expected. For... when Lycurgus, as tradition says, wanted to bring the women under his laws,
they resisted, and he gave up the attempt."
He goes on to accuse Spartans of avarice, which he attributes to the unequal distribution of
property. Although lots cannot be sold, he says, they can be given or bequeathed. Two-fifths of all
the land, he adds, belongs to women. The consequence is a great diminution in the number of
citizens: it is said that once there were ten thousand, but at the time of the defeat by Thebes there
were less than one thousand.
Aristotle criticizes every point of the Spartan constitution. He says that the ephors are often very
poor, and therefore easy to bribe; and their power is so great that even kings are compelled to
court them, so that the constitution has been turned into a democracy. The ephors, we are told,
have too much licence, and live in a manner contrary to the spirit of the constitution, while the
strictness in relation to ordinary citizens is so intolerable that they take refuge in the secret illegal
indulgence of sensual pleasures.
Aristotle wrote when Sparta was decadent, but on some points he expressly says that the evil he is
mentioning has existed from early times. His tone is so dry and realistic that it is difficult to
disbelieve him, and it is in line with all modern experience of the results of excessive severity in
the laws. But it was not Aristotle's Sparta that persisted in men's imaginations; it was the mythical
Sparta of Plutarch and the philosophic idealization of Sparta in Plato Republic. Century after
century, young men read these works, and were fired with the ambition to become Lycurguses or
philosopher-kings. The resulting union of idealism and love of power has led men astray over and
over again, and is still doing so in the present day.
The myth of Sparta, for medieval and modern readers, was mainly fixed by Plutarch. When he
wrote, Sparta belonged to the romantic past; its great period was as far removed from his time as
Columbus is from ours. What he says must be treated with great caution by the historian of
institutions, but by the historian of myth it is of the utmost importance. Greece has influenced the
world, always, through its effect on men's imaginations, ideals, and hopes, not directly through
political power. Rome made roads which largely still survive, and laws which are the source of
many modern legal codes, but it was the armies of Rome that made these things important. The
Greeks,