and front of their offending." As to Plutarch's story of the Spartans making the Helots drunk, in order to teach their children, by the disgusting association, to be temperate,—its foundation, in fact, is indicated by Müller, who, in speaking of the dances, mentions the dances of the Helots, indigenous with themselves; some of which represented riotous scenes, and in which drunken persons were probably represented. The Dorians were not responsible for these dances, which very probably it would have been a cruel oppression to suppress. Undoubtedly there were evils and injustices in separable from slavery, from which the Dorians did not deliver the Helots; but in Sparta there was a legal way for them to gain liberty and citizenship. Callicratidas, Lysander, and Gylippus were of the race of the Helots.
In speaking of the Dorian education, we must not omit to say, that the Pythagorean philosophy was its highest instrument. Pythagoras was the philosophic interpreter of Apollo; and the triumph and proof of the reality of the Dorian intellectual culture were given in the fact, that, in the Pythagorean league, "the philosophy of order, of unison, of κόσμος,—expressing, and consequently enlisting on its side, the combined endeavors of the better part of the people,—obtained the management of public affairs, and held possession of it for a considerable time; so that, the nature and destination of the political elements in existence being understood, and each having assigned to it its proper place, those who were qualified, both by their rank and talents, were placed at the head of the state; a strict personal education having, in the first place, been made one of their chief obligations, in order by this means to pave the way for the education of the other members of the community."
Other effects of this intellectual culture were to be seen in other parts of Greece, where the germs of comedy and tragedy, sculpture and architecture, fructified. The Dorian was the father of Greek literature, in its multifarious forms; but the mothers were Achæan, Ionian, Pelasgic. Does not the Dorian genius and character pervade the page of Thucydides? and, but for Spartan culture, would Pericles have given name to his era?
