Plutarch: Lycurgus

Never read Plutarch until just recently. If you're curious he wrote some pretty nice Biographies of people. I also hadn't heard of Lycurgus until just recently. So perhaps my education failed and I'm not very cultured, but whatever...

My take is Sparta is the place that he lived and that Lycurgus is credited with making it more of a commune. I guess it feels a lot like a Utopian society... minus a little bit of questionable gender practices. Plutarch credits Lycurgus with three big rule (which are unwritten) that help form Sparta.

1: Equal Land
2: Non-Portable Moneys.
3: Communal eating.

I especially like the non-portable money. Big Iron Bars. Hard to steal or issue bribes with... but it does destroy the usefulness of money. Is there any small way that our world could emulate this? We seem to be going in quite the opposite direction: Money is becoming more abstract. I don't have a real concept of where all my money is and how it flow. I'm not sure where bits of it are nibbled as financial expenditures.

What does this say about our world view. What is the end result of a culture that has abstract concepts of money, and the movement there of? Likewise, we are becoming less communal and property is becoming more and more individualistic. I like the image that Pultarch portrays of a communal and happy Sparta, but I don't agree with all of their practices. I'm mostly Not Okay with infanticide and their view on marriage is pretty unique. I remember learning about it when I was studying "Women and the Classical World."

"In their marriages, the husband carried off his bride by a sort of force; nor were their brides ever small and of tender years, but in their full bloom and ripeness. After this, she who superintended the wedding comes and clips the hair of the bride close round her head, dresses her up in man's clothes, sober and composed, as having supped at the common table, and entering privately into the room where the bride lies, unties her virgin zone, and takes her to himself; and, after staying some time together, he returns composedly to his own apartment, to sleep as usual with the other young men."

This was bizarre when we first read it and now that I read it in context it still doesn't get any better. Really, what's up with that? Different culture behaves in a different way? Yeah, but the scary part here is that I can put this into modern context without twisting it too much. Aggressive men who ditch the girl after they are finished, and then go back and play Halo?