Instituta Laconia

They learned to read and write for purely practical reasons; but all other forms of education they banned from the country, books and treatises being included in this quite as much as men. All their education was directed toward prompt obedience to authority, stout endurance of hardship, and victory or death in battle.[*](Cf. Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, chap. xvi. (50 b); Isocrates, Panathenaicus, 209.)

They always went without a shirt, receiving one garment for the entire year, and with unwashed bodies, refraining almost completely from bathing and rubbing down.[*](Life of Lycurgus, 50 c; Xenophon, Constitution of Sparta, 2. 4; Justinus, Historiae Philippicae, iii. 3. 5.)

The young men slept together, according to division and company, upon pallets which they themselves brought together by breaking off by hand, without any implement, the tops of the reeds which grew on the banks of the Eurotas. In the winter they put beneath their pallets, and intermingled with them, the plant called lycophon, since the material is reputed to possess some warming qualities.[*](Cf. Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, chap. xvi. (50 c).)