Apothetae

The place of discarding. Plutarch reports that a Spartan father could not decide whether to raise his own child. The infant was carried to a building called the Lesche, where the elders of the tribe examined it. If the child was sound, they assigned it one of the nine thousand allotments of land and ordered the father to rear it. If it was judged ill-formed, it was sent to the Apothetae, a ravine at the foot of Taygetus.

Plutarch adds that Spartan women washed newborns in wine rather than water, on the belief that a sickly infant would convulse and a sound one would be tempered by it, like iron.

Two cautions. Plutarch wrote some seven centuries after the period he describes, and his Sparta is already a moralised one. Excavation at the Taygetus site has not produced infant remains. The practice may be historical, exaggerated, or a later construction of what Sparta was imagined to have been.