XXIII. The training of the Spartan youth continued till their manhood. No one was permitted to live according to his own pleasure, but they lived in the city as if in a camp, with a fixed diet and fixed public duties, thinking themselves to belong, not to themselves, but to their country. Those who had nothing else to do, either looked after the young, and taught them what was useful, or themselves learned such things from the old. For ample leisure was one of the blessings with which Lykurgus provided his countrymen, seeing that they were utterly forbidden to practise any mechanical art, while money-making and business were unnecessary, because wealth was disregarded and despised. The Helots tilled the ground, and produced the regular crops for them. Indeed, a Spartan who was at Athens while the courts were sitting, and who learned that some man had been fined for idleness, and was leaving the court in sorrow accompanied by his grieving friends, asked to be shown the man who had been punished for gentlemanly behaviour. So slavish did they deem it to labour at trade and business. In Sparta, as was natural, lawsuits became extinct, together with money, as the people had neither excess nor deficiency, but all were equally well off, and enjoyed abundant leisure by reason of their simple habits. All their time was spent in dances, feasting, hunting or gymnastic exercises and conversation, when they were not engaged in war. XXIV. Those who were less than thirty years old never came into the market-place at all, but made their necessary purchases through their friends and relations. And it was thought discreditable to the older men to be seen there much, and not to spend the greater part of the day in the gymnasium and the _lesches_ or places for conversation. In these they used to collect together and pass their leisure time, making no allusions to business or the affairs of commerce, but their chief study being to praise what was honourable, and contemn what was base in a light satiric vein of talk which was instructive and edifying to the hearers. Nor was Lykurgus himself a man of unmixed austerity: indeed, he is said by Sosibius to have set up the little statue of the god of laughter, and introduced merriment at proper times to enliven their wine-parties and other gatherings. In a word, he trained his countrymen neither to wish nor to understand how to live as private men, but, like bees, to be parts of the commonwealth, and gather round their chief, forgetting themselves in their enthusiastic patriotism, and utterly devoted to their country. This temper of theirs we can discern in many of their sayings. Paidaretus, when not elected into the three hundred, went away rejoicing that the city possessed three hundred better men than himself. Polykratidas, when he went with some others on a mission to the generals of the great king, was asked by them, if he and his party came as private persons or as ambassadors? He answered, "As