But, after all, there never was, as Cicero observes, a single orator among the Spartans; nor could it be otherwise, since all the arts which beget and foster eloquence, and, more important still, every political institution which favours it, were unknown in their state. Nay, so far did they push their aversion for the oratorical art, that if any citizen of Sparta acquired, in his experience abroad, the skill artificially to wield a syllogism or a trope, he was subjected to punishment,[906] while rhetoricians were expelled the city.[907] Ignorance, therefore, of whatever learned nations prize, was their chief boast. To them the sublime speculations of the Academy, and the logic, sharp and irresistible, of the Lyceum, were equally strangers; yet their discipline, and the habits of youth, imparted to them what in modern jargon is termed a kind of practical “philosophy.” They understood the great art, at least among them, how to command their passions; as Maximus Tyrius[908] relates of Agesilaos who, though educated in no school of philosophy, was nevertheless not a slave to love, which therefore the sophist infers could not be a matter of great difficulty. However there were limitations to their aversions for learning. They opened in their state an asylum for those antique teachers of mankind, the poets,[909] proscribed by Plato, and were in this respect so superior in good taste to that philosopher, that they at length, in imitation of the Great Preceptors of Greece, instituted public recitations of Homer. And this, Maximus Tyrius adduces as a proof that many well-constituted states had existed in which Homer was not publicly studied, for he could not mean that he was once entirely unknown at Sparta.[910] Footnote 906: The laws of Sparta were in this respect, as in many others, merely imitations of those of Crete.—Sext. Empir. adv. Mathemat. l. ii. p. 68. Plutarch having remarked that they did learn to read, adds—τῶν δὲ ἄλλων παιδευμάτων ξενηλασίαν ἐποιοῦτο, οὐ μᾶλλον ἀνθρώπων ἢ λόγων.—Instit. Lac. § 4. Footnote 907: Cressol. Theat. Rhet. i. 12. p. 88. Footnote 908: Dissert. ix. p. 118. Footnote 909: Cf. Athen. xiv. 33. Footnote 910: Dissert. vii. p. 91.