Chapter I: Of the Republick of Sparta (2)

The ephori, alarmed at this unexpected attack, sent Cleomenes at the head of the Spartan forces to oppose the invasion. The young hero behaved well, and frequently baffled that old experienced commander. But his countrymen growing weary of the war, and refusing to concur in the measures he proposed for carrying it on, he recalled Archidamus the brother of Agis from banishment, who had a strict hereditary right to the other moiety of the kingdom; imagining that when the throne was properly filled according to law, and the regal power preserved entire by the union of the two kings, it would restore the balance of government and weaken the authority of the ephori. But the faction which had murdered Agis, justly dreading the resentment of Archidamus for so atrocious a crime, took care privately to assassinate him upon his return.

Cleomenes now more than ever intent upon bringing his great project to bear, bribed the ephori with large sums to intrust him with the management of the war.[36] His mother Cratesiclea not only supplied him with money upon this occasion, but married one Megistonus, a man of the greatest weight and authority in the city, purposely to bring him over to her son’s interest. Cleomenes taking the field, totally defeated the army of Aratus, and killed Lydiadas the Megalopolitan general. This victory, which was entirely owing to the conduct of Cleomenes, not only raised the courage of his soldiers, but gave them so high an opinion of his abilities, that he seems to have been recalled by his enemies, jealous most probably of his growing interest with the army. For Plutarch, who is not very methodical in his relations, informs us, that after this affair, Cleomenes convinced his father-in-law, Megistonus, of the necessity of taking off the ephori, and reducing the citizens to their ancient equality according to the institutions of Lycurgus, as the only means of restoring Sparta to her former sovereignty over Greece.[37] This scheme therefore must have been privately settled in Sparta. For we are next told, that Cleomenes again took the field, carrying with him such of the citizens as he suspected were most likely to oppose him. He took some cities from the Achæans that campaign, and made himself master of some important places, but harrassed his troops so much with many marches and countermarches, that most of the Spartans remained behind in Arcadia at their own request, whilst he marched back to Sparta with his mercenary forces and such of his friends as he could most confide in. He timed his march so well that he entered Sparta whilst the ephori were at supper, and despatched Euryclidas before with three or four of his most trusty friends and a few soldiers to perform the execution. For Cleomenes well knew that Agis owed his ruin to his too cautious timidity, and his too great lenity and moderation. Whilst Euryclidas therefore amused the ephori with a pretended message from Cleomenes, the rest fell upon them sword in hand, and killed four upon the spot, with above ten persons more who came to their assistance. Agesilaus the surviver of them fell, and counterfeiting himself dead, gained an opportunity of escaping. Next morning as soon as it was light, Cleomenes proscribed and banished fourscore of the most dangerous citizens, and removed all the chairs of the ephori out of the forum, except one which he reserved for his own seat of judicature. He then convoked an assembly of the people, to whom he apologized for his late actions. He showed them, in a very artful and elaborate speech, “the nature and just extent of the power of the ephori, the fatal consequences of the authority they had usurped of governing the state by their own arbitrary will, and of deposing and putting their kings to death without allowing them a legal hearing in their own defence.[38] He urged the example of Lycurgus himself, who came armed into the forum when he first proposed his laws, as a proof that it was impossible to root out those pests of the commonwealth, which had been imported from other countries, luxury, the parent of that vain expense which runs such numbers in debt, usury, and those more ancient evils, wealth and poverty, without violence and bloodshed: that he should have thought himself happy, if like an able physician he could have radically cured the diseases of his country without pain: but that necessity had compelled him to do what he had already done, in order to procure an equal partition of the lands, and the abolition of their debts, as well as to enable him to fill up the number of the citizens with a select number of the bravest foreigners, that Sparta might be no longer exposed to the depredations of her enemies for want of hands to defend her.”

