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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: was only when I came to consider the peculiar institutions of the
Spartans that my wonderment ceased. Or rather, it is transferred to
the legislator who gave them those laws, obedience to which has been
the secret of their prosperity. This legislator, Lycurgus, I must
needs admire, and hold him to have been one of the wisest of mankind.
Certainly he was no servile imitator of other states. It was by a
stroke of invention rather, and on a pattern much in opposition to the
commonly-accepted one, that he brought his fatherland to this pinnacle
of prosperity.
[1] See the opening words of the "Cyrop." and of the "Symp."
[2] Or, "the phenomenal character." See Grote, "H. G." ix. 320 foll.;
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