Let those who please believe that one man, without the intervention of arms--not as a conqueror, but a friend--could succeed in establishing a constitution, resting not upon laws, but manners--not upon force, but usage--utterly hostile to all the tastes, desires, and affections of human nature: moulding every the minutest detail of social life into one system--that system offering no temptation to sense, to ambition, to the desire of pleasure, or the love of gain, or the propensity to ease--but painful, hard, steril, and unjoyous;--let those who please believe that a system so created could at once be received, be popularly embraced, and last uninterrupted, unbroken, and without exciting even the desire of change for four hundred years, without having had any previous foundation in the habits of a people--without being previously rooted by time, custom, superstition, and character into their breasts.

For my part, I know that all history furnishes no other such example; and I believe that no man was ever so miraculously endowed with the power to conquer nature.

[129] But we have not the smallest reason, the slightest excuse, for so pliant a credulity.

We look to Crete, in which, previous to Lycurgus, the Dorians had established their laws and customs, and we see at once the resemblance to the leading features of the institutions of Lycurgus; we come with Aristotle to the natural conclusion, that what was familiar to the Dorian Crete was not unknown to the Dorian Sparta, and that Lycurgus did not innovate, but restore and develop, the laws and the manners which, under domestic dissensions, might have undergone a temporary and superficial change, but which were deeply implanted in the national character and the Doric habits.

That the regulations of Lycurgus were not regarded as peculiar to Sparta, but as the most perfect development of the Dorian constitution, we learn from Pindar [130], when he tells us that "the descendants of Pamphylus and of the Heraclidae wish always to retain the Doric institutions of Aegimius." Thus regarded, the legislation of Lycurgus loses its miraculous and improbable character, while we still acknowledge Lycurgus himself as a great and profound statesman, adopting the only theory by which reform can be permanently wrought, and suiting the spirit of his laws to the spirit of the people they were to govern.
When we know that his laws were not written, that he preferred engraving them only on the hearts of his countrymen, we know at once that he must have legislated in strict conformity to their early prepossessions and favourite notions.