ven days; on
the twelfth they were to sacrifice to Demeter (Ceres) and cease from
their grief. For, in Sparta, nothing was left without regulation, but,
with all the necessary acts of life, Lykurgus mingled some ceremony
which might enkindle virtue or discourage vice; indeed he filled his
city with examples of this kind, by which the citizens were insensibly
moulded and impelled towards honourable pursuits. For this reason he
would not allow citizens to leave the country at pleasure, and to wander
in foreign lands, where they would contract outlandish habits, and
learn to imitate the untrained lives and ill-regulated institutions to
be found abroad. Also, he banished from Lacedaemon all strangers who
were there for no useful purpose; not, as Thucydides says, because he
feared they might imitate his constitution, and learn something
serviceable for the improvement of their own countries, but rather for
fear that they might teach the people some mischief. Strangers introduce
strange ideas; and these lead to discussions of an unsuitable character,
and political views which would jar with the established constitution,
like a discord in music. Wherefore he thought that it was more important
to keep out evil habits than even to keep the plague from coming into
the city.

XXVII. In all these acts of Lykurgus, we cannot find any traces of the
injustice and unfairness which some complain of in his laws, which they
say are excellent to produce courage, but less so for justice. And the
institution called Krypteia, if indeed it is one of the laws of
Lykurgus, as Aristotle tells us, would agree with the idea which Plato
conceived about him and his system. The Krypteia was this: the leaders
of the young men used at intervals to send the most discreet of them
into different parts of the country, equipped with daggers and necessary
food; in the daytime these men used to conceal themselves in
unfrequented spots, and take their rest, but at night they would come
down into the roads and murder any Helots they found. And often they
would range about the fields, and make away with the strongest and
bravest Helots they could find. Also, as Thucydides mentions in his
History of the Peloponnesian War, those Helots who were especially
honoured by the Spartans for their valour were crowned as free men, and
taken to the temples with rejoicings; but in a short time they all
disappeared, to the number of more than two thousand, and in such a way
t