To convince the people of the sincerity of his intentions, he first gave up his whole fortune to the publick stock; Megistonus, his father-in-law, with his other friends, and all the rest of the citizens, followed his example. In the division of the lands, he generously set apart equal portions for all those citizens he had banished, and promised to recall them as soon as the publick tranquillity was restored. He next revived the ancient method of education, the gymnastick exercises, publick meals, and all other institutions of Lycurgus; and lest the people, unaccustomed to the denomination of a single king, should suspect that he aimed at establishing a tyranny, he associated his brother Euclidas with him in the kingdom. By training up the youth in the old military discipline, and arming them in a new and better manner, he once more recovered the reputation of the Spartan militia, and raised his country to so great a height of power, that Greece in a very short time saw Sparta giving law to all Peloponnesus.[39]

The Achæans, humbled by repeated defeats, and begging peace of Cleomenes upon his own terms, the generous victor desired only to be appointed general of their famous league, and offered upon that condition to restore all the cities and prisoners he had taken. The Achæans gladly consenting to such easy terms, Cleomenes released and sent home all the persons of rank amongst his prisoners, but was obliged by sickness to defer the day appointed for the convention, until his return from Sparta. This unhappy delay was fatal to Greece.[40] For Aratus, who had enjoyed that honour thirty-three years, could not bear the thought of having it wrested from him by so young a prince, whose glory he envied as much as he dreaded his valour. Finding therefore all other methods ineffectual, he had recourse to the desperate remedy of calling in the Macedonians to his assistance, and sacrificed the liberty of his own country, as well as that of Greece, to his own private pique and jealousy. Thus the most publick-spirited assertor of liberty, and the most implacable enemy to all tyrants in general, brought back those very people into the heart of Greece, whom he had driven out formerly purely from his hatred to tyranny, and sullied a glorious life with a blot never to be erased, from the detestable motives of envy and revenge. A melancholy proof, as Plutarch moralizes upon the occasion, of the weakness of human nature, which with an assemblage of the most excellent qualities is unable to exhibit the model of a virtue completely perfect. A circumstance which ought to excite our compassion towards those blemishes which we unavoidably meet with in the most exalted characters.

Cleomenes supported this unequal war against the Achæans and the whole power of Macedon with the greatest vigour, and by his success gave many convincing proofs of his abilities; but venturing a decisive battle at Sallasia, he was totally defeated by the superior number of his enemies, and the treachery of Damoteles, an officer in whom he greatly confided, who was bribed to betray him by Antigonus. Out of six thousand Spartans, two hundred only escaped, the rest with their king Euclidas were left dead on the field of battle. Cleomenes retired to Sparta, and from thence passed over to Ptolemy Euergetes king of Egypt, with whom he was then in alliance, to claim the assistance he had formerly promised. But the death of that monarch, which followed soon after, deprived him of all hopes of succour from that quarter. The Spartan manners were as odious to his successor Ptolemy Philopater, a weak and dissolute prince, as the Spartan virtue was terrible to his debauched effeminate courtiers. Whenever Cleomenes appeared at court, the general whisper ran, that he came as a lion in the midst of sheep; a light in which a brave man must necessarily appear to a herd of such servile dastards. Confined at last by the jealousy of Ptolemy, who was kept in a perpetual alarm by the insinuations of his iniquitous minister Sosybius, he with about twelve more of his generous Spartan friends broke out of prison determined upon death or liberty. In their progress through the streets, they first slew one Ptolemy, a great favourite of the king, who had been their secret enemy; and meeting the governor of the city, who came at the first noise of the tumult, they routed his guards and attendants, dragged him out of his chariot, and killed him. After this they ranged uncontrouled through the whole city of Alexandria, the inhabitants flying every where before them, and not a man daring either to assist or oppose them. Such terror could thirteen brave men only strike into one of the most populous cities in the universe, where the citizens were bred up in luxury, and strangers to the use of arms! Cleomenes, despairing of assistance from the citizens, whom he had in vain summoned to assert their liberty, declared such abject cowards fit only to be governed by women. Scorning therefore to fall by the hands of the despicable Egyptians, he with the rest of the Spartans fell desperately by their own swords, according to the heroism of those ages.[41]

