“We have ever dwelt in a free and most illustrious state, and this policy of conservative self-control may well be equivalent to sound reason. We have become good warriors and wise in counsel by our careful discipline; good warriors, because self-control best quickens the sense of honour, and from this noble sense of shame springs courage; wise in counsel, because we are too unlettered to be superior to the laws, too severely self-controlled to disobey them.” A generation earlier Herodotus had paid his tribute to the Spartan loyalty to law in his story of the conversation between Xerxes, meditating his attack on Greece, and Demaratus, the ruined Spartan king who had fled to the court of Darius. Want, the exile tells the monarch, had always been a fellow-dweller in his land, but courage was an ally they had gained by wisdom and laws. “The Lacedæmonians even when fighting man for man are inferior to none, but in a body they are the best of all. For although they are free they are not wholly free, for over them there is a master, Law, whom they fear far more than thine fear thee. At any rate, they always do his bidding.” And that the Athenians, with their reverence for law, were by no means unwilling to attribute to the law-abiding Spartans a love of liberty as passionate as their own is seen in another story of Herodotus. Two young nobles volunteered to go to Xerxes and offer their lives in atonement for the murder of his father’s heralds. On their way to Persia they were entertained by the governor Hydarnes, who, calling attention to his own prosperity, urged them to make their submission to the king. “Hydarnes,” they answered, “thy advice to us is one-sided. Thou hast tried the one side, but art inexperienced in the other. For thou knowest how to be a slave, but liberty thou hast not tried as yet, whether it be sweet or no. Shouldst thou taste it, thou wouldst urge us to fight for it not only with the spear but also with the battle-axe.” One base alloy historians and poets alike found in the character of the Spartans. This was their corruptibility, their sordid greed of gain, as Aristophanes called it when angered by their rejection of peace. To the same political period belong savage attacks of Euripides on Spartan treachery and dishonesty. He also takes occasion to question the chastity of the daughters of Sparta:— “No Spartan maiden, even wishing it, were chaste! Not they. Their homes deserting, with their chitons slit Along the thigh, with robes loose-girdled, they with youths Share in the foot-race and—a thing I can’t endure— In wrestling bouts.” Probably this exactly expressed the sentiment of the average Athenian theatre-goer, accustomed to identify the virtue of women with their obedience to conventional restrictions, which men in the fifth century insisted upon as well as the husband in Menander’s play:—