Such was the education that Sparta gave her sons. That it produced strong warriors and patriotic citizens, there can be no doubt. But that is all: it produced no men. It was greatly admired by men like Xenophon and Plato, who were sick of Athenian democracy; but Aristotle estimated it at its true worth. He says: "As long as the Laconians were the only people who devoted themselves to violent exercises, they were superior to all others; but now they are inferior even in gymnastic contests and in war. Their former superiority, indeed, was not due to their training their young men in this way, but to the fact that they alone did so." And even Xenophon, at the end of a long panegyric on the Spartan constitution, is obliged to admit that already in his time it has fallen from its old worth into feebleness and corruption, and this in spite of the fact that he had his own sons educated at Sparta. When Sparta fell before the heroic and cultured Epaminondas, she fell unpitied, leaving to the world little or nothing but a warning example. CHAPTER IV PYTHAGORAS Virtue and health and all good and God are a harmony.--Pythagoras. One is the principle of all.--Philolaus the Pythagorean. All things that are known have number.--_Id._ The principles of all virtue are three, knowledge, power, and choice. Knowledge is like sight, whereby we contemplate and judge things; power is like bodily strength, whereby we endure and adhere to things; choice is like hands to the soul, whereby we stretch out and lay hold of things.--Theages the Pythagorean. The Doric discipline, even in Sparta, where it could exhibit its character most freely, produced merely soldiers and not free citizens or cultivated men. It was, nevertheless, in its essential features, the Hellenic ideal, and numerous attempts were made to remedy its defects and to give it permanence, by connecting it with higher than mere local and aristocratic interests. One of the earliest and most noteworthy of these was made by Pythagoras.