The liberty and happiness of Sparta expired with Cleomenes.[42] For the remains of the Spartan history furnishes us with very little after his death, besides the calamities and miseries of that unhappy state, arising from their intestine divisions. Machanidas, by the aid of one of the factions which at that time rent that miserable republick, usurped the throne, and established an absolute tyranny. One Nabis, a tyrant, compared to whom even Nero himself may be termed merciful, succeeded at the death of Machanidas, who fell in battle by the hand of the great Philopœmen. The Ætolians treacherously murdered Nabis, and endeavoured to seize the dominion of Sparta; but they were prevented by Philopœmen, who partly by force, partly by persuasion, brought the Spartans into the Achæan league, and afterwards totally abolished the institutions of Lycurgus.[43] A most inhuman and most iniquitous action, as Plutarch terms it, which must brand the character of that hero with eternal infamy. As if he was sensible that as long as the discipline of Lycurgus subsisted, the minds of the Spartan youth could never be thoroughly tamed, or effectually broke to the yoke of foreign government. Wearied out at last by repeated oppressions, the Spartans applied to the Romans for redress of all their grievances; and their complaints produced that war which ended in the dissolution of the Achæan league, and the subjection of Greece to the Roman domination.

I have entered into a more minute detail of the Spartan constitution, as settled by Lycurgus, than I at first proposed; because the maxims of that celebrated lawgiver are so directly opposite to those which our modern politicians lay down as the basis of the strength and power of a nation.

Lycurgus found his country in the most terrible of all situations, a state of anarchy and confusion. The rich, insolent and oppressive; the poor groaning under a load of debt, mutinous from despair, and ready to cut the throats of their usurious oppressors. To remedy these evils, did this wise politician encourage navigation, strike out new branches of commerce, and make the most of those excellent harbours, and other natural advantages which the maritime situation of his country afforded? Did he introduce and promote arts and sciences, that by acquiring and diffusing new wealth amongst his countrymen, he might make his nation, in the language of our political writers, secure, powerful, and happy? just the reverse. After he had new-modelled the constitution, and settled the just balance between the powers of government, he abolished all debts, divided the whole land amongst his countrymen by equal lots, and put an end to all dissensions about property by introducing a perfect equality. He extirpated luxury and a lust of wealth, which he looked upon as the pests of every free country, by prohibiting the use of gold and silver; and barred up the entrance against their return by interdicting navigation and commerce, and expelling all arts, but what were immediately necessary to their subsistence. As he was sensible that just and virtuous manners are the best support of the internal peace and happiness of every kingdom, he established a most excellent plan of education for training up his countrymen, from their very infancy, in the strictest observance of their religion and laws, and the habitual practice of those virtues which can alone secure the blessings of liberty and perpetuate their duration. To protect his country from external invasions, he formed the whole body of the people, without distinction, into one well armed, well disciplined national militia, whose leading principle was the love of their country, and who esteemed death in its defence, the most exalted height of glory to which a Spartan was capable of attaining. Nor were these elevated sentiments confined solely to the men; the colder breasts of the women caught fire at the glorious flame, and glowed even with superior ardour. For when their troops marched against an enemy, “to bring back their shields, or to be brought home upon them,” was the last command which the Spartan mothers gave their sons at parting.[44]

Such was the method which Lycurgus took to secure the independency and happiness of his country; and the event showed, that his institutions were founded upon maxims of the truest and justest policy. For I cannot help observing upon the occasion, that from the time of Lycurgus to the introduction of wealth by Lysander in the reign of the first Agis, a space of five hundred years, we meet with no mutiny amongst the people, upon account of the severity of his discipline, but on the contrary the most religious reverence for, and the most willing and cheerful obedience to the laws he established. As on the other hand, the wisdom of his military institutions is evident from this consideration; that the national militia alone of Sparta, a small insignificant country as to extent, situated in a nook only of the Morea, not only gave laws to Greece, but made the Persian monarchs tremble at their very name, though absolute masters of the richest and most extensive empire the world then knew.

