LYKURGEAN DISCIPLINE. 881 public forests of the state, while every one who sacrificed to the gods, 1 sent to his mess-table a part of the victim killed. From boyhood to old age, every Spartan citiz*en took his sober meals at this public mess, where all shared alike ; nor was distinction of any kind allowed, except on signal occasions of service ren- dered by an individual to the state. These public Syssitia, under the management of the Pole- marchs, were connected with the military distribution, the con- stant gymnastic training, and the rigorous discipline of detail, enforced by Lykurgus. From the early age of seven years, throughout his whole life, as youth and man no less than as boy, the Spartan citizen lived habitually in public, always either himself under drill, gymnastic and military, or a critic and spectator of others, always under the fetters and observances of a rule partly military, partly monastic, estranged from the independence of a separate home, seeing his wife, during the first years after marriage, only by stealth, and maintaining little peculiar relation with his children. The supervision, not only of his fellow-citizens, but also of authorized censors, or captains nominated by the state, was perpetually acting upon him : his day was passed in public exercises and meals, his nights in the public barrack to which he belonged. Besides the particular military drill, whereby the complicated movements required from a body of Lacedaemonian hoph'tes in the field, were made familiar to him from his youth, he also became subject to severe bodily discipline of other kinds, calculated to impart strength, activity, and endurance. To manifest a daring and pugnacious spirit, to sustain the greatest bodily torture un- moved, to endure hunger and thirst, heat, cold, and fatigue, to tread the worst ground barefoot, to wear the same garment winter and summer, to suppress external manifestations of feeling, and to exhibit in public, when action was not called for, a bearing shy, silent, and motionless as a statue, all these were the virtues of the accomplished Spartan youth. 2 Two squadrons 1 See the authors quoted in Athenaeus, iv. p. 141. 7 Xenoph. Eep. Lac. 2-3, 3-5, 4-6. The extreme pains taken to enforca KapTepia (fortitude and endurance) in the Spartan system is especiallj dwell upon by Aristotle (Politica, ii. 6, 5-16); compare Plato, De Legibus, i. p.
