Purpose and context
The Constitution of the Lacedaemonians (Greek Lakedaimoniōn Politeia) is Xenophon's account of the Spartan system he admired and knew at close range. The platform reads it as the fullest contemporary description we possess of the laws, upbringing and discipline attributed to Lycurgus — written not by a Spartan but by an admiring Athenian outsider who had lived under Spartan patronage and whose sons may have passed through the Spartan upbringing. It is a primary source of the first importance for the Sparta the platform reads, precisely because so little Spartan self-description survives.
Argument and character
The platform reads the work as an argument that the Spartan order was a deliberate and coherent design for producing good citizens and good soldiers. Xenophon takes the institutions in turn — the rearing of children, the agōgē, the common meals, the suppression of wealth, the training of the body, the structure of command — and explains how each was contrived by Lycurgus to form a particular kind of disciplined, obedient, courageous character. The platform reads this under spartan order: it is the clearest ancient statement of Sparta as a society organised around the cultivation of discipline and character.
Influence and reception
The platform reads this short work as one of the most consequential sources in the whole European reception of Sparta: through it, and through Plutarch's later Life of Lycurgus, the admiring image of the Spartan order reached Machiavelli, Rousseau and the modern world. Its reception has been complicated by its evident idealisation and by the notorious chapter (conventionally the fourteenth) in which Xenophon abruptly admits that the Spartans of his own day no longer obeyed the Lycurgan laws — a notice so out of keeping with the rest that some have doubted its placement.
Modern significance
For the Xenophon cluster the Constitution matters as the documentary ground of his Spartan admiration and as a model of the engaged outsider's ethnography. Its honest closing notice — praising an order while recording its decline — is characteristic of Xenophon's realism, the same honesty the Cyropaedia shows about Persia, and the platform reads the two together as evidence that his idealisations were never naïve.