In the Spartans’ theory of life adventures abroad or the welcome of strangers into their own territory had no place. Perhaps nothing more sharply differentiated them from the Athenians, whose love of roving was equalled only by their delight in seeing the rest of the world drawn to their city. The instinctive and reasoned reserve of the Spartans was reënforced by the physical conditions of their country. Laconia is bulwarked on three sides by mountains, through which, in antiquity, all entrances but one were difficult, and its southern boundary is the open and stormy sea. The Laconian Gulf splits the country into two peninsulas, ending in the famous promontories of Tænarum and Malea, in rounding which so many sailors, from the days of Menelaus and Agamemnon and Odysseus, have looked for violent winds. Far inland, within the rifts of the northern hills, lies the plain of Sparta. By those to whom the sea is not an essential element in Greek landscape this city is held to be more beautifully situated than any other in Greece. The brilliant luxuriousness of a southern lowland is combined with the austere grandeur of mountain scenery. Some twenty miles in length, the plain is only five miles broad between the ranges of Taygetus and of Parnon, whose bases show extraordinary caverns and fissures. Taygetus stretches along the whole western side of Laconia, but rears the highest of its long line of summits just over Sparta. These magnificent summits, covered with snow for two thirds of the year, ennoble many a landscape outside of Laconia. Below them extend the wide tracts of forest where Artemis once took her pleasure, and Spartan hunters tracked the wild boar with dogs that shared their “bravery” and “love of toil” and won a guerdon of praise from Pindar and Sophocles. In front of these woodlands rise the five peaks which have given to the mountain the modern name of Pentedactylon. It is characteristic of the Greek attitude toward nature that the mountain is not praised in poetry as much as is the beautiful plain, richly fertilized by the river Eurotas on its way from Arcadia to the sea. Telemachus, in spite of his greater affection for the rough goat-pastures of his native Ithaca, appreciated the wide courses and the meadowland of Sparta where “aboundeth the clover, the marsh grass, the wheat and the rye and the broad white ears of the barley.” Euripides knew that the reedy bed of the Eurotas, the trees and meadow flowers of its banks, its hungry foam in the season of heavy rain and the lovely gleam of its calmer waters would haunt the homesick hearts of Helen and the Spartan maidens who shared Iphigeneia’s exile among the Taurians. [Illustration: TAYGETUS]