Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

CHAPTER XX
SPARTA

“Lacedæmon’s hollowed vale by mountain-gorges pent.”

Homer, Odyssey.

In the Spartans’ theory of life adventures abroad or the welcome of strangers into their own territory had no place. Perhaps nothing more sharply differentiated them from the Athenians, whose love of roving was equalled only by their delight in seeing the rest of the world drawn to their city. The instinctive and reasoned reserve of the Spartans was reënforced by the physical conditions of their country. Laconia is bulwarked on three sides by mountains, through which, in antiquity, all entrances but one were difficult, and its southern boundary is the open and stormy sea. The Laconian Gulf splits the country into two peninsulas, ending in the famous promontories of Tænarum and Malea, in rounding which so many sailors, from the days of Menelaus and Agamemnon and Odysseus, have looked for violent winds.

Far inland, within the rifts of the northern hills, lies the plain of Sparta. By those to whom the sea is not an essential element in Greek landscape this city is held to be more beautifully situated than any other in Greece. The brilliant luxuriousness of a southern lowland is combined with the austere grandeur of mountain scenery. Some twenty miles in length, the plain is only five miles broad between the ranges of Taygetus and of Parnon, whose bases show extraordinary caverns and fissures. Taygetus stretches along the whole western side of Laconia, but rears the highest of its long line of summits just over Sparta. These magnificent summits, covered with snow for two thirds of the year, ennoble many a landscape outside of Laconia. Below them extend the wide tracts of forest where Artemis once took her pleasure, and Spartan hunters tracked the wild boar with dogs that shared their “bravery” and “love of toil” and won a guerdon of praise from Pindar and Sophocles. In front of these woodlands rise the five peaks which have given to the mountain the modern name of Pentedactylon.

It is characteristic of the Greek attitude toward nature that the mountain is not praised in poetry as much as is the beautiful plain, richly fertilized by the river Eurotas on its way from Arcadia to the sea. Telemachus, in spite of his greater affection for the rough goat-pastures of his native Ithaca, appreciated the wide courses and the meadowland of Sparta where “aboundeth the clover, the marsh grass, the wheat and the rye and the broad white ears of the barley.” Euripides knew that the reedy bed of the Eurotas, the trees and meadow flowers of its banks, its hungry foam in the season of heavy rain and the lovely gleam of its calmer waters would haunt the homesick hearts of Helen and the Spartan maidens who shared Iphigeneia’s exile among the Taurians.

TAYGETUS

Modern Sparta, founded after the War of Independence, lies in the southern district of the Sparta of antiquity. Mediæval Sparta, called Mistra, lay some distance west of the old site, very near the entrance to the Langada Pass. Homeric Sparta lay to the southeast, across the Eurotas, at Therapne, later a suburb of the Doric city. Here flourished that noble court which amazed the young Ithacan and the tale of which is still to us “a fountain of immortal drink.” Telemachus arrived just as Menelaus was marrying his son to a native princess, and his daughter, the inheritor of her mother’s loveliness, to Thessalian Neoptolemus, Achilles’s son. Never could the great vaulted hall of the palace have displayed a gayer splendour. The son of Odysseus has grown up in no mean castle, but this gleam of gold and silver, like sun and moon, this flashing bronze and shining ivory and glowing amber make him feel as if he were on Olympus at the court of Zeus. Tumblers perform wonderful tricks. A divine minstrel sings. Silver basins and golden ewers are passed around. Supper is served on a polished table in dishes of gold. Menelaus, noticing the boy’s charming admiration, tells him how he has gathered his wealth in Cyprus and Phœnicia and Egypt, but how it means little to him over against the loss of his old comrades and friends. And as they talk Helen comes in, like Artemis of the golden arrows, and her willing servants bring her a carved chair and cover it with a rug of soft wool. And sitting there, her white hands busied with the deep blue wool wound about her golden distaff and with the dressed yarn heaped in her silver basket that runs on little wheels and is rimmed with gold, she talks with them of what happened once in Troy and of Odysseus of the hardy heart and, quite easily, of how she had wanted to come home again to her own country and her child and to her lord “who was lacking in naught, nor wisdom, nor beauty of manhood.” And into their drinking cups she put a drug and “they drank of it, quenching all anger and pain and all of their sorrows forgetting.”

The memory of the royal pair never died in Sparta. Therapne contained a sanctuary called the “Menelaeion,” where prayers were offered for the physical beauty which was keenly desired by an athletic people. Helen sometimes walked abroad to bestow in turn the gift she had received from Aphrodite. At least, Herodotus tells a story of a nurse taking a very ugly girl baby to the temple and meeting a strange woman who insisted upon seeing the child and who then gently stroked its head and said, “One day this child shall be the fairest lady in Sparta.” And from that very day her looks began to change and the ugly baby became the beauty of the town and married the king.