Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 68 — Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans

Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 68 — Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans, Plutarch; served verbatim

Of Charillus. Charillus being asked why Lycurgus made so few laws; Because, he replied, those whose words are few need but few laws. Another enquiring why their virgins appear in public unveiled, and their wives veiled; Because, said he, virgins ought to find husbands, married women keep those they have. To a slave saucily opposing him he said, I would kill thee if I were not angry. And being asked what polity he thought best; That, said he, in which most of the citizens without any disturbance contend about virtue. And to a friend enquiring why amongst them all the images of the Gods were armed he replied, That those reproaches we cast upon men for their cowardice may not reflect upon the Gods, and that our youth may not supplicate the Deities unarmed.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Charillus — a candidate entry Lycurgus — a life

Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans, Plutarch — translated by unknown (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)