On the other hand, the common meals, the public education, the crypteia are borrowed from Sparta and not from Athens, and the superintendence of private life, which was to be practised by the governors, has also its prototype in Sparta.

The extravagant dislike which Plato shows both to a naval power and to extreme democracy is the reverse of Athenian.
The best-governed Hellenic states traced the origin of their laws to individual lawgivers.

These were real persons, though we are uncertain how far they originated or only modified the institutions which are ascribed to them.

But the lawgiver, though not a myth, was a fixed idea in the mind of the Greek,--as fixed as the Trojan war or the earth-born Cadmus.

'This was what Solon meant or said'-- was the form in which the Athenian expressed his own conception of right and justice, or argued a disputed point of law.