30.5
People did not send requests to them for ships, or money, or hoplites, but for a single Spartan commander; and when they got him, they treated him with honour and reverence, as the Sicilians treated Gylippus; the Chalcidians, Brasidas; and all the Greeks resident in Asia, Lysander, Callicratidas, and Agesilaüs. These men, wherever they came, were styled regulators and chasteners of peoples and magistrates, and the city of Sparta from which they came was regarded as a teacher of well-ordered private life and settled civil polity.
30.6
To this position of Sparta Stratonicus would seem to have mockingly alluded when, in jest, he proposed a law that the Athenians should conduct mysteries and processions, and that the Eleians should preside at games, since herein lay their special excellence, but that the Lacedaemonians should be cudgelled if the others did amiss.Cf. chapter xviii. 4. This was a joke; but Antisthenes the Socratic, when he saw the Thebans in high feather after the battle of Leuctra,In 371 B.C., when the Thebans under Epaminondas broke the supremacy of Sparta. said in all seriousness that they were just like little boys strutting about because they had thrashed their tutor.
31.1
It was not, however, the chief design of Lycurgus then to leave his city in command over a great many others, but he thought that the happiness of an entire city, like that of a single individual, depended on the prevalence of virtue and concord within its own borders. The aim, therefore, of all his arrangements and adjustments was to make his people free-minded, self-sufficing, and moderate in all their ways, and to keep them so as long as possible.
