And they could be silent. Of the positive uses of the negation of speech, like genuine scholars of Pythagoras, the Lacedaemonians were well aware, gaining strength and intensity by repression. Long spaces of enforced silence had doubtless something to do with that expressive brevity of utterance, which could be also, when they cared, so inexpressive of what their intentions really were--something to do with the habit of mind to which such speaking would come naturally. In contrast with the ceaseless prattle of Athens, Lacedaemonian assemblies lasted as short a time as possible, all standing. A [223] Lacedaemonian ambassador being asked in whose name he was come, replies: "In the name of the State, if I succeed; if I fail, in my own." What they lost in extension they gained in depth. Had our traveller been tempted to ask a young Lacedaemonian to return his visit at Athens, permission would have been refused him. He belonged to a community bent above all things on keeping indelibly its own proper colour. Its more strictly mental education centered, in fact, upon a faithful training of the memory, again in the spirit of Pythagoras, in regard to what seemed best worth remembering. Hard and practical as Lacedaemonians might seem, they lived nevertheless very much by imagination; and to train the memory, to preoccupy their minds with the past, as in our own classic or historic culture of youth, was in reality to develope a vigorous imagination. In music (mousikê)+ as they conceived it, there would be no strictly selfish reading, writing or listening; and if there was little a Lacedaemonian lad had to read or write at all, he had much to learn, like a true conservative, by heart: those unwritten laws of which the Council of Elders was the authorised depositary, and on which the whole public procedure of the state depended; the archaic forms of religious worship; the names of their kings, of victors in their games or in battle; the brief record of great events; the oracles they had received; the rhetrai, from [224] Lycurgus downwards, composed in metrical Lacedaemonian Greek; their history and law, in short, actually set to music, by Terpander and others, as was said. What the Lacedaemonian learned by heart he was for the most part to sing, and we catch a glimpse, an echo, of their boys in school chanting; one of the things in old Greece one would have liked best to see and hear--youthful beauty and strength in perfect service--a manifestation of the true and genuine Hellenism, though it may make one think of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of our own old English schools, nay, of the young Lacedaemonian's cousins at Sion, singing there the law and its praises.