so that they might from time to time receive corrections or additions from men educated in the spirit of the Lacedaemonian system.  On this education the whole scheme of Lykurgus’s laws depended.  One rhetra, as we have seen, forbade the use of written laws.  Another was directed against expenditure, and ordered that the roof of every house should consist of beams worked with the axe, and that the doors should be worked with the saw alone, and with no other tools.  Lykurgus was the first to perceive the truth which Epameinondas is said in later times to have uttered about his own table, when he said that “such a dinner has no room for treachery.”  He saw that such a house as that has no place for luxury and expense, and that there is no man so silly and tasteless as to bring couches with silver feet, purple hangings, or golden goblets into a simple peasant’s house, but that he would be forced to make his furniture match the house, and his clothes match his furniture, and so on.  In consequence of this it is said that the elder Leotychides when dining in Corinth, after looking at a costly panelled ceiling, asked his host whether the trees grew square in that country.  A third rhetra of Lykurgus is mentioned, which forbids the Spartans to make war frequently with the same people, lest by constant practice they too should become warlike.  And this especial accusation was subsequently brought against King Agesilaus in later times, that, by his frequent and long-continued invasions of Boeotia, he made the Thebans a match for the Lacedaemonians; for which cause Antalkidas, when he saw him wounded, said, “The Thebans pay you well for having taught them to fight, which they were neither willing nor able to do before.”

Maxims of this sort they call rhetras, which are supposed to have a divine origin and sanction.

XIII.  Considering education to be the most important and the noblest work of a lawgiver, he began at the very beginning, and regulated marriages and the birth of children.  It is not true that, as Aristotle says, he endeavoured to regulate the lives of the women, and failed, being foiled by the liberty and habits of command which they had acquired by the long absences of their husbands on military expeditions, during which they were necessarily left in sole charge at home, wherefore their husbands looked up to them more than was fitting, calling them Mistresses; but he made what regulations were necessary for them also.  He strengthened the bodies of the girls by exercise in running, wrestling, and hurling quoits or javelins, in order that their children might spring from a healthy source and so grow up strong, and that they themselves might have strength, so as easily to endure the pains of childbirth.  He did away with all affectation of seclusion and retirement among the women, and ordained that the girls, no less than the boys, should go naked in processions, and dance and sing at festivals in the presence of the young men.  The jokes which