LYCURGUS. 125

fixed upon the city of Sparta itself, as the perfect model of good manners and wise government. The rest seemed as scholars, they the masters of Greece ; and to this Stra- tonicus pleasantly alluded, when in jest he pretended to make a law that the Athenians should conduct reli- gious processions and the mysteries, the Eleans should preside at the Olympic games, and, if either did amiss, the Lacedaemonians be beaten. Antisthenes, too, one of the scholars of Socrates, said, in earnest, of the The- bans, when they were elated by their victory at Leuctra, that they looked like schoolboys who had beaten their master. However, it was not the design of Lycurgus that his city should govern a great many others; he thought rather that the happiness of a state, as of a private man, consisted chiefly in the exercise of virtue, and in the con- cord of the inhabitants; his aim, therefore, in all his arrangements, was to make and keej> them free-minded, self-dependent, and temperate. And therefore all those who have written well on politics, as Plato, Diogenes, and Zeno, have taken Lycurgus for their model, leaving be- hind them, however, mere projects and words ; whereas Lycurgus was the author, not in writing but in reality, of a government which none else could so much as copy ; and while men in general have treated the individual philosophic character as unattainable, he, by the example of a complete philosophic state, raised himself high above all other lawgivers of Greece. And so Aristotle says they did him less honor at Lacedsemon after his death than he deserved, although he has a temple there, and they offer sacrifices yearly to him as to a god. It is reported that when his bones were brought home to Sparta his tomb was struck with lightning ; an acci- dent which befell no eminent person but himself, and

Euripides, who was buried at Arethusa in Macedonia :