The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

than
despotic government. Neither is a city to be deemed happy or a
legislator to be praised because he trains his citizens to conquer
and obtain dominion over their neighbors, for there is great evil
in this. On a similar principle any citizen who could, should
obviously try to obtain the power in his own state—the crime which
the Lacedaemonians accuse king Pausanias of attempting, although he
had so great honor already. No such principle and no law having
this object is either statesmanlike or useful or right. For the
same things are best both for individuals and for states, and these
are the things which the legislator ought to implant in the minds
of his citizens.
    Neither should men study war with a view to the enslavement of
those who do not deserve to be enslaved; but first of all they
should provide against their own enslavement, and in the second
place obtain empire for the good of the governed, and not for the
sake of exercising a general despotism, and in the third place they
should seek to be masters only over those who deserve to be slaves.
Facts, as well as arguments, prove that the legislator should
direct all his military and other measures to the provision of
leisure and the establishment of peace. For most of these military
states are safe only while they are at war, but fall when they have
acquired their empire; like unused iron they lose their temper in
time of peace. And for this the legislator is to blame, he never
having taught them how to lead the life of peace.
XV
    Since the end of individuals and of states is the same, the end
of the best man and of the best constitution must also be the same;
it is therefore evident that there ought to exist in both of them
the virtues of leisure; for peace, as has been often repeated, is
the end of war, and leisure of toil. But leisure and cultivation
may be promoted, not only by those virtues which are practiced in
leisure, but also by some of those which are useful to business.
For many necessaries of life have to be supplied before we can have
leisure. Therefore a city must be temperate and brave, and able to
endure: for truly, as the proverb says, ‘There is no leisure for
slaves,’ and those who cannot face danger like men are the slaves
of any invader. Courage and endurance are required for business and
philosophy for leisure, temperance and justice for both, and more
especially in times of peace and leisure, for war compels men to be
just and temperate, whereas the enjoyment of good fortune and the
leisure which comes with peace tend to make them insolent. Those
then who seem to be the best-off and to be in the possession of
every good, have special need of justice and temperance—for
example, those (if such there be, as the poets say) who dwell in
the Islands of the Blest; they above all will need philosophy and
temperance and justice, and all the more the more leisure they
have, living in the midst of abundance. There is no difficulty in
seeing why the state that would be happy and good ought to have
these virtues. If it be disgraceful in men not to be able to use
the goods of life, it is peculiarly disgraceful not to be able to
use them in time of leisure—to show excellent qualities in action
and war, and when they have peace and leisure to be no better than
slaves. Wherefore we should not practice virtue after the manner of
the Lacedaemonians. For they, while agreeing with other men in
their conception of the highest goods, differ from the rest of
mankind in thinking that they are to be obtained by the practice of
a single virtue. And since they think these goods and the enjoyment
of them greater than the enjoyment derived from the virtues …
and that it should be practiced for its own sake, is evident from
what has been said; we must now consider how and by what means it
is to be attained.
    We have already determined that nature and habit and rational
principle are required, and, of these, the proper nature of the
citizens has also been defined by us. But we have still to consider
whether the training of early life is to be that of rational
principle or habit, for these two must accord, and when in accord
they will then form the best of harmonies. The rational principle
may be mistaken and fail in attaining the highest ideal of life,
and there may be a like evil influence of habit. Thus much is clear
in the first place, that, as in all other things, birth implies an
antecedent beginning, and that there are beginnings whose end