I observe farther, that the introduction of wealth by Lysander, after the conquest of Athens, brought back all those vices and dissensions which the prohibition of the use of money had formerly banished; and that all historians assign that open violation of the laws of Lycurgus, as the period from which the decadence of Sparta is to be properly dated. I observe too, with Plutarch, that though the manners of the Spartans were greatly corrupted by the introduction of wealth, yet that the landed interest (as I may term it) which subsisted as long as the original allotments of land remained unalienable, still preserved their state; notwithstanding the many abuses which had crept into their constitution. But that as soon as ever the landed estates became alienable by law, the moneyed interest prevailed, and at last totally swallowed up the landed, which the historians remark as the death’s-wound of their constitution. For the martial virtue of the citizens not only sunk with the loss of their estates, but their number, and consequently the strength of the state, diminished in the same proportion. Aristotle, who wrote about sixty years after the death of Lysander, in his examen of the Spartan republick, quite condemns that law which permitted the alienation of their lands.[45] For he affirms, that the same quantity of land which, whilst equally divided, supplied a militia of fifteen hundred horse, and thirty thousand heavy armed foot, could not in his time furnish one thousand; so that the state was utterly ruined for want of men to defend it.[46] In the reign of Agis the 3d, about a hundred years after the time of Aristotle, the number of the old Spartan families was dwindled (as I remarked before) to seven hundred; out of which about one hundred rich overgrown families had engrossed the whole land of Sparta, which Lycurgus had formerly divided into thirty-nine thousand shares, and assigned for the support of as many families. So true it is, that a landed interest diffused through a whole people is not only the real strength, but the surest bulwark of the liberty and independency, of a free country.

From the tragical fate of the third Agis we learn, that when abuses introduced by corruption are suffered by length of time to take root in the constitution, they will be termed by those whose interest it is to support them, essential parts of the constitution itself; and all attempts to remove them will ever be clamoured against by such men, as attempts to subvert it: As the example of Cleomenes will teach us, that the publick virtue of one great man may not only save his falling country from ruin, but raise her to her former dignity and lustre, by bringing her back to those principles on which her constitution was originally founded. Though the violent remedies made use of by Cleomenes never ought to be applied, unless the disease is grown too desperate to admit of a cure by milder methods.

I shall endeavour to show in its proper place, that the constitution established by Lycurgus, which seemed to Polybius to be rather of divine than of human institution, and was so much celebrated by the most eminent philosophers of antiquity, is much inferior to the British constitution as settled at the revolution.[47] But I cannot quit this subject without recommending that excellent institution of Lycurgus which provided for the education of the children of the whole community without distinction. An example which under proper regulations would be highly worthy of our imitation, since nothing could give a more effectual check to the reigning vices and follies of the present age, or contribute so much to a reformation of manners, as to form the minds of the rising generation by the principles of religion and virtue. Where the manners of a people are good, very few laws will be wanting; but when their manners are depraved, all the laws in the world will be insufficient to restrain the excesses of the human passions. For as Horace justly observes....

_Quid legis sine moribus
Vanæ proficiunt._ Ode 24. lib. 3.

[5] Dion. Halicarn. p. 248. edit. Rob. Steph. 1546.

[6] Plutarch relates this affair greatly to the honour of
Lycurgus in the beginning of his life.

[7]

Ἄγιδος γοῦν τοῦ βασιλέως
ἐζημίωσαν αὐτόν

Plut. vita Lycur. pag. 46. lit. c. Edit. Xiglandri.

[8] Lycurgus was the first who collected the entire works of
Homer; which he brought into Greece out of Asia-Minor.

[9] Plutarch has taken no notice of them. But Xenophon has
fully explained them in his treatise on the Spartan republick,
p. 542, and seq.

[10] Plut. Vit. Lycurg. ad finem.

[11] Plut. ibid. p. 58. A. Ἡ γὰρ τῶν Ἐφόρων κατάστασις, &c.

[12] De Rebuspubl. cap. 11. p. 154. vol. 2. Edit Basil. 1550.

[13] Οὐ δῆτα φάναι παραδίδωμι γὰρ πολυχρονιωτέραν.

[14] Arist. de. Rebuspubl. lib. 2. c. 7. p. 122. lit. 1. vol.
2.

