An Athenian's Spartan loyalty
Xenophon was an Athenian, but his deepest political admiration ran to Sparta. He lived for years on a Spartan-granted estate, served under the Spartan king Agesilaus, was probably exiled from Athens for his Spartan sympathies, and may have sent his sons through the Spartan upbringing. The platform reads his Constitution of the Lacedaemonians as the fullest contemporary praise of the Spartan order we possess — and asks what an intelligent Athenian found there to admire.
A society engineered for character
The platform reads the core of Xenophon's admiration as his sense that Sparta was a society deliberately engineered to form character. Where other Greek cities left the making of citizens largely to chance, Sparta — through the order attributed to Lycurgus — had designed every institution, from the rearing of children to the common meals to the structure of command, to produce disciplined, obedient, courageous men. For a thinker whose whole ethics centred on discipline and character, this was the deepest possible attraction: Sparta had built, at the scale of a whole polity, the self-command his Socrates taught the individual to build in himself.
Discipline as the root of order
The platform reads Xenophon's Spartan admiration as continuous with his leadership thought. The Spartan order embodied, collectively, the virtues he prized in the leader — self-command, endurance, the subordination of private appetite to common purpose, the willing obedience to law. He read the Spartan order as proof that a society could make good men by design, and that military excellence and civic virtue grew from the same disciplined root. His admiring Agesilaus shows that order realised, as he saw it, in a single exemplary king.
The honest qualification
The platform reads Xenophon's admiration as clear-eyed, not naïve. Even the praising Constitution ends by noting that the Spartans of his own day had fallen away from the Lycurgan discipline — that imperial success had corrupted the very virtues that produced it. The platform reads this as the same honesty the Cyropaedia shows about Persia: Xenophon admires an order while recording its decline, and the realism is part of the admiration. The platform's own fuller reckoning with the Spartan order, its achievements and its costs, is in Sparta and the discipline of order.