It is not proved that the laws of Sparta were in ancient times either written down in books or engraved on tablets of marble or brass.  Nor is it certain that, if they had been, the Spartans could have read them.  They were ancient customs, some of them older probably than the settlement in Laconia, of which the origin is unknown; they occasionally received the sanction of the Delphic oracle, but there was a still stronger obligation by which they were enforced,—­the necessity of self-defence:  the Spartans were always living in the presence of their enemies.  They belonged to an age when written law had not yet taken the place of custom and tradition.  The old constitution was very rarely affected by new enactments, and these only related to the duties of the Kings or Ephors, or the new relations of classes which arose as time went on.  Hence there was as great a difference as could well be conceived between the Laws of Athens and Sparta:  the one was the creation of a civilized state, and did not differ in principle from our modern legislation, the other of an age in which the people were held together and also kept down by force of arms, and which afterwards retained many traces of its barbaric origin ‘surviving in culture.’

Nevertheless the Lacedaemonian was the ideal of a primitive Greek state.  According to Thucydides it was the first which emerged out of confusion and became a regular government.  It was also an army devoted to military exercises, but organized with a view to self-defence and not to conquest.  It was not quick to move or easily excited; but stolid, cautious, unambitious, procrastinating.  For many centuries it retained the same character which was impressed upon it by the hand of the legislator.  This singular fabric was partly the result of circumstances, partly the invention of some unknown individual in prehistoric times, whose ideal of education was military discipline, and who, by the ascendency of his genius, made a small tribe into a nation which became famous in the world’s history.  The other Hellenes wondered at the strength and stability of his work.  The rest of Hellas, says Thucydides, undertook the colonisation of Heraclea the more readily, having a feeling of security now that they saw the Lacedaemonians taking part in it.  The Spartan state appears to us in the dawn of history as a vision of armed men, irresistible by any other power then existing in the world.  It can hardly be said to have understood at all the rights or duties of nations to one another, or indeed to have had any moral principle except patriotism and obedience to commanders.  Men were so trained to act together that they lost the freedom and spontaneity of human life in cultivating the qualities of the soldier and ruler.  The Spartan state was a composite body in which kings, nobles, citizens, perioeci, artisans, slaves, had to find a ‘modus vivendi’ with one another.  All of them were taught some use of arms.  The strength of the family tie was diminished among them by an enforced absence from home and by common meals.  Sparta had no life or growth; no poetry or tradition of the past; no art, no thought.  The Athenians started on their great career some centuries later, but the Spartans would have been easily conquered by them, if Athens had not been deficient in the qualities which constituted the strength (and also the weakness) of her rival.