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They could afford to praise Sparata, since they did not have to live in it.  They did not feel at close range the selfishness, coldness, and cruelty of the Spartan character; they could not see from the select gentlemen whom they met, or the heroes who they commemorated from afar, that the Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; that it made vigor of body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the things of the mind.  With the triumph of the code the arts that had flourished before its establishment died a sudden death; we hear of no more poets, sculptors, or builders in Sparta after 550.

The Story of Civilization II, The Life of Greece, by Will Durant, page 87