So he went on with his dream of the perfect state. Since the Spartans had swallowed that one, Lycurgus knew they would be good for about anything. “All of Laconia (Sparta) looks like a family estate, divided among brothers.” It did Lycurgus’ heart good to see all the smoke-stacks on all the little plots that first year at harvest time. What more do a man and woman need? The rest is just vice.”Īnd two thousand years of readers of Plutarch and other authors, and a few more who actually saw old Sparta with their own eyes, have believed with or without reservations, that the “people” of Sparta, including, yes, the land-owning nobles whose land was taken from them, agreed to go ahead with this scheme that it was done without more than the odd ulcer or gripe expounded privately, at home, during lunch. Each plot would yield enough grain and olive oil and wine to keep a family healthy and happy. How about starting from scratch again and re-dividing the country-slicing it up into thirty thousand little plots of land and giving one to each family. Sparta doesn’t have much land and it is all in the hands of a few rich families. “This country has too many poor people,” he said. “All right,” he said, “you asked for it.” And he gave them his next bombshell. The Spartans liked that first one and told him to go on, they were game. The new kind of government wasn’t the only one of Lycurgus’s ideas. It did seem to be a good way to stabilize a government. The Western world would see a lot of it since. That Spartan Senate was the first of its kind and quite an innovation. If they say no to a bill, it will be thrown out. And the people-the rest of the state? The people will have their own assembly and they will have the right to ratify or reject the proposals that the Senate and king dream up. The Senate and the king will rule together, like it or not. Let’s create an assembly of nobles and give them powers that are equal to the king’s. In time either the king misbehaves or the nobles get strong and try to dump him. Kingdoms are the natural form of government, he said, but they aren’t stable. Right off the bat Lycurgus created a Senate-a sort of House of Lords. That isn’t the last surprise, as you will see. By the time Lycurgus went back to Sparta he had made up his mind about the perfect state he knew exactly what he wanted and the first surprise to us readers of the story is that the Spartans, including their king, received him with open arms and gave him their state to monkey with. In Athens he was lucky enough to meet a great philosopher, a poet named Thales. His aim was to observe how those countries were governed and to try to figure out the best constitution for a state. During that time Lycurgus would travel around the old Mediterranean and visit countries like Crete and Egypt and Persia and talk to their wisest men. He was a nobleman from Sparta and by means of a very easy crime he could have become king but since that would probably have meant a civil war, and it was a crime, he decided to go away for twenty years while the rightful king, an infant, grew to manhood. They say a single man named Lycurgus gave Sparta its laws. Sparta really existed-it was a working state-and even now it is hard to believe that the whole story isn’t some kind of fantasy. Plato imagined the perfect state in his dialog called The Republic, but that was only a theory. The little state of Sparta always fascinated the Greeks-it was one of their strangest experiments.
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