Lycurgus of Sparta

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Lycurgus is the legendary lawgiver to whom the ancient Greeks credited the whole shape of the Spartan order — its mixed kingship and council, its common meals, its severe upbringing of the young, its turn away from wealth and toward arms. He is also the lawgiver whose existence the ancients themselves could not be sure of. Plutarch opens his life of him by conceding the difficulty at the door: of Lycurgus the lawgiver nothing can be said that has not been disputed, and historians agree least of all on when the man lived. His dates, his travels, the order of his acts, and the manner of his death are reported in versions that cannot all be true at once. The body of custom is firm; the man at its center keeps dissolving. Modern scholarship, following that ancient unease to its end, reads Lycurgus less as a person than as a name fixed, after the fact, to institutions whose real growth was slow, collective, and anonymous — a single author imagined for a constitution that in truth had none.

Lycurgus shows the ancients of Sparta their newborn king, an 18th-century oil painting in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Blois — Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier (attributed), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The disagreement over his date is the sharpest sign of the problem. Plutarch (Lycurgus 1) sets two ancient schools against each other. Aristotle placed Lycurgus in the time of Iphitus, sharing in the founding of the Olympic truce, and pointed to a bronze discus preserved at Olympia on which, he reported, the lawgiver’s name was still legible — a relic offered as proof. Against him, those who counted backward through the lists of Spartan kings, Eratosthenes and Apollodorus among them, set Lycurgus many years before the first Olympiad of 776 BCE. A gap of generations separated the estimates, and no later inquiry closed it. A man whose century cannot be fixed within a hundred years or more, and whose chief physical token is an inscribed discus shown to visitors, is already half a legend in the telling.

What the tradition transmits is consistent in outline if not in detail. Lycurgus, of the royal house, became guardian of his orphaned nephew, the infant king, and ruled in his name; then, to escape the suspicion that he coveted the throne, he withdrew from a Sparta sick with disorder and faction. He traveled — to Crete, whose austere and military laws he studied; to Ionia, where he found the opposite, a life of softness and display, and learned by contrast what to forbid; in some accounts onward to Egypt, and even, the later embellishers add, to the sages of further east. Wherever he went he gathered laws and customs, choosing what he would carry home. The constitution he brought back was not invented from nothing but assembled — a discipline of selection. This is the portrait of the lawgiver as collector and editor of the best, a type the Greeks found congenial: order is not conjured but discerned, gathered from the world and imposed on a willing city.

The constitution

The order credited to Lycurgus was, before all else, a balance of powers held in deliberate tension. Two hereditary kings led the city in war and presided over its sacrifices, their authority checked by each other and by a council of twenty-eight elders, the gerousia, men over sixty chosen for life. Above and beneath these stood the assembly of full citizens, which could approve or reject what the kings and elders set before it but could not freely debate or amend. Later, the ephors — five magistrates elected yearly — emerged as a further counterweight, though the tradition divided over whether Lycurgus himself made them. The genius the ancients saw in this arrangement was that no single element could grow tyrannical: monarchy, oligarchy, and a measure of popular voice were braced against one another so that the whole stood still. The mixed constitution, much admired by later political thought across ancient Greece and beyond, found in Sparta its founding example.

Around this frame Lycurgus was said to have built a total way of life. He redivided the land into equal lots, so that the conspicuous gap between rich and poor should close; he drove out gold and silver coin in favor of heavy, near-worthless iron, so that wealth could neither be hoarded nor easily moved, and with it drove out the trades and luxuries that money draws. Men ate together in common messes, the same plain fare for king and commoner, so that no one might dine richly in private and grow soft. The rearing of children was taken from the household and given to the city: the famed harsh upbringing that trained boys from seven in endurance, obedience, and arms, and that bred girls strong to bear strong sons. The end of the whole machine was singular — to make of every citizen a soldier and of the city a camp, and to bend the desire for wealth, comfort, and private gain into a desire for honor and the common good. Whether one man designed this or many generations grew it, the design hangs together, and that coherence is part of why a single architect was wanted.

“Lycurgus Demonstrates the Benefits of Education,” in which the lawgiver illustrates the power of training, c. 1660–62 — Caesar van Everdingen, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The oracle at Delphi

The decisive moment in the story is not political but religious. Before his laws could bind, they had to be ratified by a power above the city, and Lycurgus went to Delphi to seek it. The oracle of Apollo, Herodotus reports (Histories 1.65), greeted him as one dear to Zeus and to all who hold the halls of Olympus, and declared itself uncertain whether to address him as man or as god — inclining, it said, to call him god. The same Herodotus records the two accounts that circulated in his day of where the Spartan order came from: some held the Pythia herself dictated the present constitution to Lycurgus; the Spartans themselves said he had brought it from Crete while serving as guardian of his nephew Labotas. Herodotus sets the versions side by side and does not choose between them — the historian’s caution preserved at the source.

