Grote, always somewhat inclined to racial explanations, argues (ed. 1888, ii, 262), as against K.O. Müller, who had still stronger leanings of the kind, that the Spartans were not the "true Doric type," in that their institutions were peculiar to themselves, distinguishing them "not less from Argos, Corinth, Megara, Epidaurus, Sikyôn, Korkyra, or Knidus, than from Athens or Thebes." This is doubtless true as against Müller (cp. Kopstadt, cited by Grote; Cox, _General History of Greece_, 1877, p. 28; and Ménard, _Histoire des Grecs_, 1884, pp. 218, 221), but the suggestion that the Spartans varied in respect of being _less_ "Doric" is equally astray. Grote goes on to note that "Krête was the only other portion of Greece in which there prevailed institutions in many respects analogous, yet still dissimilar in those two attributes which form the real mark and pinch of Spartan legislation--viz., the military discipline and rigorous private training. There were doubtless Dorians in Krête, but we have no proof that these peculiar institutions belonged to them more than to the other inhabitants of the island." The argument cuts both ways. If it was not definitely "Dorian" to have such institutions, neither was it un-Dorian. As Cox observes (p. 30), the Spartan constitution in its earlier stages "much resembled the constitution of the Achaians as described in the _Iliad_." Equally arbitrary seems Grote's argument (i, 451) that "the low level of taste and intelligence among the Thessalians, as well as certain points of their costume, assimilates them more to Macedonians or Epirots than to Hellenes." He notes the equally low level of taste and intelligence among the Spartans, who as a rule could not read or write (ii, 307), and to whom he might as well have assimilated the Thessalians as to the Macedonians. In all cases alike culture conditions supply the true explanation. All through Greece, barring Sparta, stocks were endlessly mixed. M. Ménard well points out in reply to Müller that it is impossible to associate types of government with any of the special "races"--that as against Sparta there were "Ionian aristocracies at Marseilles and at Chalkis, and Dorian democracies at Tarentum and Syracuse," while most of the Greek cities had by turns aristocratic and democratic constitutions. 4. As regards Sparta, the specialisation of all life on the military side developed a spirit of peculiar separateness and arrogance,[340] which clinched the geographical influence. Where Greeks of all States were admitted to the Eleusinian festivals, Sparta kept hers for her own people.[341] This would limit her literary mythology, and by consequence her art.