Gymnastic, "bodily exercise," of course, does [219] not always and necessarily effect the like of that. A certain perfectly preserved old Roman mosaic pavement in the Lateran Museum, presents a terribly fresh picture of the results of another sort of "training," the monstrous development by a cruel art, by exercise, of this or that muscle, changing boy or man into a merely mechanic instrument with which his breeders might make money by amusing the Roman people. Victor Hugo's odious dream of L'homme qui rit, must have had something of a prototype among those old Roman gladiators. The Lacedaemonians, says Xenophon on the other hand, homoiôs apo te tôn skelôn kai apo cheirôn kai apo trachêlou gymnazontai.+ Here too, that is to say, they aimed at, they found, proportion, Pythagorean symmetry or music, and bold as they could be in their exercises (it was a Lacedaemonian who, at Olympia, for the first time threw aside the heavy girdle and ran naked to the goal) forbade all that was likely to disfigure the body. Though we must not suppose all ties of nature rent asunder, nor all connexion between parents and children in those genial, retired houses at an end in very early life, it was yet a strictly public education which began with them betimes, and with a very clearly defined programme, conservative of ancient traditional and unwritten rules, an aristocratic education for the few, the liberales--"liberals," as we may say, in that the proper sense of the word. It made them, in [220] very deed, the lords, the masters, of those they were meant by-and-by to rule; masters, of their very souls, of their imagination, enforcing on them an ideal, by a sort of spiritual authority, thus backing, or backed by, a very effective organisation of "the power of the sword." In speaking of Lacedaemon, you see, it comes naturally to speak out of proportion, it might seem, of its youth, and of the education of its youth. But in fact if you enter into the spirit of Lacedaemonian youth, you may conceive Lacedaemonian manhood for yourselves. You divine already what the boy, the youth, so late in obtaining his majority, in becoming a man, came to be in the action of life, and on the battle-field. "In a Doric state," says Müller, "education was, on the whole, a matter of more importance than government."