Beneath the heights fo
Taygetus stately Leda bare them, when the dark-clouded Son of Cronos had privily bent her to his will.
As the huntress Diana goes forth upon the mountains of
Taygetus or Erymanthus to hunt wild boars or deer, and the wood nymphs, daughters of Aegis-bearing Jove, take their sport along with her (then is Leto proud at seeing her daughter stand a full head taller than the others, and eclipse the loveliest amid a whole bevy of beauties), even so did the girl outshine her handmaids.
Ye wild-eyed Muses, sing the Twins of Jove, Whom the fair-ankled Leda, mixed in love With mighty Saturn's Heaven-obscuring Child, On
Taygetus, that lofty mountain wild, Brought forth in joy: mild Pollux, void of blame, And steed-subduing Castor, heirs of fame.
In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount
Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.
They were, in fact, Dorian invaders from the north, and upon arriving on the Eurotas plain they conquered and enslaved an indigenous population, the Achaeans, that, perhaps, felt that the jutting peaks of the
Taygetus Mountains would deter invaders.
This multistage, multidisciplinary project published, in 1972, the results of an extensive surface exploration of a very large area, bounded to the west and south by the sea, to the east by the Taygetus Mountains, and to the north by the Alpheios valley and Triphylia in all, an area of ca.
Distance, not to mention the impressive barrier of the Taygetus mountain range, has often been invoked as a general point to remember when assessing the logistics and practicalities of Spartan-Messenian relations.
The excavators suggest that the positioning of a Late Geometric pithos burial on the ridge, from which there is a fine view to both the east and south, "may reflect a conscious wish by the living to enlist the dead hero's continued vigilance to help them ward off the incursions of the hated foe from across Taygetus." (39) Such symbolic use of heroic associations may have been necessary, for--on the whole--the UMME survey evidence fails to support the picture, derived from later literary sources, of a large Messenian population rising up in opposition to invasion.
Heavyhearted, their father follows time-honoured tradition and exposes the crippled baby on Mount
Taygetus. Before the wolves can get him, however, he is rescued by a wise old shepherd and brought up as a helot, one of the aboriginal population the Spartans have enslaved.
It intertwines the lives of two brothers born to a noble family - one strong and healthy, the other born lame and therefore left to die on the exposed slopes of Mount
Taygetus as decreed by Spartan law.
One obvious problem in the poem is how 15-16, and especially their first two words, fit the context: et modo Taygeti, crines aspersa pruina,/ sectatur patrios per iuga longa canes, `and now, her hair sprinkled with frost, she follows her native hounds throughout the long crests of
Taygetus'.
He describes a two-day chariot ride by Telemachus between Pylos and Sparta, with no consideration of the interlying slopes of Mount
Taygetus (3.482-4.2).