A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

112 Sparta and the Peloponnesian League
unity and concord, breathing a spirit of calm and order,
which insensibly civilised their hearers and by urging
them to the pursuit of honorable objects, led them to lay
aside the feelings of party strife so prevalent in Sparta;
so that he may be said in some degree to have educated
the people and prepared them to receive the reforms of
Lycurgus.
II.
His Idea of Education
Public
tables.
Wishing still further to put down luxury and take away
the desire for riches, he introduced the third and the
Plutarch,
Lycurgus, lo.
most admirable of his reforms, that of the common dining-table.
At this the people were to meet and dine
together upon a fixed allowance of food, and not to live
in their own homes, lolling on expensive couches at rich
tables, fattened like beasts in private by the hands of
servants and cooks, and undermining their health by indulgence
to excess in every bodily desire, long sleep, warm
baths, and much repose, so that they required a sort of
Girls and
women.
lb. 14.
daily nursing like sick people.
Considering education to be the most important and
the noblest work of a lawgiver, he began at the very beginning,
and regulated marriages and the birth of children.
It is not true that, as Aristotle says, he endeavored to
regulate the lives of the women, and failed, being foiled
by the liberty and habits of command which they had
acquired by the long absences of their husbands on military
expeditions, during which they were necessarily
left in sole charge at home, wherefore their husbands looked
up to them more than was fitting, calling them Mistresses;
but he made what regulations were necessary for them also.
He strengthened the bodies of the girls by exercises in
running, wrestling, and hurling quoits or javelins, in