[15] Polyb. lib. 6. p. 685. vol. 1. edit. Isaac Gronov. 1670.

[16] Plut. in Vit. Lysand. p. 442. lit. E.

[17] Plut. it Vit. Agesi. p. 617. lit. C.

[18] In Vit. Agid. p. 796. lit. C.

[19] Ibid. p. 797. lit. C.

[20] In Vit Agid. p. 797. lit. A.

[21] Ibid. lit. E.

[22] Vita Agid. p. 797. lit. B.

[23] Ibid. lit. C.

[24] Ibid. p. 798. lit. B.

[25] Something seems plainly to be wanting in this passage,
which is strangely obscure and intricate. It is evident that
Agis employed his uncle Agesilaus to persuade his mother, who
was Agesilaus’s sister, τὴν μητέρα πείθειν, ἀδελφὴν οὖσαν τοῦ
Ἀγησιλάου. The king himself entreats his mother to assist him,
&c αὐτὸς δὲ ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐδεῖτο τῆς μητρός. And after he has
enumerated the advantages which would result from his scheme,
Plutarch abruptly adds οὕτω μετέπεσον ταῖς γνώμαις αἱ γυναῖκες
&c. in the plural number, though he had just before mentioned
Agis’s mother only, as the woman applied to on this occasion.
It is evident therefore that his grandmother and all their
female friends and relations must have been present that time,
though not mentioned, and that they were the only Spartan
ladies who came heartily into his scheme. For when Agis
afterwards offers his whole fortune to the publick, he assures
the people that his mother and grandmother, τὰς μητέρας, and
his friends and relations, who were the richest families in
Sparta, were ready to do the same. As Agis certainly includes
the wives of his friends and relations, and mentions no other
women, I have taken that speech for my guide in giving the
sense of this whole passage, in which I could get no assistance
from any of the commentators.

[26] In Vit. Agid. p. 798. lit. D.

[27] Vit. Agid. p. 800. lit. A.

[28] Ibid. 799. lit. A.

[29] This is an oracle mentioned by Plutarch, about which the
learned are not agreed: however, it seems to have given its
responses in dreams.

[30] The reader may be glad perhaps to find here the ceremony
made use of upon this occasion. Vit. Agid. p. 800. lit. B.
δι’ ἐτῶν ἐννέα λαβόντες οἱ Ἔφοροι, &c. Every ninth year the
ephori taking the opportunity of a clear and still night, when
the moon did not appear, sat silently and observed the sky with
great attention, and if they saw a star shoot, they judged the
kings had offended the gods; and removed them from government,
until an oracle came from Delphos which was favourable to them.

[31] Plut. Vit. Agid. p. 798. lit. A.

[32] Ibid. p. 801. lit. B.

[33] Vit. Agid. p. 803. lit. A.

[34] Plut. Vit. Cleom. p. 805. lit. B.

[35] Plut. Vit. Cleom. p. 809. lit. A.

[36] Plut. Vit. Cleom. p. 807. lit. B.

[37] Vit. Cleom. p. 808. lit. A.

[38] Vit. Cleom. p. 809. lit. A.

[39] Parallel. inter Agid. et Cleom. et T. et C. Gracch. p.
844. lit. D.

[40] Vit. Cleom. p. 811. lit. C.

[41] Plut. Vit. Cleom. p. 822. lit. E.

[42] Polyb. lib. 4. p. 479.

[43] Plut. Vit. Philopœm. p. 365. lit. E.

[44] To bring back their shields, implied victory; to be
brought home upon them, a glorious death in defence of their
country; because the Spartans, if possible, brought back and
buried all who fell in battle in their native country.

[45] Aristot. de Rebuspubl. lib. 2. cap. 7. fol. 122. lit.
Θ.

[46] Ἡ πόλις ἀπώλετο διὰ τὴν ὀλιγανθρωπίαν. Aristot. ibid.

[47] Ὥστε θειοτέραν τὴν ἐπινοίαν ἢ κατ’ ἄνθρωπον
αὐτὸν νομίζειν. Polyb. lib. 6. p. 683.