The brutality in the training of Spartan youth has bulked so large in tradition that local associations with it perhaps impress the traveller more sharply than any others. In the southwestern region of the town, near the large ruins of a Roman bath, lay, it is thought, the Dromos or race course, and the Platanistas or Plane-tree Grove, surrounded by a moat and entered by two bridges, where the boys, as a part of their education, fought very savage battles. This grove is an excellent illustration of the danger of claiming too much for the influence on the mind of external forms. Plato held that even the shapes of trees might influence the spirit of those who walked among them, and Walter Pater, in his study of Lacedæmon, compresses the idea into a definite application by describing the plane tree, the characteristic tree of Sparta, as “a very tranquil and tranquillizing object, regally spreading its level or gravely curved masses on the air.” Yet within a circle of these tranquillizing objects Cicero, and later Lucian and Pausanias, saw the Spartan boys fighting with incredible fury, kicking, scratching, biting, and dying rather than confess themselves beaten. In literature as well as in the plastic arts the Spartans failed to express themselves. Only four poets of any widespread fame had their homes in Sparta, and no one of these was a native born. Significantly, too, they all lived at least as early as the seventh century, at the only period when Spartan life showed any pliability. Individual freedom was not wholly repressed, and an acknowledgment of the graces of life was at times permitted. Only under these conditions could art live at all, and poetry outran sculpture in permanent achievement. This was, perhaps, due to its immediate connection with music (including dancing), the only art which the later Spartans, although they did not give it a place in their educational curriculum, seem to have appreciated. According to tradition, Sparta’s poets all came to her in response to a call for foreign aid in her domestic broils. Terpander of Lesbos and Thaletas of Crete successively founded two musical epochs in a city that was intent upon controlling its serfs and developing its soil. Terpander’s service was almost incalculable, for he modified the existing lyre into an instrument which was universally used until the fifth century and which gave the first great impulse to vocal music. But “the strings he fingered are all gone,” and of the verses that he wrote we have only a few fragments to recall his life in Sparta, his invocations at public festivals of Apollo, the chief god of the city, and of Castor and Polydeuces, the city’s heroes, and his praise of the city herself:— “Bursts into bloom there the warrior’s ardour, Clear lifts the note of the shrill-voicèd Muse. Justice walks down the wide highways as Warder, Ever their Helper glory to choose.”