Word: lycurgus
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...more old-fashioned political theory this is the part where the miraculous lawgiver steps up to bat. It may be Moses or Solon or Lycurgus or God. He is uncommonly wise with a gift for lawmaking and an impeccable moral vision. His legislation is both moral and politic, popular and wise. Of course, the picture isn't completely rosy. Sometimes the people do not understand the message or the messenger. The people of Israel lose faith in Moses; the ten commandments are shattered at the foot of Sinai...
Dying in a Spartan jail in the year 500-and-something B.C., the hero of this sharp and provoking little antihistorical novel finds no difficulty in giving verbatim quotations from the Dryden translation (17th century A.D.) of Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus (2nd century A.D.). It is true that he is a certified Seer of Apollo, and the future drifts before his eyes as effortlessly as the past or the present. So the reader need not be really surprised to find Lycurgus (spelled Ly-kourgos, in the barbarous tradition of contemporary university classics departments), a dim semi-mythological figure...
Agathon was once a handsome and ambitious academic-political young man, an Archaic Period Kissinger to the John Mitchell of Lycurgus, the famous lawgiver who recast the constitution of Sparta in a fierce authoritarian mold. Now Agathon is a drunken old bum. In between, he has fought a battle disguised as a woman, seduced and married the daughter of an archon, helped the Ionian philosophers invent humanism, rationalism and Western civilization, betrayed his best friend to the Athenian FBI, and made love to the wives of all his friends. By teaching his greatest love, a Helot woman, to read...
...fatality. At still others, when what he calls facticity catches up with him, Agathon is just a slobbish old lecher smelling of onions. In this guise he represents the irreducible, incorrigible lump of humanity that always jams up the bright theoretical machines continually being invented by one Lycurgus or another, and thus saves mankind from betterment...
...beginning, man's desperate struggling for order and justice has given force to the law. It gave force to the divinely inspired canons for human conduct of Moses; it gave force to the rule of the Hindu Manu, the Babylonian Hammurabi, the Roman Numa and the Greek Lycurgus; it gave force to the law as a human science in the Digest of Rome's Emperor Justinian; it gave force to the common law of England, based on principle, shaped by experience, controlled by reason...