elves
to walk fearlessly and safely in the dark. This then is the way in which
the common dining-tables are managed.

XII. Lykurgus did not establish any written laws; indeed, this is
distinctly forbidden by one of the so-called Rhetras.

He thought that the principles of most importance for the prosperity and
honour of the state would remain most securely fixed if implanted in the
citizens by habit and training, as they would then be followed from
choice rather than necessity; for his method of education made each of
them into a lawgiver like himself. The trifling conventions of everyday
life were best left undefined by hard-and-fast laws, so that they might
from time to time receive corrections or additions from men educated in
the spirit of the Lacedaemonian system. On this education the whole
scheme of Lykurgus's laws depended. One _rhetra_, as we have seen,
forbade the use of written laws. Another was directed against
expenditure, and ordered that the roof of every house should consist of
beams worked with the axe, and that the doors should be worked with the
saw alone, and with no other tools. Lykurgus was the first to perceive
the truth which Epameinondas is said in later times to have uttered
about his own table, when he said that "such a dinner has no room for
treachery." He saw that such a house as that has no place for luxury and
expense, and that there is no man so silly and tasteless as to bring
couches with silver feet, purple hangings, or golden goblets into a
simple peasant's house, but that he would be forced to make his
furniture match the house, and his clothes match his furniture, and so
on. In consequence of this it is said that the elder Leotychides when
dining in Corinth, after looking at a costly panelled ceiling, asked his
host whether the trees grew square in that country. A third _rhetra_ of
Lykurgus is mentioned, which forbids the Spartans to make war frequently
with the same people, lest by constant practice they too should become
warlike. And this especial accusation was subsequently brought against
King Agesilaus in later times, that, by his frequent and long-continued
invasions of Boeotia, he made the Thebans a match for the
Lacedaemonians; for which cause Antalkidas, when he saw him wounded,
said, "The Thebans pay you well for having taught them to fight, which
they were neither willing nor able to do before."

Maxims of this sort they call _rhetras_, which are supposed to have a
divi