Strona 482 z 1391

1. Plato expressly says that he is intending to found an Hellenic

State (Book V). Many of his regulations are characteristically

Spartan; such as the prohibition of gold and silver, the common

meals of the men, the military training of the youth, the

gymnastic exercises of the women. The life of Sparta was the life

of a camp (Laws), enforced even more rigidly in time of peace

than in war; the citizens of Sparta, like Plato's, were forbidden

to trade-they were to be soldiers and not shopkeepers. Nowhere

else in Greece was the individual so completely subjected to the

State; the time when he was to marry, the education of his

children, the clothes which he was to wear, the food which he was

to eat, were all prescribed by law. Some of the best enactments

in the Republic, such as the reverence to be paid to parents and

elders, and some of the worst, such as the exposure of deformed

children, are borrowed from the practice of Sparta.