[1333b]
[1]
but still more capable of living in peace and leisure; and he
should do what is necessary and useful, but still more should he do what is
noble. These then are the aims that ought to be kept in view in the education of
the citizens both while still children and at the later ages that require
education. But the Greek peoples
reputed at the present day to have the best constitutions, and the lawgivers
that established them, manifestly did not frame their constitutional systems
with reference to the best end, nor construct their laws and their scheme of
education with a view to all the virtues, but they swerved aside in a vulgar
manner towards those excellences that are supposed to be useful and more
conducive to gain. And following the same lines as they, some later writers also
have pronounced the same opinion: in praising the Spartan constitution they
express admiration for the aim of its founder on the ground that he framed the
whole of his legislation with a view to conquest and to war. These views are easy to refute on
theoretical grounds and also have now been refuted by the facts of history. For
just as most of mankind covet being master of many servants1 because this produces a manifold supply of
fortune's goods, so Thibron2
and all the other writers about the Spartan constitution
[20]
show admiration for the lawgiver of the Spartans
because owing to their having been trained to meet dangers they governed a wide
empire. Yet it clearly follows
that since as a matter of fact at the present day the Spartans no longer possess
an empire, they are not happy, and their lawgiver was not a good one. And it is
ridiculous that although they have kept to his laws, and although nothing
hinders their observing the laws, they have lost the noble life. Also writers
have a wrong conception of the power for which the lawgiver should display
esteem; to govern freemen is nobler and more conjoined with virtue than to rule
despotically. And again it is not
a proper ground for deeming a state happy and for praising its lawgiver, that it
has practised conquest with a view to ruling3 over its neighbors. This principle is most
disastrous; it follows from it that an individual citizen who has the capacity
ought to endeavor to attain the power to hold sway over his own city; but this
is just what the Spartans charge as a reproach against their king Pausanias,
although he attained such high honor. No principle therefore and no law of this
nature is either statesmanlike or profitable, nor is it true; the same ideals
are the best both for individuals and for communities, and the lawgiver should
endeavor to implant them in the souls of mankind. The proper object of practising military training is not
in order that men may enslave those who do not deserve slavery, but in order
that first they may themselves avoid becoming enslaved to others; then so that
they may seek suzerainty for the benefit of the subject people,
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