The Historians' History of the World 03

He banished the arts, except for the adornment of his temple of Apollo at Amyclæ; and in this he succeeded. Pausanias makes note of some fifty temples in Lacedæmonia, but not a stone of them remains. Rustic piety and not art erected them. Save for a certain taste in music, the dance, and a severe style of poetry, Sparta stands alone as a barbarian city in the middle of Greece, a spot of darkness where all else is light; she did not even know thoroughly the only art she practised, that of war; at least she always remained ignorant of certain features of it.

As Aristotle says: “Trained for war, Lacedæmonia, like a sword in its scabbard, rests in peace.” All her institutions taught her to fight, not one to live the life of the spirit. Savage and egotistical, she satisfied the pride of her children, and won the praise of those who admire power and success, but what did she do for the world? A war machine perfectly fitted to destroy but incapable of production, what has she left behind her? Not an artist nor a man of genius, not even a ruin that bears her name; she is dead in every part as Thucydides predicted, while Athens, calumniated by rhetoricians of all ages, still has to show the majestic ruins of her temples, source of inspiration to modern art in two worlds, as her poets and philosophers are the source of eternal beauty.

To sum up, and this is the lesson taught by this history: rigidly as Lycurgus might decree for Sparta equality of possessions, an end contrary to natural as to social conditions, nowhere in Greece was social inequality so marked. Something of her discipline subsisted longer, and it was this strange social ordonnance that won for Lacedæmon her power and renown, striking as it did all other populations with astonishment.

The Spartans have further set a noble example of sobriety, and of contempt for passion, pain, and death. They could obey and they could die. Law was for them, according to the felicitous expression of Pindarus and of Montaigne: “Queen and Empress of the World.” Let us accord to them one more virtue which does them honour, respect for those upon whose head Time has placed the crown of whitened locks.

The aristocratic poet of Bœotia who like another Dorian, Theognis of Megara hated the masses, admired the city where reigned under a line of hereditary kings, “The wisdom of old men, and the lances of young, the choirs of the Muse and sweet harmony.” Simonides more clearly recognises the true reason of Sparta’s greatness; he called Lacedæmon “the city which tames men.” Empire over oneself usually gives empire over others, and for a long time the Spartan possessed both.d

FOOTNOTES

[8] [J. B. Bury translates it as “a secret police.”]

CHAPTER VII. THE MESSENIAN WARS OF SPARTA

[ca. 764 B.C.]

That there were two long contests between the Lacedæmonians and Messenians, and that in both the former were completely victorious, is a fact sufficiently attested. And if we could trust the statements in Pausanias,—our chief and almost only authority on the subject,—we should be in a situation to recount the history of both these wars in considerable detail. But unfortunately, the incidents narrated in that writer have been gathered from sources which are, even by his own admission, undeserving of credit, from Rhianus, the poet of Bene in Crete, who had composed an epic poem on Aristomenes and the Second Messenian War, about B.C. 220, and from Myron of Priene, a prose author whose date is not exactly known, but belonging to the Alexandrine age, and not earlier than the third century before the Christian era.