Lycurgus, the Obnoxious Tyrant

Back during one of my depressed years, maybe Grade 11, when I was worried about being underread, I kept our old brown copy of Plutarch's Lives (in the Dryden translation, and my grandmother's I believe) at the bedside and strove to make inroads.

One of the lives did strike a chord, since it recapitulated what I learned about Spartan education in history class during an otherwise mostly unedifying year in German school. Under the impression that Lycurgus's biography was the one in question, I found it this morning in a different translation online and read it, keeping on expecting to find the nice passages. The further it went the clearer it was that this is the incomprehensible hagiography of a tremendous jerk, and a paean to totalitarianism.

As I thought it out, Plutarch is likely an originator of the neoclassical and later Christian model of finding a historical figure who can be elevated as a man worthy of emulation, who never does anything wrong and whose enemies are wicked envious ones, or whose faults (for whom a nebulous and inexorable fate is to blame) are a dignified caution to his historical successors. (Probably a harebrained idea, but it seems to me after reading lots of retellings that Homer's heroes for example don't strive so hard after perfection and everyone meets a sticky end whether they're impressive human beings or middling ones — their paths of glory lead but to the grave, etc.) The taxation on the truth and the realities of the human character is too high to be redeemed by the potential benefit. In short it appears profoundly unsound. The air of moral eventemperedness and conservative yearnings are taken as signs of health and practicability, but in fact they often appear to conceal narrow experience, feeble imagination about human nature and the world, and an egotistical need to order the cosmos to one's physical and spiritual comfort that neither recognizes the rights and differences of others, nor is fundamentally good.

Anyway, that is a tangent which it is practically impossible to defend objectively, so to return to "Lycurgus" here is one passage that encapsulates a little of the pleasant experience his rule must have been:

the Laconian cup, we are told by Kritias, was especially valued for its use in the field. Its colour prevented the drinker being disgusted by the look of the dirty water which it is sometimes necessary to drink, and it was contrived that the dirt was deposited inside the cup and stuck to the bottom, so as to make the drink cleaner than it would otherwise have been.

From the modern perspective, water taken from dirty sources would have borne fecal bacteria and parasites, and drinking a broth is not more pleasant even if the silt has settled and the vessel it's served in is a tasteful chalky grey. Besides I am pretty sure that Lycurgus would have drunk (if that grammatical tense is correct) from a slightly different cup. Skim over the dry passages and there are many more gems like this one.

Anyway, I don't follow Plutarch's thoughts. Would he have liked to live in a dual kingdom with lousy furniture, communal dinners, discontent rich people throwing stones, servants presumably living in worse circumstances as the wealth declined, a mediocre democracy where Lycurgus was ruling through the young second king after a military coup (though bloodless), no "useless tradesmen" and no merchant relations with foreign towns since these couldn't do much with the new iron (as opposed to gold and silver) coins?

Unless he was living on the street and was infested with a horrible disease, in contrast to which this Sparta might sound like the Elysian Fields, I doubt Plutarch would have found this lifestyle much fun to put in practice. Sparta may have been truly awful before Lycurgus improved it and so he is a model of making the best of a bad lot. Or, since I didn't finish the Life (too disgruntled), perhaps it has a splendid surprise ending.

Maybe he should be excused on the grounds that most of us who read the Little House on the Prairie series when we were little also thought that, with the exception perhaps of the Long Winter, it sounded rather cozy and nice. The idea of austerity can be charming, the reality of it unthinkable.

What also annoyed me was the praise which the Oracle at Delphi accorded to Lycurgus, twice. Either the oracle accepted arrant bribery, Lycurgus was misrepresenting its findings or never went there, or the oracle did inspire herself through now-controlled substances and had partaken of particularly happy ones whenever he came to visit. I don't think any proper god would accord a follower unalloyed praise, because 'tis human to err, etc. The tale of Croesus is far more instructive and real, I think, and I would think more of Plutarch's or Lycurgus' psychology if one of them had thought that the praise must be a particularly mean trick of the Olympians.

But, to end on a more cheerful note, the Laconian cup puts me in mind of Aunt Adelaide Stitch's education and boarding programme in Nurse Matilda:

"Her own suite of rooms, decorated in chocolate brown
A new wardrobe of clothing in colours that wouldn't show the dirt"