Atra
AH-truh
Recorded in this scroll aloneThe Spartan captain who leads the dead. He is the first of the ghosts to speak to Acenes, and what he says is four words: the dragon must be destroyed.
He carries a lambda shield, a crested helmet and a scar from temple to jaw, and the other spirits defer to him. It is he who explains why the gods have chosen not to act, and concedes that they are not entirely wrong to refuse.
He is named in no other surviving source, and the name is recorded nowhere else in Laconia.
Sources
This term is carried by PHerc. 1667 alone. No other surviving source records it.
Discussed in the papers
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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