Athens and of its rival city, has been fully verified. No one who looks upon these fragments would suppose, that the city to which they belong had ever held the sway of Greece.

There is one important characteristic of her internal policy, in which Sparta presents a remarkable contrast to that of the capital of Attica, and which is forcibly suggested by the aspect of the physical objects about us, compared with those which we surveyed at Athens. Sparta seems by nature to be excluded from all communication from without. She was placed at the distance of many miles from the sea. She was hemmed in on all sides by lofty mountains. She lay secure and unmolested in her own nestlike valley. She possessed a plain sufficient to supply her frugal wants. She owned the rich neighbouring territory of Messenia on the west, productive of corn and abundant in cattle. She was therefore all-sufficient to herself. At Athens the reverse of all this was the case. Everything there was free and open; the sea was near, and the earth barren. It was on her efficiency abroad, not upon her self-sufficiency at home, that Athens was led by nature to depend. Hence the two different systems of Education adopted by these States,-systems which seem to have been dictated by the physical forms of the two countries

336

EDUCATION AT SPARTA AND ATHENS COMPARED.

themselves. At Sparta, the distance of her position from the coast, the lofty hills with which her valley was pent, her situation at the extremity of Greece, so that no stranger would pass through her territory in his way to any other land, -all these her natural properties spoke of restraint and control, of abstinence and self-denial; they prepared the way for the establishment and reception of a system founded upon the single principle of unhesitating and implicit obedience to the Law. In the objects about us at Lacedæmon we appear to recognise the elements that led to the creation of the spirit which is nowhere more truly or more emphatically described than in the epitaph engraved upon the tomb of the Spartan heroes who fell at Thermopylæ,"O stranger, go and tell the Lacedæmonians that we lie here in obedience to their commands." Not for personal glory, not even for public aggrandizement,

DICTATED BY THE NATURAL FEATURES OF EACH.

337

not for the sake of national revenge, much less from private animosity, but because he was commanded to do so by the State, did the Spartan march to the field.

At Athens, on the contrary, placed where she was, endowed with the advantages she possessed, and subject to difficulties and privations greater than those advantages, the maintenance of such a system of education would have been a physical impossibility. Morally and politically, she dwelt at the antipodes of Sparta. Everything about her struggled against restraint; everything was eager for the freest development of which it was capable; all things in nature —her air, her soil, her wide plain, her earth barren in corn and in pasture, but fertile in marble and in silver, the sea flowing before her, her excellent

ports, formed by the hand of Nature,-the islands not far beyond them, tempting her, as it were, by degrees across the deep to the Asiatic coast and to all the regions of the East, her facilities for communicating with strangers of all countries both at home and abroad, these, and other circumstances of a similar kind, led to the adoption of a system of education of which the greatest possible development and exercise of individual energy was the object and the result.

338

NAME AND SITE OF MYCENE.

By a road which we have before traced we proceed from Sparta, the city of Menelaus, to

that of his brother, Mycena. The road from

Nauplia thither lies through the Argolic plain, which is confined by a curved barrier of hills on all sides but the south, where it is bounded by the sea. Mycena lies in the northern apse of this curve of hills, at a distance of nine miles from the head of the gulf. Hence no more appropriate designation could be devised than that which describes Argos, by which we mean the province and not the city, as hollow, and Mycenae as lying in the corner or