“Lycurgus Consulting the Pythia,” the lawgiver seeking the Delphic oracle’s sanction for his laws, c. 1835–45 — Eugène Delacroix, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Xenophon gives the religious sanction its sharpest constitutional form (Constitution of the Lacedaimonians 8). In his account of the Spartan order, Lycurgus, before publishing his laws, asked the god at Delphi whether it was better for Sparta to obey them; only when Apollo answered yes did he bring them forward, and he made it a fixed rule that to disobey laws given by the Pythian god was not merely unlawful but impious — a transgression against heaven, not the city. By this stroke the constitution was lifted out of the reach of ordinary politics. A law a man has made another man may argue with and amend; a law the god at Delphi has approved stands as a piece of prophecy, and the Spartans held theirs unchanged for centuries on exactly that ground. Here Lycurgus belongs to the wider Greek practice of seeking divination at the founding of any grave enterprise: a colony, a war, a temple, a code — none was begun without first asking the god.

The founding charter the Spartans preserved, the Great Rhetra, was itself framed as an oracular utterance — the word rhetra means a saying or pronouncement, and the document reads as a response delivered from Delphi. Plutarch (Lycurgus 6) preserves its terms: that a sanctuary be founded to Zeus Syllanius and Athena Syllania, the people divided into tribes and obai, a council of thirty established including the two kings, the assembly gathered at set seasons between the river-marks called Babyca and Cnacion, where measures should be introduced and set aside — and that the people should hold the final decision and the power. To this terse charter a later rider was added by the kings Polydorus and Theopompus: should the people choose crookedly, the elders and kings might refuse and dissolve the assembly — a check written back into a text that had granted the demos the last word, and itself, the tradition said, confirmed by a second oracle. The Rhetra is the oldest layer of the Spartan constitution to survive in words, and its form is significant: not a statute enacted by men but a sentence handed down through the god.

Topography of ancient Sparta and its environs, showing the theater, citadel, and river-marks of the city, 1783 — Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage / Geographicus, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Death and worship

The legend closes on a second sacred turn, and it is the strangest part of the story. Having brought his city to good order, Lycurgus told the Spartans that one matter of the greatest weight remained, on which he must again consult the god, and he bound them by oath — kings, elders, and people together — to change nothing in his laws until he returned. He went to Delphi a last time and asked whether his constitution was good and sufficient; the oracle answered that it was excellent, and that the city which kept the laws of Lycurgus would win the highest fame in the world. He sent that response home in writing — and then did not return. By the common account he starved himself to death abroad, so that his death itself might serve the city: dying without coming back, he left the oath in force forever, the Spartans bound in perpetuity by the very promise they had made for a season. The lawgiver’s last act was to make his absence permanent, that his work might be.

Sparta answered as it answered nothing else. The city built Lycurgus a temple and offered him sacrifice every year as to a god (Plutarch, Lycurgus 31), and Aristotle, Plutarch notes, thought even these honors fell short of his desert. Herodotus had reported the question debated in his own day — whether Lycurgus had been a god from the first or only a man raised to that rank — but the city had already decided the matter in practice by worshipping him. The apotheosis of the lawgiver is the natural close of a life whose authority was claimed to come from above: the man who carried the god’s law down to the city is taken up, at the end, into the company of the gods who gave it.

The lawgiver as a type

Lycurgus belongs to a recognizable figure in the ancient imagination — the lawgiver whose code is not merely wise but revealed, its authority anchored in a god and its author lifted, at the last, beyond the human. The comparison was drawn by ancient writers themselves and recurs in later reflection on the springs of law. Minos of Crete was said to receive his laws from Zeus in the cave on Ida, ascending every ninth year to take them fresh from the god — the same Cretan tradition that set his brother Rhadamanthus among the just as a judge of the dead. Numa, second king of Rome, took his sacred ordinances from a divine counselor met at a spring, after the manner of the nymph Egeria and the goddess who was said to favor Servius Tullius; and the Greeks who looked abroad set Moses, who brought down the law from the mountain, in the same company. In every case the pattern is one: the deepest rules of a community are felt to issue from somewhere higher than the men who keep them, and the lawgiver is the channel rather than the source. Later Platonist writers, Iamblichus among them, would read the great lawgivers as souls sent down to order the lives of cities — the philosopher’s version of a claim the cults had made all along.

Statue of Lycurgus as lawgiver at the Law Courts of Brussels, where he stands among the great figures of law — photograph by Matt Popovich, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

It is best read, then, not as a record of events but as a claim a tradition makes about its own foundations: that what holds a people together cannot rest on the will of any one of them, and so must be referred to the god. The historicity of Lycurgus is the register in which this claim becomes a problem of evidence — and at this point the ancient doubt returns with full force. The earliest Spartan voice on the constitution, the seventh-century poet Tyrtaeus, sings in his Eunomia of an order brought from Delphi by the kings, sanctioned by Apollo — and does not name Lycurgus at all. The lawgiver, on this showing, arrives in the tradition later than the laws he is said to have made, a name supplied afterward for an authorship the early poets felt no need to assign. That the man may be a back-formation from the system does not lessen the system; it only sharpens the question of where such a system’s binding force is imagined to live.

Plato, idealizing Sparta in his political works, took the Lycurgan order half as history and half as a model of the well-ordered soul, reading the disciplined city outward as a picture of the disciplined self. That double vision — Sparta as fact and Sparta as emblem — followed the figure of the lawgiver down the centuries, into Roman admiration, into the classical learning of the Renaissance, into the political dreams of revolutions that invoked Spartan virtue against the corruptions of wealth. What survives is less a biography than a question the Greeks kept asking through him: where the binding force of a law is finally supposed to come from.

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