Polıteía 59
more, in making peace and in preparing for war, the rulers of a community
must neither love nor hate with any real vehemence. Instead, they must cher-
ish the city’s friends and allies in the full expectation that someday enmity will
be required, and they must be hostile to her foes in the full knowledge that
these may well become friends and allies at some point in the not too far dis-
tant future.
Similarly, the young are hardly fit for rule in any regime aimed at fostering
homónoıa and at achieving stability. Young men are in all places an unsettling
element. Even where reared in accord with the spirit of the laws and encour-
aged to deem honorable precisely what convention prescribes, they rarely dis-
play that reverence for the past and that veneration for tradition which is the
foundation of communal solidarity. In contrast, because the old are backward-
looking and enslaved to memory, they tend naturally to assume that precedent
should govern in all cases and that what has been done from time immemorial
has an authority and a sanction almost religious in character.
It is not fortuitous that the Spartans rarely conferred political responsibil-
ities on anyone young. Within any community, Aristotle observes, there are
two functions—the martial and the deliberative—and both justice and good
sense dictate that they be distributed to the young and to the old, respectively:
for the young are generally strong, and the old are often prudent. Nor is it an
accident that the Spartans were famous throughout ancient times for the ex-
aggerated respect which they paid to age.^65
Where they received such attention, the old were in a position to do great
service. Because they were at leisure, they could act as censors willing to over-
see not just public affairs, but private matters as well. Plutarch emphasizes that
the old men of Sparta kept watch over the young, attending their workouts
in the gymnasium and their games and taking note of their general comport-
ment throughout the day. Simply by their presence, they inspired fear in those
likely to transgress and reinforced the shame and the yearning for excellence
which guide those inclined to be virtuous. In these circumstances, he notes,
“the young tend to cultivate and follow the lead of the old, and the latter, in
turn, manage to strengthen and encourage the innate orderliness and nobility
of their disciples without incurring envy thereby.” The Spartans were fully
aware of the character and import of this relationship: an older man who wit-
nessed wrongdoing on the part of a young man and failed to administer the
proper reproof was subject to punishment himself.^66
The depiction in Aristotle’s Rhetoric of the differences between the young