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and several other cities. Dr. Adam Smith, in his "Wealth of Nations," in treating this subject of the Greek colonization, has justly remarked that with regard to these new settlements, the mother city, though she considered the colony as a child at all times entitled to great favor and assistance, and owing in return much gratitude and respect, yet viewed it as an emancipated child, over whom she pretended to claim no direct authority or jurisdiction. The colony settled its own form of government, enacted its own laws, and made peace or war with its neighbors as an independent state, which had no occasion to wait for the consent or sanction of the mother city.

Those colonies which Greece sent abroad in her more advanced periods, from an excessive increase of population, were observed to make a most rapid progress, and soon become great and flourishing states. Dr. Smith has accounted for this fact with his usual sagacity; and I make no scruple to adopt his observations.

"The colony of a civilized nation which takes possession either of a waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society. The colonists carry out with them a knowledge of agriculture and of other useful arts, superior to what can grow up of its own accord in the course of many centuries among savage and barbarous nations. They carry out with them, too, the habit of subordination, some notion of regular government which takes place in their own country, of the system of laws which support it, and of a regular administration of justice; and they naturally establish something of the same kind in the new settlement. But among savage and barbarous nations, the natural progress of law and government is still slower than the natural progress of arts, after law and government have been so far established as is necessary for their protection.

"The progress of many of the ancient Greek colonies towards refinement, wealth, and greatness, seems accordingly to have been extremely rapid. In the course of a century or two, several of them appear to have rivalled, and even to have surpassed, their parent states. Thus Syracuse and Agrigentum in Sicily, Tarentum and Locri in Italy, Ephesus and Miletus in Asia Minor, appear to have been at least equal to any of the cities of ancient Greece. Though posterior in their establishment, yet all the arts of refinement, philosophy, poetry, and elegance, seem to have been cultivated as early, and to have been improved as highly, in them as in any part of the mother country. The schools of the two oldest. Greek philosophers, those of Thales and Pythagoras, were established, it is remarkable, not in ancient Greece, but in Miletus and Crotona, the former an Asiatic, the latter an Italian colony. All those colonies had established themselves in countries inhabited by savage and barbarous nations, who easily gave place to the new settlers. Thus they had as much land as they chose, a benign

climate, and a fertile soil; for these circumstances must have dedicated the choice of their place of establishment. They were independent of their mother country, and at liberty to conduct themselves in any way they should judge most suitable to their interest." It was no wonder they should soon become great and powerful states.

Meantime, the parent country owed, perhaps, some of its greatest political revolutions to its first colonies. The Greeks who remained at home, naturally envious of the happiness and prosperity which they saw their countrymen enjoy in their new establishments, began to aspire at the same freedom of constitution. An ardent passion for liberty soon became the ruling passion of the Greeks. Thebes and Athens, we have already remarked, were the first states which threw off the regal government, and substituted in its place the republican. Other states soon followed their example, and either entirely expelled their tyrannical governors, or so circumscribed their authority as to reduce them to the function of the principal magistrate of a democracy.*

A new road was now open to ambition; for it is the quality of the republican form of government to generate and keep alive that passion in all the members of the state: and hence, of all forms of government, it is necessarily the most turbulent. But these republics, thus newly formed, could not subsist by the ancient and very imperfect systems of laws by which they had been formerly governed; for these laws, framed in the spirit of despotism, and owing their obligation solely to the strong hand which carried them into execution, fell of necessity along with the power which framed and enforced them. The infant republics of Greece demanded, therefore, new laws; and it was necessary that some enlightened citizen should arise, who had discernment to perceive what system of laws was best adapted to the genius and character of his native state, who had abilities to compile and digest such a system, and sufficient weight and influence with his countrymen to recommend and carry it into execution. Such men were the Spartan Lycurgus and the Athenian Solon.

*The word Tugarros, in a strict sense, has no reference to the abuse of power, as in the modern acceptation of the word. It means, properly, the person invested with the chief authority under any form of government, and was applied originally to the best as well as to the worst of sovereigns.

CHAPTER IX.

THE REPUBLIC OF LACEDÆMÓN Origin Divided Sovereignty - Brown s Thecry of the Spartan Constitution examined-Reform of Lycurgus-Senate -Limitation of the Kingly Power-Regulation of Manners-Equal Partition of Land among all the Citizens-Iron Money-Arts prohibited and confined to Slaves-Public Tables-Education-Defects of the System of Lycurgus -Its effects on Manners-Theft authorized-Cruelty-Idleness-Creation of the Ephori.

THE territory of Lacedæmon, or Laconia, of which Sparta, situated on the Eurotas, was the chief city, forms the south-east corner of Peloponnesus; having Argos and Arcadia on the north, Messene on the west, the Mare internum, or Mediterranean, on the south, and the bay of Argos on the Ægean Sea to the east. The whole territory, bounded by a natural barrier of mountains, did not exceed fifty miles in its largest diameter, but was extremely populous, containing many considerable towns and excellent sea-ports. Sparta is said to have been built by a prince of the name of Lacedæmon, who reigned there in the time of Crotonus, king of Argos, and Amphitryon of Athens, 303 years before the destruction of Troy, and 711 before the first Olympiad. At the time of the siege of Troy, Menelaus was the sovereign of Lacedæmon, whose wife Helen, carried off by Paris, the son of Priam, was the cause of the war.

Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, and nephew of Menelaus, succeeded to the sovereignty of Lacedæmon in right of his mother Clytemnestra, the daughter of Tyndarus. The united kingdoms of Argos, Mycenæ, and Lacedæmon were possessed by his son Tesamenes, who, being expelled and dethroned, as we have seen, by the Heraclidæ, they made a partition of his states, assigning Laconia to Eurysthenes and Procles, two sons of Aristodemus. The brothers did not divide the kingdom, but governed jointly with equal power, as the Roman consuls; and such continued to pe the form of the Spartan sovereignty during a succession of thirty princes of the line of Eurysthenes, and twenty-seven of the race of Procles. The celebrated Lycurgus was the son of Polydectes, the sixth prince in a direct descent from Procles. Of the great political revolution, operated by this eminent legislator, we shall immediately proceed to give some account, after a previous examination of a new theory of the Spartan government, which, though extremely ingenious, rests on no basis of historical evidence.

It is in general a very just opinion that political establishments and forms of government have owed their origin not so much to the genius and efforts of any individual lawgiver or politician, as to a natural progress in the condition of men, and the state of society in which they arose: but this observation, in general true, is not universally so. It is as fallacious a position to assert that no political establishment has been the result of the genius of a single man, as to affirm that all have had that origin. It is too much the prevailing passion with speculative politicians to reduce every thing to general principles. Man, say they, is every where the same animal; and will, placed in similar situations, always exhibit a similar appearance. His manners, his habits, his improvements, the government under which he lives, the municipal laws by which he is regulated, arise naturally from that situation in which we find him, and all is the result of a few general laws of nature which operate equally upon the whole of the human kind. I very much fear that this fondness for generalizing has been prejudicial both to sound philosophy and to historic truth, by making fact bend to system. I am afraid that those who have flattered themselves with possessing that penetration of intellect which can develop the simple but hidden laws which regulate human nature, have forgotten that it is the knowledge of facts alone that must lead to the discovery of those laws; and that to know for certain whether we possess those necessary facts, we must have attained a perfect acquaintance with the history of the whole species. The philosopher, who antecedently to this extensive knowledge should, from a partial view of a single nation or race of men, or even from the best details which history can furnish, think himself qualified to lay down the laws of the species, may have the ability to make a very beautiful hypothesis, which, after all, may be as distant from the truth as an Utopian romance.

These reflections have occurred on considering a theory with regard to the constitution of Sparta, which was first started by an ingenious writer, Dr. Brown, in his Essay on Civil Liberty; and as it pleases the imagination by its ingenuity, it has obtained of late a pretty general currency. It has been adopted by Mr. Logan in a small tract entitled "The Philosophy of History," and has thence been ingrafted into a larger work, probably written by the same author, though under a different name. *

The theory to which I allude, proceeding upon this principle, that all political establishments result naturally from the state of society in which they arise, gives the following ingenious account of the origin of the Spartan government, and solution of all those singular phenomena which it exhibited.

The army of the Heraclide, when they came to recover the

*Rutherford's View of Universal History.

dommion of their ancestors, was composed of Dorians from Thessaly, the most barbarous of all the Greek tribes. The Achæans, the ancient inhabitants of Laconia, were compelled to seek new habitations, while the barbarians of Thessaly took possession of their country. Of all the nations which are the subject of history, this people, it is said, bore the nearest resemblance to the rude Americans. An American tribe, where a chief presides, where the council of the aged deliberate, and the assembly of the people give their voice, is on the eve of such a political establishment as the Spartan constitution. The Dorians, or Thessalians, settled in Lacedæmon, manifested the same nianners with all other nations in a barbarous state. Lycurgus did no more than arrest them in that state by forming their usages into laws. He checked them at once in the first stage of improvement; he put forth a bold hand to that spring which is in society, and stopped its motion.

It remains now to inquire whether this ingenious theory is consistent with historic truth. It may be remarked, in the first place, that the Dorians, thus represented as one of the most barbarous of the Greek nations, were in no period of history described as possessing that character. From the nature of their country, they were in ancient times a pastoral people, whose chief occupation was the care of their flocks and herds; and hence the Doric character in poetry and music is synonymous with the pastoral. But the Dorians inhabiting the centre of Greece adjoining to Attica, and in the immediate vicinity of Delphos, were probably among the most early refined of the Grecian tribes. They were among the first who, from an excessive population, sent forth distant colonies; and, if we are to judge of the mother state from her children, we should estimate their civilization at that period to be remarkable; since their colonies Syracuse and Agrigentum, Tarentum and Locri, were within a short period of their foundation among the most polished and luxurious of the states of antiquity.

But in reality we have no sufficient authority for this alleged fact, that the Dorians, or any other people, expelled the ancient inhabitants of Laconia, and took possession of their country. That the Heraclidæ, after a tedious war, at length recovered the dominions of their ancestors, is a fact upon which all antiquity is agreed; but that they used the absurd and unnatural policy of extirpating their own natural subjects, and planting a race of strangers in their stead, is an assertion which is not easily to be credited. A single oration of Isocrates is quoted as countenancing this alleged fact. Addressing the Lacedæmonians, he says, "Ye were originally Dorians;" and in another passage he says that the Dorians agreed to follow the Heraclidæ on condition of getting a share of the conquered lands. On this slender authority rests the supposed fact, that the Dorians got the whole of this territory by the extirpation of its former inhabitants. An incidental passage in

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