For Plato, Sparta’s constitution came the closest in reality to his own political ideal, that of a “total community,” as he puts it in the Laws, in which “everybody feels pleasure and pain at the same things, so that they all praise and blame with complete unanimity.” It is also the one most able to hold corruption in check, by banishing its primary source: individuality. In war and in peace, Plato argued, no citizen should “get in the habit of acting alone and independently” and instead must obey his leaders “even in tiny details, just as they did in Sparta.”16
