Lycurgus

"For they say that Lycurgus was an admirer of Homer, and that he first brought the poetry from Crete or from Ionia into Greece.

And indeed in matters of the couch and the daily way of life Homer seems competent to give an education truly heroic and kingly, so that Lycurgus, having learned the Laconian common meals from him, established them by law for the Spartans.

Do you suppose, then, that Iphitus and Lycurgus and the Eleans of that day, through want of money, made the contest and the sacrifice befitting Zeus, but found no statue to bear the name and figure of the god — they who were well-nigh superior in power to those of later times — or rather that they feared lest they might never be able to imitate adequately, by mortal art, the supreme and most perfect nature?

And that most ancient Lycurgus saw nearly the same things.

And in doing this he first saw and judged the same thing that Lycurgus a little before had seen at Sparta:

Lycurgus called the elders gerontes at Lacedaemon—too few of them, indeed, twenty-eight, in whose hands he wished the chief counsel to be, while the king held the chief command;

And Lycurgus, who lived many years after the capture of Ilium, gives laws to the Spartans a hundred years before the Olympiads;

for Dieuchidas, in the fourth book of his Megarica, sets the flourishing of Lycurgus about the two hundred and ninetieth year after the capture of Ilium.

And Apollodorus says it was a hundred years after the Ionian colony, when Agesilaus the son of Doryssaeus reigned over the Spartans, so that Lycurgus the lawgiver, still a young man, overlapped with him.

" This was a brave race, while the laws of Lycurgus were in vigour.

I cannot say, however this is to be taken, that Lycurgus and Solon lack glory for their laws and public discipline, or Themistocles and Epaminondas for their warlike valour.

But why do I commemorate Socrates or Theramenes, men eminent in the renown of virtue and wisdom, when a certain Spartan, whose name has not even been recorded, so despised death that, when he was being led to it, condemned by the ephors, and was of cheerful and glad countenance, and a certain enemy had said to him, "Do you scorn the laws of Lycurgus?

Now as regards the laying of the injunction and the legal points, I considered that Lycurgus would deal adequately with them;

Now there are some facts about the information laid against him which Lycurgus seems to have passed over, but which I had better lay before you;

but had he no eyes for me, the orator with whom he was at open war, or for Lycurgus, or for the other orators about whom he will have so much to say presently?

He it was that drove the nursing women who were in charge of frenzied Bacchus through the land of Nysa, and they flung their thyrsi on the ground as murderous Lycurgus beat them with his oxgoad.

The godlike hero Ereuthalion stood forward as their champion, with the armor of King Areithoos upon his shoulders - Areithoos whom men and women had surnamed ‘the Mace-man,’ because he fought neither with bow nor spear, but broke the battalions of the foe with his iron mace.

A just citizen will not let private enmity induce him to start a public prosecution against one who does the state no harm.

Justice towards you, Athenians, and reverence for the gods, shall mark the opening of my speech against Leocrates, now here on trial;

I submitted to the defence a written challenge on all these points and demanded the slaves of Leocrates for torture, according to the right procedure for making challenges.

Were not the very laws of Lycurgus, amended by the Lacedaemonians, the cause of so much grief to their author that he passed sentence on himself, in seclusion, by starvation?

If I close with you on the score of equanimity — Lycurgus chose to starve himself to death, because the Lacedaemonians had amended his laws:

another of the men of the plain, who sought oligarchy, whose leader was Lycurgus;

But before his rule had taken root, the party of Megacles and Lycurgus, being of one mind, expelled him in the sixth year after his first establishment, in the archonship of Hegesias.

that the writings of Lycurgus, of Solon, our Twelve Tables are not laws, nor even is it a city or a state unless it be of the wise?

I never heard, in the school of Epicurus, Lycurgus, Solon, Miltiades, Themistocles, Epaminondas named — who are on the lips of all the other philosophers.

nor shall I ever say that the discipline of the Lacedaemonians was given to Sparta by Apollo rather than by Lycurgus.

Let the Athenian, then, follow the laws of Solon, and the Argive those of Phoroneus, and the Spartan those of Lycurgus;

I think Lycurgus in his speech has satisfactorily proved that the defendant is an unscrupulous man and has an extraordinary faculty for injustice;

And yet before his very eyes he observed those who might have assisted the cause of the people growing weak with the drift of events and their adversaries gaining strength in every way.

In testing these, if the actions of Lycurgus seem honest and public-spirited and inspired by loyalty, then it is justice that his sons should not only meet with no harm at your hands, but with all the benefits imaginable;

Furthermore, the fact that it is unjust to entertain concerning Lycurgus the opposite opinion to the one you held while he lived, and that justice demands that you should have more regard for the dead than for the living, and all such considerations I shall pass over, for I assume them to be universally agreed upon.

You have come to my rich temple, Lycurgus,

But I think rather you are a god, Lycurgus.

I am in doubt whether to pronounce you man or god,

Thus after the time of Lycurgus, and more particularly after the institutionof the Ephori, the kings of the Lacedaemonians are said by Polybius, Plutarch, and Cornelius Nepos, to have been Kings more in name than in reality.

Did you not call Lycurgus to join you in the prosecution, a speaker who is the equal of any in the city and who has the reputation among these gentlemen of being sound and honorable?

Among these was recorded a statement of Lycurgus, who claimed to have been told by the relatives that during the wedding of Charippus to the woman I followed and tried to persuade her to reserve herself and have nothing to do with Charippus.

For if, disdaining to take notice of the criticisms of people who are able to do nothing but find fault, I were to review one after the other not only the other achievements of our ancestors but also the ways and practices in warfare by which they prevailed over the barbarians and attained to glory among the Hellenes, inevitably some will say that I am really speaking of the ordinances which Lycur …

I acknowledge that I am going to speak at length of the institutions of Sparta, not taking the view, however, that Lycurgus invented or conceived any of them, but that he imitated as well as he could the government of our ancestors, establishing among the Spartans a democracy tempered with aristocracy—even such as existed in Athens —, enacting that the offices be filled, not by lot, but by electio …

Lycurgus, sensible of the cause by which governments were corrupted, excluded it entirely;

Well then, when an orator or a king is able to rival the greatness of Lycurgus or Solon or Darius and attain immortality as a writer in the state, does he not while living think himself equal to the gods, and has not posterity the same opinion of him, when they see his writings?

but concerning the greatest and finest things of which Homer undertakes to speak, wars and generalship and the administration of cities and the education of men, it surely is fair to question him and ask, Friend Homer, if you are not at the third remove from truth and reality in human excellence, being merely that creator of phantoms whom we defined as the imitator, but if you are even in the seco …

Or only look, she said, at the fine children whom Lycurgus left behind him in Lacedaemon to deliver his country and—I may almost say—the whole of Greece;