“You’re overstepping, wife, a married woman’s bounds, The front door passing; for to ladies of good birth The house door is the limit by convention set. This chasing and this running out into the street, Your billingsgate still snapping, Rhode, is for dogs!” Men possessed of these ideas could not appreciate that in Sparta, in the great periods, freedom and sobriety went hand in hand. Aristotle, in his arraignment of the license and luxury of the Spartan women as one of the defects of the Spartan system, may have been dealing with some special facts of his own day. In the fourth century Sparta had in certain ways deteriorated. But this deterioration could not do more than blur the outlines of a system of life which for three centuries had stood before the world, a “whole serene creation.” Comic writers might show up the boorishness of the unlearned Spartans, and irritable tragic poets might vent their spleen on their country’s enemy, but in the end Spartan institutions had to be respected and admired. Indeed, many Athenians affected a special predilection for qualities unlike their own and “laconized” in dress, manner, and speech. Philosophy flourished in Sparta, Plato tells us, and with it a rare skill in conversation. The typical Spartan, after pretending that he could not talk, would throw into the discussion, “like a clever javelin-thrower,” a remark “worth listening to, brief, compressed.” Thinkers as well as Laconomaniacs displayed enthusiasm for Spartan ideas. Aristotle, to be sure, while praising the love of education among the Lacedæmonians, deplored their absorption in one object and also complained that they preferred the good they gained to the virtue by means of which they gained it. But, true as this may be, the nobility of the effort, the flawless harmony of details, the perfect adjustment of the system to the use for which it was intended, resulted in a product as truly Greek as is a Doric temple or an Attic trilogy. It is not strange that its apotheosis is found in the ideal state of the great visionary of Athens. Plato’s “Republic” is Sparta idealized and interpreted by an Athenian.