istory of the
Jews shows what God does for men; the history of Greece shows what man
does left to himself.

Greece was not so small as what is called Greece now in our modern maps.
It reached northwards as far as the Volutza and Khimera mountains, beyond
which lay Macedon, where the people called themselves Greeks, but were
not quite accepted as such. In this peninsula, together with the
Peloponnesus and the isles, there were twenty little states, making up
Hellas, or Greece. {109}

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CHAP. XIII.--LYCURGUS AND THE LAWS OF SPARTA. B.C. 884-668.

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You remember that after a hundred years the grandsons of Hercules
returned, bringing with them their followers of Dorian birth, and
conquered Laconia. These Dorians called themselves Spartans, and were
the rulers of the land, though the Greeks, who were there before them,
were also freemen, all but those of one city, called Helos, which
revolted, and was therefore broken up, and the people were called Helots,
and became slaves to the Spartans. One of the Spartan kings, sons of
Hercules, had twin sons, and these two reigned together with equal
rights, and so did their sons after them, so that there were always two
kings at Sparta. One line was called the Agids, from Agis, its second
king; the other Eurypontids, from Eurypon, its third king, instead of
from the two original twins.

The affairs of Sparta had fallen into a corrupt state by the third
generation after Eurypon. The king of his line was killed in a quarrel,
and his widow, a wicked woman, offered his brother Lycurgus to kill her
little new-born babe, if he would marry her, that she might continue to
be queen. Lycurgus did not show his horror, but advised her to send the
child alive to him, that he might dispose of it. So far from killing it
was he, that he carried it at once to the council, placed it on the
throne, and proclaimed it as Charilaus, king of Sparta.

There were still murmurs from those who did not know that Lycurgus had
saved the little boy's life. As he was next heir to the throne, it was
thought that he must want to put Charilaus out of the way, so as to reign
himself; so, having seen the boy in safe keeping, Lycurgus went on his
travels to study the laws and ways of other countries. He visited Crete,
and learnt the laws of Minos; and, somewhere among the Greek settlements