3. Lycurgus

Greek historians from Herodotus onward took it for granted that Lycurgus was the author of the Spartan code, just as they accepted as historical the siege of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon. And as modern scholarship for a century denied the existence of Troy and Agamemnon, so today it hesitates to admit the reality of Lycurgus. The dates assigned to him vary from 900 to 600 B.C.; and how could one man take out of his head the most unpleasant and astonishing body of legislation in all history, and impose it in a few years not only upon a subject population but even upon a self-willed and warlike ruling class?³³ Nevertheless it would be presumptuous to reject on such theoretical grounds a tradition accepted by all Greek historians. The seventh century was peculiarly an age of personal legislators—Zaleucus at Locris (ca. 660), Draco at Athens (620), and Charondas at Sicilian Catana (ca. 610)—not to speak of Josiah’s discovery of the Mosaic code in the Temple at Jerusalem (ca. 621). Probably we have in these instances not so much a body of personal legislation as a set of customs harmonized and clarified into specific laws, and named, for convenience’s sake, from the man who codified them and in most cases gave them a written form.* We shall record the tradition, while remembering that it has in all likelihood personified and foreshortened a process of change, from, custom to law, that required many authors and many years.

According to Herodotus,³⁴ Lycurgus, uncle and guardian of the Spartan King Charilaus, received from the oracle at Delphi certain rhetra, or edicts, which were described by some as the laws of Lycurgus themselves, or by others as a divine sanction for the laws that he proposed. Apparently the legislators felt that to alter certain customs, or to establish new ones, the safest procedure would be to present their proposals as commands of the god; it was not the first time that a state had laid its foundations in the sky. Tradition further relates that Lycurgus traveled in Crete, admired its institutions, and resolved to introduce some of them into Laconia.³⁵ The kings and most of the nobles grudgingly accepted his reforms as indispensable to their own security; but a young aristocrat, Alcander, resisted violently, and struck out one of the legislator’s eyes. Plutarch tells the story with his usual simplicity and charm:

Lycurgus, so far from being daunted or discouraged by this accident, stopped short, and showed his disfigured face, and eye beaten out, to his countrymen. They, dismayed and ashamed at the sight, delivered Alcander into his hands to be punished. . . . Lycurgus, having thanked them, dismissed them all, excepting only Alcander; and taking him with him into his house, neither did nor said anything severely to him, but . . . bade Alcander to wait upon him at table. The young man, who was of an ingenuous temper, without murmuring did as he was commanded; and being thus admitted to live with Lycurgus, he had an opportunity to observe in him, besides his gentleness and calmness of temper, an extraordinary sobriety and an indefatigable industry; and so, from being an enemy, became one of his most zealous admirers, and told his friends and relations that he was not that morose and ill-natured man they had taken him for, but the one mild and gentle character of the world.³⁶

Having completed his legislation, Lycurgus (says a probably legendary coda to his story) pledged the citizens not to change the laws till his return. Then he went to Delphi, retired into seclusion, and starved himself to death, “thinking it a statesman’s duty to make his very death, if possible, an act of service to the state.”³⁷