Thus far, then, we can perceive no vestiges of a disregard to right and
wrong, which is the fault some people find with the laws of Lycurgus,
allowing them well enough calculated to produce valour, but not to
promote justice. Perhaps it was the Cryptia, as they called it, or
ambuscade, if that was really one of this lawgiver's institutions, as
Aristotle says it was, which gave Plato so bad an impression both of
Lycurgus and his laws. The governors of the youth ordered the shrewdest
of them from time to time to disperse themselves in the country,
provided only with daggers and some necessary provisions. In the daytime
they hid themselves, and rested in the most private places they could
find, but at night they sallied out into the roads, and killed all the
Helotes they could meet with. Nay, sometimes by day, they fell upon them
in the fields, and murdered the ablest and strongest of them. Thucydides
relates in his history of the Peloponnesian war, that the Spartans
selected such of them as were distinguished for their courage, to the
number of two thousand or more, declared them free, crowned them with
garlands, and conducted them to the temples of the gods; but soon after
they all disappeared; and no one could, either then or since, give
account in what manner they were destroyed. Aristotle particularly says,
that the Ephori, as soon as they were invested in their office, declared
war against the Helotes, that they might be massacred under pretence of
law. In other respects they treated them with great inhumanity:
sometimes they made them drink till they were intoxicated, and in that
condition led them into the public halls, to show the young men what
drunkenness was. They ordered them too to sing mean songs, and to dance
ridiculous dances, but not to meddle with any that were genteel and
graceful. Thus they tell us, that when the Thebans afterwards invaded
Laconia, and took a great number of the Helotes prisoners, they ordered
them to sing the odes of Terpander, Aleman, or Spendon the Lacedæmonian,
but they excused themselves, alleging that it was forbidden by their