daemonian cook on purpose to make him
some, but had no sooner tasted it than he found it extremely bad, which
the cook observing, told him, "Sir, to make this broth relish, you
should have bathed yourself first in the river Eurotas."

After drinking moderately, every man went to his home without lights,
for the use of them was, on all occasions, forbid, to the end that they
might accustom themselves to march boldly in the dark. Such was the
common fashion of their meals.

Lycurgus would never reduce his laws into writing; nay, there is a
Rhetra expressly to forbid it. For he thought that the most material
points, and such as most directly tended to the public welfare, being
imprinted on the hearts of their youth by a good discipline, would be
sure to remain, and would find a stronger security, than any compulsion
would be, in the principles of action formed in them by their best
lawgiver, education.

One, then, of the Rhetras was, that their laws should not be written;
another is particularly leveled against luxury and expensiveness, for
by it it was ordained that the ceilings of their houses should only be
wrought by the axe, and their gates and doors smoothed only the saw.
Epaminondas's famous dictum about his own table, that "Treason and a
dinner like this do not keep company together," may be said to have been
anticipated by Lycurgus. Luxury and a house of this kind could not well
be companions. For a man must have a less than ordinary share of sense
that would furnish such plain and common rooms with silver-footed
couches and purple coverlets and gold and silver plate. Doubtless he
had good reason to think that they would proportion their beds to their
houses, and their coverlets to their beds, and the rest of their goods
and furniture to these. It is reported that King Leotychides, the first
of that name, was so little used to the sight of any other kind of
work, that, being entertained at Corinth in a stately room, he was much
surprised to see the timber and ceilings so finely carved and paneled,
and asked his host whether the trees grew so in his country.

A third ordinance or Rhetra was that they should not make war often, or
long, with the same enemy, lest they should train and instruct them
in war, by habituating them to defend themselves. And this is what
Agesilaus was much blamed for a long time after; it being thought that,
by his continual incursions into Boeotia, he made the Thebans a match
for the L