Plutarch, a Greek from Chaeronea in central Greece, wrote Parallel Lives around AD 100: paired biographies of famous Greeks and Romans. This life is Lycurgus of Sparta, a city in southern Greece, set beside Numa, Rome's early priest-king. Two lives about how a city's character gets made.

Lycurgus is the name Sparta gave to the man who shaped it — if he was a man at all. Coming back from Delphi, the oracle in Greece, he divided the land, banned gold, put the men in shared mess halls and the boys in barracks, and taught a people to live on black broth and to fear disgrace more than death. The rhetra, his great ordinance, locked kings, a council of elders, and an assembly into a hard order. When the laws had taken hold, he made the Spartans swear to change nothing until he returned, and he never returned. They kept that oath for centuries.