on from bad to worse until there
was a revulsion of pure shame. Lysander put to death three thousand
Athenians, captives, after the battle of AEgospotami, as reprisals for
the barbarities executed by the Athenians against Sparta and her allies.
The allies wanted to exercise war law on Athens, but Sparta would not
consent. To her then belongs the honor of fixing a new precedent. It was
her duty to do so after the act of Lysander. Beloch thinks that science
made the greater humanity of the fourth century.[1647] It is more
probable that it was due to a perception of the horror and shame of the
other course. The parties in the cities, in the later centuries, were
also guilty of excess, rancorous passion, revenge, and oppression. These
cases come under the head of unseemliness in so far as they show a lack
of sense of where to stop. That sense, especially in the political acts
of democracies, must be a resultant, in the minds of men of the most
numerous classes, from the spirit and temper of the folkways.

+498. Seemliness in the Middle Ages.+ In the Middle Ages very great
attention was given to seemliness in the private conduct of individuals.
Moderation especially was to be cultivated. Women were put under minute
rules of dress, posture, walk, language, tone of voice, and attitude.
The guiding spirit of the regulations was restraint and limit.[1648]
Public life, however, was characterized by great unseemliness, and the
examples of it are especially valuable because they show how necessary a
sense of seemliness is to prevent great evils, although the virtue
itself is vague and refined, and entirely beyond the field of positive
cultivation by education or law. When the crusaders captured Mohammedan
cities they showed savage ferocity. A case is recorded of a quarrel
between a man of rank and a cook. The former proceeded to very extreme
measures, and the cook, since he was a cook, could get no redress or
attention.[1649] In the fifteenth century a rage for indecent conduct
arose. The type which the Germans call the _Grobian_ was affected.
Rudeness of manners in eating, dancing, etc., was cultivated as a pose.
This fashion lasted for more than a century. In 1570 a society was
formed of twenty-seven members, who swore to be nasty, not to wash or
pray, and to practice blasphemy, etc. When drunk such persons committed
great breaches of order, decency, etc.[1650]

+499. Unseemly debate.+ The folkways of the Middle Ages were fantas