Two main-springs of action were constructed within him--the dread of shame and the love of country.
These were motives, it is true, common to all the Grecian states, but they seem to have been especially powerful in Sparta.

But the last produced its abuse in one of the worst vices of the national character.

The absorbing love for his native Sparta rendered the citizen singularly selfish towards other states, even kindred to that which he belonged to.

Fearless as a Spartan,--when Sparta was unmenaced he was lukewarm as a Greek.

And this exaggerated yet sectarian patriotism, almost peculiar to Sparta, was centred, not only in the safety and greatness of the state, but in the inalienable preservation of its institutions;--a feeling carefully sustained by a policy exceedingly jealous of strangers [139].