Musonius Rufus, Fragments 39

Who of us does not marvel at the action of Lycurgus the Lacedaemonian? For when he had been blinded in one eye by one of his fellow citizens and had received the young man at the hands of the people to punish as he saw fit, he did not choose to do this, but trained him instead and made a good man of him, and afterward escorted him to the public theater. 

 

And when the Lacedaemonians regarded him with amazement, he said: "This man I received from you an insolent and violent creature; I return him to you a reasonable man and a good citizen."

 

I know many people who define themselves almost completely by their political affiliations, and therefore usually, as I like to say, “start at the top” of any problem. Social matters are seen on a large scale, and so a conformity to certain sets of general dictates is the norm. 

 

Has someone followed the rules? Then he should receive a prescribed pleasurable reward. Has someone broken the rules? Then he should be given a prescribed painful punishment. A belief in the “system”, of whatever sort, is paramount. 

 

I do not deny the importance of such abstractions, but in daily life I find it far more helpful to start with people, not with “—isms”. I see something of this in the above story about Lycurgus, the founder of Spartan law. 

 

Custom gave Lycurgus the power to determine the wrongdoer’s sentence, and I can imagine the usual options of a fine, or imprisonment, or a public caning, or perhaps even exile or execution. 

 

And yet Lycurgus wasn’t interested in vengeance, or causing pain, or removing a criminal from society. He treated the young fellow like a human being, not like a faceless statistic, and was committed to improving his personal character, not beating him into submission. 

 

I will respectfully claim that a society as a whole will only function when its individual members take the time to treat one another with decency and compassion. The rules are only as good as the motives of its members. Justice is built from the bottom up.