Gymnopaediae
jim-no-PIE-dee-eye
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe festival of naked youths, held in high summer in the Spartan agora. Choruses of boys and men danced and sang through the heat, and the occasion doubled as a public display of who had come through the upbringing well.
Herodotus uses it to devastating effect in a single scene. Demaratus, deposed from the kingship, is watching the Gymnopaediae when his successor sends a servant to ask, as a joke, how it feels to hold office after being king. Demaratus answers that he has now experienced both, and that the reply will mean either great good or great evil for Sparta. He covers his head, leaves the theatre, and goes over to the Persians.
Thucydides shows the festival still functioning as a fixed point of the Spartan year during the Peloponnesian War.
Sources
- Hdt. 6.67
- Thuc. 5.82
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
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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