Notes to Pages 4–6 147
- Suda s.v. Dıkaíarchos. There are no grounds for supposing that Dicaearchus’ treatise was
not taken up by the Lacedaemonians until the Roman period, as Tigerstedt, The Legend of Sparta
in Classical Antiquity, I 586, n. 651, suggests, and Kennell, G V, 19, vigorously asserts; and it is most
unlikely that this was the case: see K. M. T. Chrimes, Ancient Sparta: A Reexamination of the
Evidence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949), 7; Edmond Lévy, “Remarques prélim-
inaires sur l’éducation spartiate,” Ktèma 22 (1997): 151–60 (at 154, n. 16); Hodkinson, PWCS, 62,
n. 19; and Ducat, SE, 177, n. 43. At every stage in their history, the Spartans, who were proud of
their heritage, would have welcomed such a work.
20.Cf. Kennell, G V, passim (esp. 5–48), who emphatically denies that there was any substan-
tial continuity between the civic paıdeía given the Spartiates in the classical age and the agōgē ́
of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, with Lévy, “Remarques préliminaires sur l’éducation spar-
tiate,” 151–60, and Ducat, SE, ix–xvii, who quite rightly assert that the available evidence suggests
the contrary. Note Paul Cartledge’s review of the last-mentioned work: NECJ 34:2 (May 2007):
149–50.
21.Cicero on Sparta: cf. Flacc. 25.63 with Tu s c. 2.14.34.
22.Ephorus’ hostility to Sparta: Massimiliano Pavan, “La teoresia storica di Diodoro Siculo,”
RAL 16 (1961): 19–51. 117–50 (esp. 31–32). Regarding Xenophon, the argument advanced by
Leo Strauss, “The Spirit of Sparta and the Taste of Xenophon,” Social Research 6 (1939): 502–36;
W. E. Higgins, Xenophon the Athenian: The Problem of the Individual and the Society of the Polis
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 65–82, 115–22; and Gerald Proietti, Xeno
phon’s Sparta: An Introduction (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), has now been taken up by a number of
classicists: see Chapter 1, note 78, below. Cf. Ollier, Le Mirage spartiate, I 372–440, and Tigerstedt,
The Legend of Sparta in Classical Antiquity, I 159–79, who envisage Xenophon as a more or less
unabashed admirer of Lacedaemon. This view still has its adherents: cf. Guido Schepens, “À la
Recherché d’Αgésilas le roi de Sparte dans le jugement des historiens du IVe siècle av. J.-C.,” REG
118:1 (January–June 2005): 31–78 (at 43–62), with Noreen Humble, “True History: Xenophon’s
Agesilaus and the Encomiastic Genre,” forthcoming in Xenophon and Sparta: New Perspectives, ed.
Anton Powell and Nicolas Richer (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, n.d.).
23. See, for example, Pl. Leg. 1.630d–631b, 3.688a–d, with Lévy, “La Sparte de Platon,” 217–
36, and Lutz, Divine Law and Political Philosophy in Plato’s Laws, 54–89; then, consider Arist. Pol.
1269b12–1271b19, 1333b5–1334b5, 1337a11–1339a10. As David, “Aristotle and Sparta,” 67–103,
points out, on this matter, the two philosophers were generally in agreement. For careful, recent
reexaminations of Aristotle’s critique, see Elisabeth Hermann-Otto, “Verfassung und Gesellschaft
Spartas in der Kritik des Aristoteles,” Historia 47:1 (1st Quarter 1998): 18–40, and Edmond Lévy,
“Le Régime lacédémonien dans la Politique d’Aristote: Une Réflexion sur le pouvoir et l’ordre social
chez les Grecs,” in Images et représentations du pouvoir et de l’ordre sociale dans l’antiquité, ed.
Michel Molin (Paris: De Boccard, 2001), 57–72. For a summary account of the criticism these fig-
ures direct at Lacedaemon, see Chapters 1 and 2, below. Cf. Ollier, Le Mirage spartiate, I 139–371,
who dismisses as a bigoted aristocrat any ancient observer who is in any way critical of the direct
democracies of antiquity and in any way admiring of Lacedaemon; and Tigerstedt, The Legend of
Sparta in Classical Antiquity, I 241–304, who takes note of the criticism directed at Lacedaemon
but does not have a just estimate of its significance, with Ducat, SE, 50–64, 140–41, and Hodkin-
son, “The Imaginary Spartan Politeia,” 227–32, 249–54, 259–61, who have a better understanding
and appreciation of the central concerns of the two philosophers.
24. Cf. Hodkinson, PWCS, 19–112, who recognizes that the Socratics were critics of Sparta
and who then goes on to argue that Theophrastus, Dicaearchus, Heracleides, Sphaerus, and the
like ignored what the men they most admired had to say, with Figueria, “Spartan ‘Constitutions’
and the Enduring Image of the Spartan Ethos,” 143–57.
2 5.See Noreen Humble, “Xenophon, Aristotle and Plutarch on Sparta,” in CASPTP, 291–300.
26.One could easily apply to Plutarch’s lives of Lycurgus and Numa the argument developed
with regard to his paired lives of two other legendary founders by Christopher B. R. Pelling, “ ‘Mak-
ing Myth Look Like History’: Plato in Plutarch’s TheseusRomulus,” in Plutarco, Platón y Aristóteles,
ed. Aurelio Pérez Jiménez, José García López, and Rosa María Aguilar (Madrid: Ediciones Clasi-
cas, 1999), 431–43, reprinted as “ ‘Making Myth Look Like History’: Plutarch’s TheseusRomulus,”
in Pelling, Plutarch and History: Eighteen Studies (London: Duckworth, 2002), 171–95.