Apophthegmata Laconica
Plutarch
Plutarch. Moralia, Vol. III. Babbitt, Frank Cole, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1931 (printing).
When two brothers quarrelled with each other, the Spartans fined the father because he permitted his sons to quarrel.
They fined a visiting harp-player because he played the harp with his fingers. [*](Thus making the music pleasanter to hear than if he had used the plectrum. Cf. Moralia, 802 F.)
Two boys were fighting, and one of them wounded the other mortally with the stroke of a sickle. The friends of the wounded boy, as they were about to separate, promised to avenge him and make away with the one who had struck him, but the boy said, In Heaven’s name do not, for it is not right; the fact is, I should have done that myself if I had been quick enough and brave enough.
In the case of another boy, when the time had arrived during which it was the custom for the free boys to steal whatever they could, and it was a disgrace not to escape being found out, when the boys with him had stolen a young fox alive, and given it to him to keep, and those who had lost the fox came in search for it, the boy happened to have slipped the fox under his garment. The beast, however, became savage and ate through his side to the vitals; but the boy did not move or cry out, so as to avoid being exposed, and later, when they had departed, the boys saw what had happened, and blamed him, saying that
it would have been better to let the fox be seen than to hide it even unto death; but the boy said, Not so, but better to die without yielding to the pain than through being detected because of weakness of spirit to gain a life to be lived in disgrace. [*](The story is told more briefly in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, chap. xviii. (51 B).)Some people, encountering Spartans on the road, said, You are in luck, for robbers have just left this place, but they said, Egad, no, but it is they who are in luck for not encountering us. [*](Cf. the note on Moralia, 194 D (3), supra. )
A Spartan being asked what he knew, said, How to be free.
A Spartan boy, being taken captive by Antigonus the king and sold, was obedient in all else to the one who had bought him, that is, in everything which he thought fitting for a free person to do, but when his owner bade him bring a chamber-pot, he would not brook such treatment, saying, I will not be a slave; and when the other was insistent, he went up upon the roof, and saying, You will gain much by your bargain, he threw himself down and ended his life. [*](Cf.Moralia, 242 D (30), infra. This story is repeated by Philo Judaeus, Every Virtuous Man is Free, chap. xvii. (882 C); Seneca, Epistulae Moral. no. 77 (x. 1. 14), and is referred to by Epictetus, i. 2.)