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The hills, wooded with oak, and swimming in soft blue vapor, interlocked far before us, inclosing the loveliest green dells in their embraces, and melting away to the break in Taygetus, which yawned in the distance. On the right towered the square, embrasured castle of Passava on the summit of an almost inaccessible hill the site of the ancient Las.
If he was weakly, if he had any bodily unsightliness, he was exposed on a place called Taygetus, and so perished. It was a consequence of this that never did the sun in his course light on man half so godly stalwart, on woman half so houri-lovely, as in stern and stout old Sparta. Death, like all mortal, they must bear; disease, once and for all, they were resolved to have done with.
No more! At this Brother John fainted, falling like a great buttress of a hill, such as Taygetus or Erymanthus. While they were busy with him, others of the frantic folk had built great platforms of wood, whereon they all stood and spoke at once, both men and women.
If they thought it well-built and strong, they ordered the father to bring it up, and assigned one of the nine thousand plots of land to it; but if it was mean-looking or misshapen, they sent it away to the place called the Exposure, a glen upon the side of Mount Täygetus; for they considered that if a child did not start in possession of health and strength, it was better both for itself and for the state that he should not live at all.
From Mount Taygetus, which overhung the city, and on which the women of Lacedaemon were wont to hold their bacchanalian orgies, huge fragments rolled into the suburbs. The greater portion of the city was absolutely overthrown; and it is said, probably with exaggeration, that only five houses wholly escaped the shock.
From the theater I made a sketch of the valley, with the dazzling ridge of Taygetus in the rear, and Mistra, the medieval Sparta, hanging on the steep sides of one of his gorges. The sun was intensely hot, and we were glad to descend again, making our way through tall wheat, past walls of Roman brickwork and scattering blocks of the older city, to the tomb of Leonidas.
The district, which the brethren from Scio had specially in view, was exceedingly uninviting to an observer from the sea; where it seemed to be only a mass of rocky cliffs and mountains, gradually rising from the sea to St. Elias, the highest peak of Taygetus. Yet among these rocks were upwards of a hundred villages, containing from thirty to forty thousand souls.
"Did I plant my standard on Taygetus, though all Sparta encamped against it " "All the slaves would cut their way to thy side. O Pausanias, think how much nobler it were to reign over tens of thousands who become freemen at thy word, than to be but the equal of 10,000 tyrants." "The Helots fight well, when well led," said Pausanias; as if to himself. "Launch the boat."
One fellow, indeed, called Nancleidas, grew a little too fat to please the sensitive eyes of the Spartans: I believe he was periodically whipped. Under a system so very barbarous, the super-sweet, egoistic voice of the club-footed poet Byron would, of course, never have been heard: one brief egoistic "lament" on Taygetus, and so an end.
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