to return to their public repasts;--these had several names in
Greek; the Cretans called them andria, because the men only came to
them. The Lacedaemonians called them phiditia, that is, by changing l
into d, the same as philitia, love feasts, because that, by eating and
drinking together, they had opportunity of making friends. Or perhaps
from phido, parsimony, because they were so many schools of sobriety; or
perhaps the first letter is an addition, and the word at first was
editia, from edode, eating. They met by companies of fifteen, more or
less, and each of them stood bound to bring in monthly a bushel of meal,
eight gallons of wine, five pounds of cheese, two pounds and a half of
figs, and some very small sum of money to buy flesh or fish with.
Besides this, when any of them made sacrifice to the gods, they always
sent a dole to the common hall; and, likewise, when any of them had been
a hunting, he sent thither a part of the venison he had killed; for
these two occasions were the only excuses allowed for supping at home.
The custom of eating together was observed strictly for a great while
afterwards; insomuch that king Agis himself, after having vanquished the
Athenians, sending for his commons at his return home, because he
desired to eat privately with his queen, was refused them by the
polemarchs; which refusal when he resented so much as to omit next day
the sacrifice due for a war happily ended, they made him pay a fine.
They used to send their children to these tables as to schools of
temperance; here they were instructed in state affairs by listening to
experienced statesmen; here they learnt to converse with pleasantry, to
make jests without scurrility, and take them without ill humor. In this
point of good breeding, the Lacedaemonians excelled particularly, but if
any man were uneasy under it, upon the least hint given there was no
more to be said to him. It was customary also for the eldest man in the
company to say to each of them, as they came in, "Through this"
(pointing to the door), "no words go out." When any one had a desire to
be admitted into any of these little societies; he was to go through the
following probation, each man in the company took a little ball of soft
bread, which they were to throw into a deep basin, which a waiter
carried round upon his head; those that liked the person to be chosen
dropped their ball into the basin without altering its figure, and those
who disliked him pressed it between their fingers, and made it flat; and
this signified as much as a negative voice. And if there were but one
of these pieces in the basin, the suitor was rejected, so desirous were
they that all the members of the company should be agreeable to each
other. The basin was called caddichus, and the rejected candidate had a
name thence derived. Their most famous dish was the black broth, which
was so much valued that the elderly men fed only upon that, leaving what
flesh there was to the younger.
They say that a certain king of Pontus, having heard much of this black
broth of theirs, sent for a Lacedaemonian cook on purpose to make him
some, but had no sooner tasted it than he found it extremely bad, which
the cook observing, told him, "Sir, to make this broth relish, you
should have bathed yourself first in the river Eurotas."
After drinking moderately, every man went to his home without lights,
for the use of them was, on all occasions, forbid, to the end that they
might accustom themselves to march boldly in the dark. Such was the
common fashion of their meals.
Lycurgus would never reduce his laws into writing; nay, there is a
Rhetra expressly to forbid it. For he thought that the most material
points, and such as most directly tended to the public welfare, being
imprinted on the hearts of their youth by a good discipline, would be
sure to remain, and would find a stronger security, than any compulsion
would be, in the principles of action formed in them by their best
lawgiver, education. And as for things of lesser importance, as
pecuniary contracts, and such like, the forms of which have to be
changed as occasion requires, he thought it the best way to prescribe no
positive rule or inviolable usage in such cases, willing that their
manner and form should be altered according to the circumstances of
time, and determinations of men of sound judgment. Every end and object
of law and enactment it was his design education should effect.
One, then, of the Rhetras was, that their laws should not be written;
another is particularly leveled against luxury and expensiveness, for by
it it was ordained that the ceilings of their houses should only be
wrought by the axe, and their gates and doors smoothed only by the saw.
Epaminondas's famous dictum about his own table, that "Treason and a
dinner like this do not keep company together," may be said to have been
anticipated by Lycurgus. Luxury and a house of this kind could not well
be companions. For a man must have a less than ordinary share of sense
that would furnish such plain and common rooms with silver-footed
couches and purple coverlets and gold and silver plate. Doubtless he
had good reason to think that they would proportion their beds to their
houses, and their coverlets to their beds, and the rest of their goods
and furniture to these. It is reported that king Leotychides, the first
of that name, was so little used to the sight of any other kind of work,
that, being entertained at Corinth in a stately room, he was much
surprised to see the timber and ceiling so finely carved and paneled,
and asked his host whether the trees grew so in his country.
