To destroy the power of Sparta the Achæans could imagine no better means than to change their system of education.—Plut. Vit. Philop. § 16. Paus. vii. 8. 5. The Mityleneans, too, desirous of breaking the military spirit of certain of their allies, forbade them to give the least instruction to their children.—Ælian, V. H. vii. 15. With the same view the Emperor Julian closed the public schools against the Christians.—Gibbon, iv. 111. Among our ancestors, too, when a blow was meditated against Dissenters, no measure more severe could be devised than to deprive them of education.—Lord John Russell, Hist. of Eur. i. 273. A modern writer has correctly remarked that by permitting the state to decide on the lives of infants, the institutions of Lycurgus recognised the authority of the community to regulate, how it pleased, the education they were to receive. The authority of parents over their children was thus all but annihilated, for, although the recognition and feeling of relationship continued after the state had undertaken the training of youth, their influence was exceedingly weakened, a circumstance to which may be attributed the seeming heroism of the Spartan women, who could stoically bear the death of their sons because they had been in a great measure estranged from them. As, however, the institutions of Lycurgus differed in all things else from those of other Grecian legislators, it is not surprising they should also differ on the subject of education. But it may greatly be doubted whether we altogether comprehend his system. The accounts transmitted to us are in many points contradictory, and it may in general be remarked that on no subject whatever do modern ideas differ so much from those prevalent in antiquity, as on the subject of education. Plutarch and Xenophon, or rather the sophist who assumed his name, two of the authors on whom in this discussion most reliance is usually placed, were prejudiced and credulous, and often, to speak frankly, extremely ignorant. Both were unwilling, even if they possessed the power, to criticise the system, and yet by modern writers their opinions have generally without scruple been adopted. Xenophon himself, as well as the sophist who here apes him, was in predilections a Spartan, and as strongly disposed to satirise and underrate the institutions of his own country as to exaggerate the merits of the Laconian. Even were the trifling essay on the Lacedæmonian republic proved to be his, we should yet lay little stress upon its testimony, unless when corroborated by the evidence of other and better writers.