Comparison of Lycurgus and Numa

so the Romans make record of the fact that Spurius Carvilius was the first to divorce his wife, two hundred and thirty years after the founding of Rome, there being no precedent for it; also that the wife of Pinarius, Thalaea by name, was the first woman to quarrel with her own mother-in-law, Gegania, in the reign of Tarquinius Superbus. In such fitting and proper manner were marriages regulated by their lawgiver.

Further, the practice of the two peoples in the matter of giving their young maids in marriage conforms to their education of them in general. Lycurgus made them brides only when they were fully ripe and eager for it, in order that intercourse with a husband, coming at a time when nature craved it, might produce a kindly love, instead of the timorous hate that follows unnatural compulsion; also that their bodies might be vigorous enough to endure the strain of conception and child-birth, convinced as he was that marriage had no other end than the production of children. The Romans, on the other hand, gave their maidens in marriage when they were twelve years old, or even younger. In this way more than any other, it was thought, both their bodies and their dispositions would be pure and undefiled when their husbands took control of them.

It is clear, therefore, that one practice regarded nature more, with children in view; the other regarded more the formation of character, with married life in view.

But surely, by his careful attention to boys, by their collection into companies, their discipline and constant association, and by his painstaking arrangements for their meals and bodily exercise and sports, Lycurgus proves that Numa was no more than an ordinary lawgiver. For Numa left the bringing up of youths to the wishes or necessities of their fathers.

A father might, if he wished, make his son a tiller of the soil, or a shipwright, or might teach him to be a smith or a flute-player, as if it were not important that all of them should be trained with one and the same end in view from the outset, and have their dispositions formed alike; but rather as if they were like passengers on a ship, each coming with a different object and purpose, and each therefore uniting with the rest for the common good only in times of peril, through fear of private loss, but otherwise consulting only his own interests.

Now, it is not worth while to censure the common run of legislators, who fail through ignorance or weakness. But when a wise man had consented to be king over a people newly constituted and pliant to his every wish, what should have been his first care, unless it was the rearing of boys and the training of youths so that there might be no confusing differences in their characters, but that they might be moulded and fashioned from the very outset so as to walk harmoniously together in the same path of virtue?

This, indeed, was what helped Lycurgus to secure, among other things, the stability and permanence of his laws. The Spartans took oaths to maintain these laws, it is true, but this would have availed little had he not, by means of his training and education of the boys, infused his laws, as it were, into their characters, and made the emulous love of his government an integral part of their rearing. The result was that for more than five hundred years the sovereign and fundamental features of his legislation remained in force, like a strong and penetrating dye.