Lycurgus & Numa

Why we love it

• •Lycurgus inherited the crown of Sparta, and when his brother’s son was born, he set the baby in the king’s own place and told the Spartans, here is your king. He had ruled eight months.
• •An enemy once sent Sparta a long, frightening threat that ended: "If we capture your city, we will burn it to the ground." Sparta wrote back a single word: "If."
• •Under Numa, the doors of Rome’s temple of war stayed shut for forty-three years, so long that the hinges went stiff and grass grew up against the sills.
• •The sacred fire Numa gave Rome, tended by priestesses whose one duty was never to let it die, was still burning in the heart of the city more than a thousand years later.

Why it matters

Lycurgus and Numa belong in a child’s education because every later argument about how a society should be built runs back through them. Lycurgus shaped Sparta into a city where every citizen lived alike, and Sparta held to his laws for about five hundred years. Numa, remembered as the founder of ancient Rome’s religion and its calendar, ruled for forty-three years without a single war, by persuasion alone. Their fingerprints are still on ordinary life: the word laconic still carries Sparta’s region, Laconia, inside it, and January, the month Numa set at the head of the year so that peace would stand before war, is still where the world’s year begins. Plutarch paired the two lives because their answers to the same problem were exact opposites: equality against freedom, discipline against gentleness. His own comparison divides the honors between the two men. A child who meets that argument early is handed a tool for thinking, not a moral.