39. Action and not speaking was the study and commendation of a Spartan, and therefore polite discourses and long harangues were not with them the character of a wise or learned man, their speech being always grave and sententious, without any ornament or tedious argumentation. They accustomed themselves to brevity, and upon every subject to express themselves in the finest words, with as much satire and smartness as possible; insomuch as they had a law among them for the instruction of their youth, by which they were enjoined to practise a close and compendious style in all their orations; which made them banish one Cephisophon, a talkative rhetorician, for boasting publicly that he could upon any subject whatsoever entertain his auditory for a whole day together; alleging this as a sufficient reason for their justification, that it was the part of a good orator to adjust his discourse according to the weight and dignity of the matter he was to treat of. 40. There was indeed a strange and unnatural custom amongst them, annually observed at the celebration of the bloody rites of Diana Orthia, where there was a certain number of children, not only of the vulgar sort but of the gentry and nobility, who were whipped almost to death with rods before the altar of the goddess; their parents and relations standing by, and all the while exhorting them to patience and constancy in suffering. Although this ceremony lasted for the space of a whole day, yet they underwent this barbarous rite with such a prodigious cheerfulness and resolution of mind as never could be expected from the softness and tenderness of their age. They did not so much as express one little sigh or groan during the whole solemnity, but out of a certain emulation and desire of glory there was a great contention among them, who should excel his companions in the constancy of enduring the length and sharpness of their pains; and he who held out the longest was ever the most esteemed and valued person amongst them, and the glory and reputation wherewith they rewarded his sufferings rendered his after life much more eminent and illustrious.