62 Polıteía
One would be hard put to charge John Stuart Mill with being a partisan
of Sparta. Lacedaemon was, in his view, “memorable for the peculiar pettiness
of its political conduct.” Furthermore, Mill gave great emphasis to the fact
that, when temporarily liberated from supervision by his fellow citizens, a
Spartan “was not only the most domineering and arrogant, but in spite of, or
rather by a natural reaction from his ascetic training, the most rapacious and
corrupt of all Greeks.” And yet, despite the distaste that he consistently dis-
played, the great nineteenth-century liberal could not help being moved by
“the steadiness of the Spartan polity, and the constancy of Spartan maxims.”
He was even prepared to acknowledge that the “habitual abnegation of or-
dinary personal interests, and merging of self with an idea”—so evident at
Lacedaemon—“were not compatible with pettiness of mind. Most of the an-
ecdotes and recorded sayings of individual Lacedaemonians breathe a certain
magnanimity of spirit.” To these concessions, Mill ultimately added another
of equal or even greater importance: “There is indeed no such instance of
the wonderful pliability, and amenability to artificial discipline, of the human
mind, as is afforded by the complete success of the Lacedaemonian legislator,
for many generations, in making the whole body of Spartan citizens at Sparta
exactly what he had intended to make them.”^70
Aristotle shared Mill’s misgivings. Like Xenophon, who conveyed his
criticism by indirection, and like Plato, who was forthright, the peripatetic
thought it morally obtuse and politically imprudent that the Spartan lawgiver
had designed the Lacedaemonian regime for the cultivation of martial virtue
almost to the exclusion of all other forms of excellence. The Spartans he bluntly
accused of having turned their children into wild animals, and their polity’s
dramatic decline in his own time he traced to the fact that the Spartiates had
not been properly instructed in the refined use of leisure and in pursuits suited
to times of peace.^71 But, like Xenophon, Plato, and Mill, Aristotle nonetheless
admired the achievements of early Lacedaemon. Although, as we shall see, he
was not among those who believed that everything attributed by tradition to
Lycurgus was actually his work, he was nonetheless prepared at times to speak
as if this were so. This composite, quasi-fictional figure he ranked as one of
“the best lawgivers,” alongside Solon and Charondas. He drew attention to
the fact that Lycurgus had transformed a tyranny into an aristocracy, and he
praised him for having been almost alone in making provision for the paıdeía
and moral formation of the citizens of the political community within which
he lived. In his treatise on the polıteía of the Lacedaemonians, Aristotle ap-