And turn death cold,
Never, ah, never more
The hearth of her home to see,
Nor sand of the Spartan shore,
Nor tombs where her fathers be
Nor Athena’s Brazen Dwelling
Nor the towers of Pitane.”[[43]]
The discovery of the Temple of Artemis is of great importance, not only because it was the pivot of the religious life of Sparta but because its eighth century foundations, excavated beneath the traces of a sixth century structure, may belong to the earliest temple in Greece. The image, called Orthia because it had been found “upright” in a thicket of willows, was believed by the Spartans to be the ancient wooden one brought by Orestes and Iphigeneia from the land of the Taurians, where Iphigeneia, rescued by Artemis from the sacrificial altar at Aulis, had been its priestess and guardian. Euripides naturally preserves the Athenian tradition that the image was brought to Brauron. But Pausanias presses the Spartan claim and explains the hoary custom of annually scourging the boys in front of the image by the “relish for blood” that it had acquired in the days when human sacrifices were offered to it in a barbarian land.
The brutality in the training of Spartan youth has bulked so large in tradition that local associations with it perhaps impress the traveller more sharply than any others. In the southwestern region of the town, near the large ruins of a Roman bath, lay, it is thought, the Dromos or race course, and the Platanistas or Plane-tree Grove, surrounded by a moat and entered by two bridges, where the boys, as a part of their education, fought very savage battles. This grove is an excellent illustration of the danger of claiming too much for the influence on the mind of external forms. Plato held that even the shapes of trees might influence the spirit of those who walked among them, and Walter Pater, in his study of Lacedæmon, compresses the idea into a definite application by describing the plane tree, the characteristic tree of Sparta, as “a very tranquil and tranquillizing object, regally spreading its level or gravely curved masses on the air.” Yet within a circle of these tranquillizing objects Cicero, and later Lucian and Pausanias, saw the Spartan boys fighting with incredible fury, kicking, scratching, biting, and dying rather than confess themselves beaten.
In literature as well as in the plastic arts the Spartans failed to express themselves. Only four poets of any widespread fame had their homes in Sparta, and no one of these was a native born. Significantly, too, they all lived at least as early as the seventh century, at the only period when Spartan life showed any pliability. Individual freedom was not wholly repressed, and an acknowledgment of the graces of life was at times permitted. Only under these conditions could art live at all, and poetry outran sculpture in permanent achievement. This was, perhaps, due to its immediate connection with music (including dancing), the only art which the later Spartans, although they did not give it a place in their educational curriculum, seem to have appreciated.