[Side-note: Spartan institutions--great impression which they produced upon speculative Greek minds.] It was from the Spartan institutions (and the Kretan, in many respects analogous) that the speculative political philosophers in Greece usually took the point of departure for their theories. Not only Plato did so, but Xenophon and Aristotle likewise. The most material fact which they saw before them at Sparta was, a public discipline both strict and continued, which directed the movements of the citizens, and guided their thoughts and feelings, from infancy to old age. To this supreme controul the private feelings, both of family and property, though not wholly suppressed, were made to bend: and occasionally in a way quite as remarkable as any restrictions proposed by either Plato or Xenophon.[124] Moreover, the Spartan institutions were of immemorial antiquity; believed to have been suggested or sanctioned originally by Apollo and the Delphian oracle, as the Kretan institutions were by Zeus.[125] They had lasted longer than other Hellenic institutions without forcible subversion: they obtained universal notice, admiration, and deference, throughout Greece. It was this conspicuous fact which emboldened the Grecian theorists to postulate for the lawgiver that unbounded controul, over the life and habits of citizens, which we read not merely in the Republic of Plato but in the Cyropædia of Xenophon, and to a great degree even in the Politica of Aristotle. To an objector, who asked them how they could possibly expect that individuals would submit to such unlimited interference, they would have replied--"Look at Sparta. You see there interference, as constant and rigorous as that which I propose, endured by the citizens not only without resistance, but with a tenacity and long continuance such as is not found among other communities with more lax regulations. The habits and sentiments of the Spartan citizen are fashioned to these institutions. Far from being anxious to shake them off, he accounts them a necessity as well as an honour." This reply would have appeared valid and reasonable, in the fourth century before the Christian era. And it explains--what, after all, is the most surprising circumstance to a modern reader--the extreme boldness of speculation, the ideal omnipotence, assumed by the leading Grecian political theorists: much even by Aristotle, though his aspirations were more limited and practical--far more by Xenophon--most of all by Plato. Any theorist, proceeding avowedly [Greek: kat' eu)chê\n], considered himself within bounds when he assumed to himself no greater influence than had actually been exercised by Lykurgus. [Footnote 124: See Xenophon, Hellenic. vi. 4, 16, the account of what passed at Sparta after the battle of Leuktra, related also in my "History of Greece," chap. 78, vol. x. p. 253.] [Footnote 125: Plato, Legg. i. pp. 632 D, 634 A.]