After the seventh century Sparta entered the Greek world with an offering that excluded art and the consciousness of external beauty. This was her mode of life, dedicated to one austere end. The citizens of Sparta were a small body of men, of pure Dorian blood, freed from the cares of self-support by the serfs or helots who were descendants of the original possessors of the soil they tilled. The whole time of the masters could be devoted to the state, and the pivotal demand of the state was for strong, brave and skilful soldiers. All life was a vast system of education directed toward the end of military efficiency. This explains each one of their customs: the exposure of sickly infants on the slopes of Mount Taygetus; the savage training of their boys and the severe training of their girls, who were to be the mothers of soldiers; the repression of personal luxury, the equalizing of rich and poor, the detailed elimination of individual pursuits. Conservatism was the breath of their life. Their institutions were of very ancient origin, although Lycurgus is now regarded as merely a legendary designer, and, once in possession of their imaginations, could not be shaken off or essentially modified. At the crucial period following the Peloponnesian War their inability to use new conditions played havoc with their political opportunities. Exclusiveness and reserve were corollaries of their single purpose. Indifference to the arts of peace was inevitable in a nation consecrated to preparation for war. The spectacle presented by the Spartans never failed to excite the lively interest of the other Greeks. Men as diverse as Xenophon and Aristotle wrote about their institutions, and popular judgments were always in evidence. An opinion which was probably held by many just before the Peloponnesian War is contained in Thucydides’s rehearsal of a speech made in Sparta by a Corinthian delegate to the conference which the allies had forced upon her. Impatiently he tells the Spartans that they do not know how utterly unlike them the Athenians are:— “They are revolutionary and swift to plan and to execute whatever they conceive, but you are all for conserving the existing state of things, inventing no new policy and in action not even coming up to what necessity demands. Again, they are daring beyond their strength and run risks contrary to their judgment, and in the midst of terrors they are full of hope. Whereas your way is to act within your strength, to have confidence not even in your best secured plans and, when terrors threaten, to think that you will never be set free from them. Nay, they are energetic and you are laggards; they go abroad while you cling to home.” The Spartan king, Archidamus, justified his nation in a speech made in a private session:—