A third ordinance or Rhetra was, that they should not make war often, or
long, with the same enemy, lest that they should train and instruct them
in war, by habituating them to defend themselves. And this is what
Agesilaus was much blamed for, a long time after; it being thought,
that, by his continual incursions into Boeotia, he made the Thebans a
match for the Lacedaemonians; and therefore Antalcidas, seeing him
wounded one day, said to him, that he was very well paid for taking such
pains to make the Thebans good soldiers, whether they would or no.
These laws were called the Rhetras, to intimate that they were divine
sanctions and revelations.
In order to the good education of their youth (which, as I said before,
he thought the most important and noblest work of a lawgiver), he went
so far back as to take into consideration their very conception and
birth, by regulating their marriages. For Aristotle is wrong in saying,
that, after he had tried all ways to reduce the women to more modesty
and sobriety, he was at last forced to leave them as they were, because
that, in the absence of their husbands, who spent the best part of their
lives in the wars, their wives, whom they were obliged to leave absolute
mistresses at home, took great liberties and assumed the superiority;
and were treated with overmuch respect and called by the title of lady
or queen. The truth is, he took in their case, also, all the care that
was possible; he ordered the maidens to exercise themselves with
wrestling, running, throwing the quoit, and casting the dart, to the end
that the fruit they conceived might, in strong and healthy bodies, take
firmer root and find better growth, and withal that they, with this
greater vigor, might be the more able to undergo the pains of child-
bearing. And to the end he might take away their over-great tenderness
and fear of exposure to the air, and all acquired womanishness, he
ordered that the young women should go naked in the processions, as well
as the young men, and dance, too, in that condition, at certain solemn
feasts, singing certain songs, whilst the young men stood around, seeing
and hearing them. On these occasions, they now and then made, by jests,
a befitting reflection upon those who had misbehaved themselves in the
wars; and again sang encomiums upon those who had done any gallant
action, and by these means inspired the younger sort with an emulation
of their glory. Those that were thus commended went away proud, elated,
and gratified with their honor among the maidens; and those who were
rallied were as sensibly touched with it as if they had been formally
reprimanded; and so much the more, because the kings and the elders, as
well as the rest of the city, saw and heard all that passed. Nor was
there any thing shameful in this nakedness of the young women; modesty
attended them, and all wantonness was excluded. It taught them
simplicity and a care for good health, and gave them some taste of
higher feelings, admitted as they thus were to the field of noble action
and glory. Hence it was natural for them to think and speak as Gorgo,
for example, the wife of Leonidas, is said to have done, when some
foreign lady, as it would seem, told her that the women of Lacedaemon
were the only women of the world who could rule men; "With good
reason," she said, "for we are the only women who bring forth men."
These public processions of the maidens, and their appearing naked in
their exercises and dancings, were incitements to marriage, operating
upon the young with the rigor and certainty, as Plato says, of love, if
not of mathematics. But besides all this, to promote it yet more
effectually, those who continued bachelors were in a degree
disfranchised by law; for they were excluded from the sight of those
public processions in which the young men and maidens danced naked, and,
in wintertime, the officers compelled them to march naked themselves
round the market-place, singing as they went a certain song to their own
disgrace, that they justly suffered this punishment for disobeying the
laws. Moreover, they were denied that respect and observance which the
younger men paid their elders; and no man, for example, found fault with
what was said to Dercyllidas, though so eminent a commander; upon whose
approach one day, a young man, instead of rising, retained his seat,
remarking, "No child of yours will make room for me. "
In their marriages, the husband carried off his bride by a sort of
force; nor were their brides ever small and of tender years, but in
their full bloom and ripeness. After this, she who superintended the
wedding comes and clips the hair of the bride close round her head,
dresses her up in man's clothes, and leaves her upon a mattress in the
dark; afterwards comes the bridegroom, in his every-day clothes, sober
and composed, as having supped at the common table, and, entering
privately into the room where the bride lies, unties her virgin zone,
and takes her to himself; and, after staying some time together, he
returns composedly to his own apartment, to sleep as usual with the
other young men. And so he continues to do, spending his days, and,
indeed, his nights with them, visiting his bride in fear and shame, and
with circumspection, when he thought he should not be observed; she,
also, on her part, using her wit to help and find favorable
opportunities for their meeting, when company was out of the way. In
this manner they lived a long time, insomuch that they sometimes had
children by their wives before ever they saw their faces by daylight.
Their interviews, being thus difficult and rare, served not only for
continual exercise of their self-control, but brought them together with