manvantara, a new uncouth formless form, to be played on, shaped
and infused by the life-currents again. In Greece an old
manvantara had evolved patricianism and culture; which the
pralaya following swept all away, except some relics perhaps in
Thebes the isolated and conservative, certainly in Sparta.
Lycurgus was wise in his generation when he sought by a rigid
system to impose the plebeian virtues on Spartan patricianism.

Wise in his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle.
Spartan greatness, too, was ineffectual: there is that about
pouring new wine into old bottles. Sparta was old and conservative;
covered her patrician virtues with a rude uncultural exterior;
was inept politically--as old aristocracies so commonly are;
she shunned that love of the beautiful and the things of
the mind which is the grace, as Bushido--to use the best
name there is for it--is the virtue, of the patrician. You
may say she was selfish and short-sighted; true; and yet she
began the Peloponnesian War not without an eye to freeing the
cities and islands from the soulless tyranny an Athenian
democracy had imposed on them: when there is a war, some men
will always be found, who go in with unselfish high motives.--
Being the patrician state, and the admired of all, it was she
naturally who assumed the hegemony when the Persian came. But
she had foregone the graces of her position, and her wits,
through lack of culture, were something dull. She lost that
leadership presently to a young democratic Athens endowed
with mental acumen and potential genius; who, too, gained
immeasurably from Sparta, because she knew how to turn everything
to the quickening of her wits--this having at her doors so
contrasting a neighbor, for example.--Young? Well, yes; I