ught acuteness, promptness, and
discernment--for such are qualities essential to the soldier. He was
stimulated to condense his thoughts, and to be ready in reply; to say
little, and to the point. An aphorism bounded his philosophy. Such
an education produced its results in an athletic frame, in simple and
hardy habits--in indomitable patience--in quick sagacity. But there
were other qualities necessary to the position of the Spartan, and
those scarce so praiseworthy--viz., craft and simulation. He was one
of a scanty, if a valiant, race. No single citizen could be spared
the state: it was often better to dupe than to fight an enemy.
Accordingly, the boy was trained to cunning as to courage. He was
driven by hunger, or the orders of the leader over him, to obtain his
food, in house or in field, by stealth;--if undiscovered, he was
applauded; if detected, punished. Two main-springs of action were
constructed within him--the dread of shame and the love of country.
These were motives, it is true, common to all the Grecian states, but
they seem to have been especially powerful in Sparta. But the last
produced its abuse in one of the worst vices of the national
character. The absorbing love for his native Sparta rendered the
citizen singularly selfish towards other states, even kindred to that
which he belonged to. Fearless as a Spartan,--when Sparta was
unmenaced he was lukewarm as a Greek. And this exaggerated yet
sectarian patriotism, almost peculiar to Sparta, was centred, not only
in the safety and greatness of the state, but in the inalienable
preservation of its institutions;--a feeling carefully sustained by a
policy exceedingly jealous of strangers [139]. Spartans were not
permitted to travel. Foreigners were but rarely permitted a residence
within the city: and the Spartan dislike to Athens arose rather from
fear of the contamination of her principles than from envy at the
lustre of her fame. When we find (as our history proceeds) the
Spartans dismissing their Athenian ally from the siege of Ithome, we
recognise their jealousy of the innovating character of their
brilliant neighbour;--they feared the infection of the democracy of
the Agora. This attachment to one exclusive system of government
characterized all the foreign policy of Sparta, and crippled the
national sense by the narrowest bigotry and the obtusest prejudice.
Wherever she conquered, she enforced her own constitution, no matter
how ini