The Nexus Archive
Moral Biography · Biography
Life of Lycurgus
by Plutarch · The Judge of Character · Greco-Roman World, c. 46-after 119
Plutarch's moral-political biography of the legendary Spartan lawgiver, civic discipline, and the city shaped by law.
- Intermediate
- c. 100 CE
- ~1 hr read
- 4 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the Return to Sparta and the Great Rhetra guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
A City Shaped by Law
Plutarch begins by admitting that almost everything about Lycurgus is disputed: his dates, travels, laws, even the circumstances of his death. The biographer must choose among conflicting traditions about the man credited with shaping Sparta. In the story he follows, Lycurgus first protects his infant nephew's claim to the throne, then leaves the city to escape suspicion that he wants the crown for himself. His eventual return raises a larger question: how can a divided community acquire habits strong enough to outlast its ruler?
The experiment reaches far beyond a constitution. Property, money, meals, marriage, childhood, speech, music, war, burial, and leisure all become instruments of civic discipline. Sparta's order can look austere, coherent, and astonishingly durable because private appetite is made answerable to a public ideal.
Plutarch admires the courage and restraint attributed to this order, but his account also reveals its coercion and exclusions. The Spartan citizens whose leisure makes public service possible depend on the labour of the enslaved Helots. Traditions about Lycurgus, descriptions of Spartan customs and examples from later generations stand beside one another throughout the Life. They form a portrait of civic character, with the distance between remembered founder and historical practice still visible.
The opening pages
Uncertain Memory and Early Rule
Concerning Lycurgus the lawgiver, in general, nothing can be said which is not disputed, since indeed there are different accounts of his birth, his travels, his death, and above all, of his work as lawmaker and statesman; and there is least agreement among historians as to the times in which the man lived. Some say that he flourished at the same time with Iphitus, and in concert with him established the Olympic truce. Among these is Aristotle the philosopher, and he alleges as proof the discus at Olympia on which an inscription preserves the name of Lycurgus. But those who compute the time by the successions of kings at Sparta, like Eratosthenes and Apollodorus, prove that Lycurgus was many years earlier than the first Olympiad. And Timaeus conjectures that there were two Lycurgus at Sparta, at different times, and that to one of them the achievements of both were ascribed, owing to his greater fame; he thinks also that the elder of the two lived not far from the times of Homer, and some assert that he actually met Homer face to face. Xenophon, also, makes an impression of simplicity in the passage where he says that Lycurgus lived in the time of the Heracleidae. For in lineage, of course, the latest of the Spartan kings were also Heracleidae; but Xenophon apparently wishes to use the name Heracleidae of the first and more immediate descendants of Heracles, so famous in story.
However, although the history of these times is such a maze, I shall try, in presenting my narrative, to follow those authors who are least contradicted, or who have the most notable witnesses for what they have written about the man. For instance, Simonides the poet says that Lycurgus was not the son of Eunomus, but that both Lycurgus and Eunomus were sons of Prytanis; whereas most writers give a different genealogy, as follows: Aristodemus begat Procles, Procles begat Soüs, Soüs begat Eurypon, and he begat Prytanis, from whom sprang Eunomus, and from Eunomus Polydectes by a first wife, and Lycurgus, who was a younger son by a second wife, Dionassa, as Dieutychidas has written, making Lycurgus sixth from Procles, and eleventh from Heracles.
Of these ancestors of Lycurgus, Soüs was most famous, under whom the Spartans made the Helots their slaves, and acquired by conquest from the Arcadians a large additional tract of land. It is also related of this Soüs that when he was besieged by the Cleitorians in a rough and waterless place, he agreed to surrender to them the land which he had conquered if he himself and all his men with him should drink from the adjacent spring. After the oaths to this agreement were taken, he assembled his men and offered his kingdom to the one who should not drink; no one of them, however, could forbear, but all of them drank, whereupon Soüs himself went down last of all to the water, sprinkled his face merely, while the enemy were still at hand to see, and then marched away and retained his territory, on the plea that all had not drunk.
Chapter guides · 4
Return to Sparta and the Great Rhetra
Power Divided in Sparta
Lycurgus returns to reorganize the city, while Plutarch distinguishes his settlement from later constitutional changes.
A guardian becomes a reformer
Lycurgus has protected his infant nephew Charilaüs and travelled abroad to escape suspicion of seeking the throne. Called home, he seeks Delphic approval and wins supporters for a thorough change of government. Their armed appearance frightens Charilaüs into taking refuge, but the king joins them after receiving assurances of safety.
Kings, elders and the people
The Council of Elders stands between the kings and the people, checking both royal tyranny and popular excess in Plutarch's account. The rhetra gives the people power to accept or reject proposals introduced by the kings and elders. Later kings add a power to dissolve an assembly when, in their view, the people have distorted a motion.
A later restraint
Plutarch places the first ephors about 130 years after Lycurgus, under Theopompus. The king presents his surrender of some royal power as a way to make it last. These later additions belong to the constitution's history; they are not all acts of the original lawgiver.
Property, Money, and the Common Table
Wealth Loses Its Uses
Land, money and common meals become means of reducing inequality among Spartan citizens.
Equality and its boundaries
Plutarch attributes a redistribution of land to Lycurgus, while recording rival accounts of the number of Spartan allotments and the contribution of the later king Polydorus. Iron currency then makes wealth cumbersome to store and useless for foreign luxuries. The claimed equality concerns the community he is organizing, not everyone living under Spartan rule.
The common table
Shared meals prevent the rich from displaying their wealth through private banquets. Admission still depends on the approval of existing mess-mates: one negative bread-ballot excludes a candidate. Boys attend these gatherings to hear political conversation and learn the limits of joking. Diet and companionship serve as forms of public education.
The attack on Lycurgus
The common meals provoke wealthy opponents, and Alcander injures Lycurgus's eye during the violence. Instead of retaliating, Lycurgus makes the young man attend him; shared daily life changes Alcander into a devoted follower. Plutarch also preserves the alternative report that the injured eye healed. The story gives the lawgiver's own conduct a role in the education he demands of the city.
Education, Discipline, and Spartan Speech
The City Takes Charge of Education
Plutarch follows civic discipline from marriage and childhood into the training of bodies, speech and judgment.
Cruelty, Final Oath, and Legacy
The Founder and the Violence of Sparta
Plutarch defends Lycurgus against the cruelty he describes, then makes the lawgiver's death the guarantee of his laws.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read Life of Lycurgus?
- About 1 hr in total.
- How difficult is Life of Lycurgus?
- Intermediate. A mid-length biography; about an hour of reading.
- Which translation is this?
- The Bernadotte Perrin translation from the Ancient Greek. The text follows Plutarch's Lives, Volume I, Loeb Classical Library (1914).
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 4 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Plutarch
Plutarch was a Greek biographer, essayist, and moral philosopher whose Parallel Lives shaped how later generations understood Greek and Roman greatness. His biographies compare character, ambition, virtue, vice, and the moral meaning of public action.
“What does power reveal about a person's character?”
Plutarch is one of the great source engines for Nexus. He gives conquerors, statesmen, and republics a moral frame.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Life of Lycurgus is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.