Aside
from Herodotus and Plutarch, Lycurgus is mentioned by Xenophon, Plato and
Polybius, to quote just these three most famous and most ancient names.
Although calling him the Father of Sparta, which implies his founding function,
ancient historians, in an apparent effort to give him some measure of
historicity, have tried to put him into some historical context, and, rather
than placing him at the very beginning of Sparta’s history as the “first
king of Sparta,” which
would have been perfectly natural, and well befitting his legend, they squeeze
him into a long line of Sparta’s kings, as we have seen in Herodotus, and as we
discover, with some surprise, in all other accounts of Lycurgus. This of course
is taking away something weighty from his legend, and it is not quite clear why
he is still being treated as a legendary figure by historians, and why, in the
usual process of legend-making, this important part of his life story has not
been radically embellished. My explanation, as in my comment on Herodotus, is
that all these ancients who write about Lycurgus have not been admirers of
Sparta, to put it mildly, and consequently, were exceedingly reluctant to give
her such a clout as would have been hers had they been more charitable to
Lycurgus. (We must make an important note here, however, that such a refusal to
bestow divinity on Lycurgus, resulting from a lingering hostility toward
Sparta, did not prevent Plato, who was at heart a hater of democracy--- after
what this democracy had done to his Socrates--- from admiring Sparta’s
anti-democratic laws, and even borrowing from them, in his elaboration of the
ideal, in Politeia.)
Having
thus expressed my view on the person of Lycurgus of Sparta in ancient
historiography, I cannot end this entry without quoting Bertrand Russell on
Lycurgus. He gives him a lot of space in his references but it is his general
opinion of Lycurgus rather than a mere presentation of his biographical facts
and fictions, that interests me the most in Russell’s Lycurgian passages.
The Spartan constitution was supposed, in later antiquity, to have
been due to a legislator named Lycurgus who was said to have promulgated his
laws in 885 B.C. In fact, the Spartan system grew up gradually, and Lycurgus
was a mythical person, originally a god.
One
of Russell’s Lycurgian references admirably sums up his world-historical
significance and the reason of his legend’s endurance in perpetuity, despite
what I have noted as its chronic inadequacy among the ancient authors. I find
it most fitting therefore to end this entry with that Russell summation.---
Aristotle criticizes every point of the Spartan constitution… [He]
wrote when Sparta was decadent, but on some points he expressly says that the
evil he is mentioning has existed from earlier times. His tone is so dry and
realistic that it is difficult to disbelieve him and it is in line with all
modern experience of the results of excessive severity in the laws. But it
wasn’t Aristotle’s Sparta that persisted in men’s imaginations; it was the
mythical Sparta of Plutarch and the philosophical idealization of Sparta in
Plato’s Politeia. Century after century, young men read these works and
were fired with the ambition to become Lycurguses or philosopher kings. The
resulting union of idealism and love of power has led men astray over and over
again, and is still doing so in the present day.
The myth of Sparta for medieval and modern readers was mainly fixed
by Plutarch. When he wrote, Sparta belonged to the romantic past; its great
period was as far removed from his time as Columbus is from ours. What he says
must be treated with great caution by the historian of institutions, but by the
historian of myth it is of the utmost importance. (Bertrand Russell. History of Western Philosophy.
Chapter xii. The Influence of Sparta.)
(This
entry is followed by the entry The Seven
Sages Of Greece.)
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