, when company
was out of the way. In this manner they lived a long time, insomuch that
they sometimes had children by their wives before ever they saw their
faces by daylight. Their interviews being thus difficult and rare,
served not only for continual exercise of their self-control, but
brought them together with their bodies healthy and vigorous, and their
affections fresh and lively, unsated and undulled by easy access and
long continuance with each other, while their partings were always early
enough to leave behind unextinguished in each of them some remaining
fire of longing and mutual delight.

"After guarding marriage with this modesty and reserve, Lycurgus was
equally careful to banish empty and womanish jealousy. For this object,
excluding all licentious disorders, he made it nevertheless honorable
for men to give the use of their wives to those whom they should think
fit, that so they might have children by them; ridiculing those in whose
opinion such favors are so unfit for participation as to fight and shed
blood and go to war therefor. Lycurgus allowed a man, who was advanced
in years and had a young wife, to recommend some virtuous and approved
young man, that she might have a child by him, who might inherit the
good qualities of the father, and be a son to himself. On the other
side, an honest man who had love for a married woman upon account of her
modesty and the well-favoredness of her children might, without
formality, beg her company of her husband, that he might raise, as it
were, from this plot of good ground worthy and well-allied children for
himself."

Regulations such as these, though shocking to modern sensibilities, seem
not to have been detrimental to public morals while Sparta submitted to
the severe austerity of the laws. It seems surprising that, while a
woman might lawfully be the recognized wife of two husbands, no such
duplication of spouses was allowed to a man. This rule is illustrated by
its one historical exception In the case of King Anaxandrides, who, says
Herodotus, when the royal Heraclidaean line of Eurystheus was in danger
of becoming extinct, married his niece, who bore him no children. The
people besought him to divorce her, and to contract another marriage;
but, owing to his love for his wife, he positively refused. Upon this,
they made a suggestion to him as follows: "Since then we perceive thou
art firmly attached to the wife whom thou now hast, consent to do this,