or
the custom that made decorous even indecency itself, would have been
indeed licentious, the Spartan maiden, strong, hardy, and half a
partaker in the ceremonies of public life, shared the habits, aided
the emulation, imbibed the patriotism, of her future consort. And, by
her sympathy with his habits and pursuits, she obtained an influence
and ascendency over him which was unknown in the rest of Greece.
Dignified on public occasions, the Spartan matron was deemed, however,
a virago in private life; and she who had no sorrow for a slaughtered
son, had very little deference for a living husband. Her obedience to
her spouse appears to have been the most cheerfully rendered upon
those delicate emergencies when the service of the state required her
submission to the embraces of another! [144]

XI. We now come to the most melancholy and gloomy part of the Spartan
system--the condition of the Helots.

The whole fabric of the Spartan character rested upon slavery. If it
were beneath a Spartan to labour--to maintain himself--to cultivate
land--to build a house--to exercise an art;--to do aught else than to
fight an enemy--to choose an ephor--to pass from the chase or the
palaestra to the public tables--to live a hero in war--an aristocrat
in peace,--it was clearly a supreme necessity to his very existence as
a citizen, and even as a human being, that there should be a
subordinate class of persons employed in the occupations rejected by
himself, and engaged in providing for the wants of this privileged
citizen. Without Helots the Spartan was the most helpless of human
beings. Slavery taken from the Spartan state, the state would fall at
once! It is no wonder, therefore, that this institution should have
been guarded with an extraordinary jealousy--nor that extraordinary
jealousy should have produced extraordinary harshness. It is exactly
in proportion to the fear of losing power that men are generally
tyrannical in the exercise of it. Nor is it from cruelty of
disposition, but from the anxious curse of living among men whom
social circumstances make his enemies because his slaves, that a
despot usually grows ferocious, and that the urgings of suspicion
create the reign of terror. Besides the political necessity of a
strict and unrelaxed slavery, a Spartan would also be callous to the
sufferings, from his contempt for the degradation, of the slave; as he
despised the employments abandoned to the Helot, even so would