nd unite them
against their external enemies. 'Certainly.' Every legislator will
aim at the greatest good, and the greatest good is not victory in war,
whether civil or external, but mutual peace and good-will, as in the
body health is preferable to the purgation of disease. He who makes war
his object instead of peace, or who pursues war except for the sake of
peace, is not a true statesman. 'And yet, Stranger, the laws both of
Crete and Sparta aim entirely at war.' Perhaps so; but do not let us
quarrel about your legislators--let us be gentle; they were in earnest
quite as much as we are, and we must try to discover their meaning. The
poet Tyrtaeus (you know his poems in Crete, and my Lacedaemonian friend
is only too familiar with them)--he was an Athenian by birth, and a
Spartan citizen:--'Well,' he says, 'I sing not, I care not about any
man, however rich or happy, unless he is brave in war.' Now I should
like, in the name of us all, to ask the poet a question. Oh Tyrtaeus, I
would say to him, we agree with you in praising those who excel in war,
but which kind of war do you mean?--that dreadful war which is termed
civil, or the milder sort which is waged against foreign enemies? You
say that you abominate 'those who are not eager to taste their enemies'
blood,' and you seem to mean chiefly their foreign enemies. 'Certainly
he does.' But we contend that there are men better far than your heroes,
Tyrtaeus, concerning whom another poet, Theognis the Sicilian, says that
'in a civil broil they are worth their weight in gold and silver.' For
in a civil war, not only courage, but justice and temperance and wisdom
are required, and all virtue is better than a part. The mercenary
soldier is ready to die at his post; yet he is commonly a violent,
senseless creature. And the legislator, whether inspired or uninspired,
will make laws with a view to the highest virtue; and this is not brute
courage, but loyalty in the hour of danger. The virtue of Tyrtaeus,
although needful enough in his own time, is really of a fourth-rate
description. 'You are degrading our legislator to a very low level.'
Nay, we degrade not him, but ourselves, if we believe that the laws of
Lycurgus and Minos had a view to war only. A divine lawgiver would have
had regard to all the different kinds of virtue, and have arranged his
laws in corresponding classes, and not in the modern fashion, which
only makes them after the want of them is felt,--about inherit