Athenians should conduct religious processions and the mysteries, the Eleans should preside at the Olympic games, and, if either did amiss, the Lacedæmonians be beaten. Antisthenes, too, one of the scholars of Socrates, said, in earnest, of the Thebans, when they were elated by their victory at Leuctra, that they looked like schoolboys who had beaten their master. However, it was not the design of Lycurgus that his city should govern a great many others; he thought rather that the happiness of a state, as of a private man, consisted chiefly in the exercise of virtue, and in the concord of the inhabitants; his aim therefore, in all his arrangements, was to make and keep them free-minded, self-dependent, and temperate. And therefore all those who have written well on politics, as Plato, Diogenes, and Zeno, have taken Lycurgus for their model, leaving behind them, however, mere projects and words; whereas Lycurgus was the author, not in writing but in reality, of a government which none else could so much as copy; and while men in general have treated the individual philosophic character as unattainable, he, by the example of a complete philosophic state, raised himself high above all other lawgivers of Greece. And so Aristotle says they did him less honor at Lacedæmon after his death than he deserved, although he has a temple there, and they offer sacrifices yearly to him as to a god. It is reported that when his bones were brought home to Sparta his tomb was struck with lightning; an accident which befell no eminent person but himself, and Euripides, who was buried at Arethusa in Macedonia; and it may serve that poet's admirers as a testimony in his favor, that he had in this the same fate with that holy man and favorite of the gods. Some say Lycurgus died in Cirrha; Apollothemis says, after he had come to Elis; Timæus and Aristoxenus,, that he ended his life in Crete; Aristoxenus adds that his tomb is shown by the Cretans in the district of Pergamus, near the strangers' road. He left an only son, Antiorus, on whose death without issue, his family became extinct. But his relations and friends kept up an annual commemoration of him down to a long time after; and the days of the meeting were called Lycurgides. Aristocrates, the son of Hipparchus, says that he died in Crete, and that his Cretan friends, in accordance with his own request, when they had burned his body, scattered the ashes into the sea; for fear lest, if his relics should be transported to Lacedæmon, the people might pretend to be released from their oaths, and make innovations in the government. Thus much may suffice for the life and actions of Lycurgus. TRANSLATION OF A. H. CLOUGH. EARLY GREEK THINKERS THE EARLY GREEK thinkers are important not only because many details of their thought have force to-day, but because they form the beginning of a movement, that, continuing almost uninterruptedly since their own time, constitutes one of the mightiest factors of modern civilization. As with the Brahmans in their Upanishads, so with the Greeks, the continual changes that they saw going on in Nature led them to seek for that something which, amid all these changing conditions, remains constant. It was easy to see that some of these alterations, such, for example, as that of snow or ice to water, water to steam, wood to fire, or vegetation to earth, were not permanent substitutions. of new substances: hence the Greeks sought to find the underlying reality back of all such manifestations of nature. Thales, the Milesian, thought the characteristic of this worldsubstance to be life, and the substance itself water; Anaximander, that the universe has no bounds in space and that all things are supplied from this infinite store; Anaximenes, also, that the world-substance is infinite, but that it is the air; Xenophanes made its peculiarity divinity and believed the universe as a whole to be an immovable god; Herakleitos considered that the reality must have the quality of change with permanence, that change is a succession of opposites such as heat and cold in an endless chain, and that the reality itself is fire; Parmenides insisted that empty space is unthinkable and that what is is uncreated, indistructable, everywhere present, and immovable. Then followed a period during which men tried to harmonize or combine these various guesses. Empedocles thought there are four |