The Lacedaemonians, alone among the Greeks, formed a permanent standing army.

While the citizens of other commonwealths were engaged in agriculture and trade, they had no employment whatever but the study of military discipline.

Hence, during the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, they had that advantage over their neighbours which regular troops always possess over militia.

This advantage they lost, when other states began, at a later period, to employ mercenary forces, who were probably as superior to them in the art of war as they had hitherto been to their antagonists.) Each pursuit therefore became first an art, and then a trade.

In proportion as the professors of each became more expert in their particular craft, they became less respectable in their general character.