Lycurgus
Ancient

In Spartan society, Lycurgus and his laws were received as the creator of the Spartan way of life. Xenophon's pro-Spartan Spartan Constitution "unreservedly regard as the Spartan legislator par excellence, who arranged the Spartan way of life once and for all". For these achievements, which they viewed as having facilitated the emergence of Sparta as the most powerful state in Greece, Lycurgus was honoured with a hero cult, which may have developed slowly into the Roman imperial period into full godhood. His temple and sanctuary, according to Pausanias, included a grave for his son with the name Eukosmos (referring to good order) with the graves of the Spartan dual monarchy's founders' wives nearby.

The idealisation of Sparta, called the "Spartan mirage", also drove praise of Lycurgus in other Greek states. The tradition of a timeless legislator with his divinely-inspired (or at least sanctioned) laws gave Sparta's constitution greater legitimacy while also making it inflexible. Even attempts to reform Spartan life during the Hellenistic period, by Spartan monarchs Agis IV and Cleomenes III, were viewed in their time as returning to Lycurgan tradition rather than an innovation. The stories of Lycurgus were constantly reinvented for each Spartan generation; the decline of Sparta through to Hellenistic times saw Lycurgus' praise extended to praise him for having creating an ideal Sparta, free from the moral and political decay of the real one.

Admiration of the customs of Sparta, supposed to be established by Lycurgus, survived – with a break during the second century when Sparta was part of the Achaean League – continuously into the Sparta of the Roman Empire. Aristotle, for example, praised the Lycurgan agoge as a form of universal education especially in the way it supported the stability of the Spartan state. Into the Roman period, Sparta received privileged treatment from the Romans as in part a means to preserve Greek traditions to display to tourists: while this touristic Sparta at times veered toward the extreme, it also cultivated its Lycurgan inheritance by means of architecture, theatre, and retention of distinctive political institutions.

The Plutarchian comparison between the paired lives of Lycurgus and Numa (the early Roman lawgiver and king), for example, judged Lycurgus favourably compared to the Roman by emphasising Lycurgan education and pronatalism. Another argument for Lycurgan superiority was also that Sparta declined as it supposedly deviated from Lycurgus' settlements while Rome flourished as it similarly deviated from Numa's ideals. In the end, for Plutarch, Lycurgus was seen as a more important political theorist than Plato and as one of the most famous, moral, and effective legislators of the Greek tradition.
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