st, and their address on the occasion
was, "Sparta honours you with this collation." When he had finished the
procession, he went to the common table, and lived as before. Only two
portions were set before him, one of which he carried away: and as all
the women related to him attended at the gates of the public hall, he
called her for whom he had the greatest esteem, and presented her with
the portion, saying at the same time, "That which I received as a mark
of honour, I give to you." Then she was conducted home with great
applause by the rest of the women.

Lycurgus likewise made good regulations with respect to burials. In the
first place, to take away all superstition, he ordered the dead to be
buried in the city, and even permitted their monuments to be erected
near the temples; accustoming the youth to such sights from their
infancy, that they might have no uneasiness from them, nor any horror
for death, as if people were polluted with the touch of a dead body, or
with treading upon a grave. In the next place, he suffered nothing to be
buried with the corpse, except the red cloth and the olive leaves in
which it was wrapped. Nor would he suffer the relations to inscribe any
names upon the tombs, except of those men that fell in battle, or those
women who died in some sacred office. He fixed eleven days for the time
of mourning: on the twelfth they were to put an end to it, after
offering sacrifice to Ceres. No part of life was left vacant and
unimproved, but even with their necessary actions he interwove the
praise of virtue and the contempt of vice: and he so filled the city
with living examples, that it was next to impossible, for persons who
had these from their infancy before their eyes, not to be drawn and
formed to honour.

For the same reason he would not permit all that desired to go abroad
and see other countries, lest they should contract foreign manners, gain
traces of a life of little discipline, and of a different form of
government. He forbid strangers too to resort to Sparta, who could not
assign a good reason for their coming; not, as Thucydides says, out of
fear they should imitate the constitution of that city, and make
improvements in virtue, but lest they should teach his own people some
evil. For along with foreigners come new subjects of discourse; new
discourse produces new opinions; and from these there necessarily spring
new passions and desires, which, like discords in music, would distu