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Lycurgus Biography

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Lycurgus (Lat., from Gk. Lykourgos). According to a common ancient tradition, a Spartan lawgiver and political reformer, who lived in the ninth century B.C. and was a son of King Eunomus. The legend declares that he exiled himself from Sparta in order to avoid the suspicion of aiming at the throne of his infant nephew, Charilaus, and that he traveled in Greece, Asia, and Egypt, and studied the laws of Minos in Crete. Returning home, he found Sparta in civil commotion and at war with her neighbors. He undertook to introduce a new constitution and to establish a new social order, which should make of Sparta a preëminently military state. How much of what is traditionally attributed to Lycurgus was actually his work it is not easy to define with accuracy. See SPARTA. Consult the life by Plutarch; Meyer, "Lykurgos von Sparta," in Forschungen zur alten Geschichte, vol. i (Halle, 1892); Nusselt, Das Lykurgproblem (Erlangen, 1898); Ernst Kessler, "Plutarchs Leben des Lykurgos," in Quellen and Forschungen zur alten Geschichte vol. xxiii (Berlin, 1910).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 505.