This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
[2]
While these remained in force, Sparta led the life, not of a city under a constitution, but of an individual man under training and full of wisdom. Nay rather, as the poets weave their tales of Heracles, how with his club and lion's skin he traversed the world chastising lawless and savage tyrants, so we may say that Sparta, simply with the dispatch-staff and cloak of her envoys, kept Hellas in willing and glad obedience, put down illegal oligarchies and tyrannies in the different states, arbitrated wars, and quelled seditions, often without so much as moving a single shield, but merely sending one ambassador, whose commands all at once obeyed, just as bees, when their leader appears, swarm together and array themselves about him. Such a surplus fund of good government and justice did the city enjoy.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. 1.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.