Pausanias the Spartan by Edward Bulwer-lytton

Everything in the familiar life to which he had returned delighted the young Lysander. But for anxious thoughts about Pausanias, he would have been supremely blest. To him the various scenes of his early years brought no associations of the restraint and harshness which revolted the more luxurious nature and the fiercer genius of Pausanias.

The plunge into the frigid waters of Eurotas -- the sole bath permitted to the Spartans[1] at a time when the rest of Greece had already carried the art of bathing into voluptuous refinement -- the sight of the vehement contests of the boys, drawn up as in battle, at the game of football, or in detached engagements, sparing each other so little, that the popular belief out of Sparta was that they were permitted to tear out each other's eyes, [2] but subjecting strength to every skilful art that gymnastics could teach -- the mimic war on the island, near the antique trees of the Plane Garden, waged with weapons of wood and blunted iron, and the march regulated to the music of flutes and lyres -- nay, even the sight of the stern altar, at which boys had learned to bear the anguish of stripes without a murmur -- all produced in this primitive and intensely national intelligence an increased admiration for the ancestral laws, which, carrying patience, fortitude,