A cleft beside the road which wound over the mountains to Messenia, the Apothetae, or “Dumping Ground,” provided the setting for the infanticide. There, where they might no longer shame the city that had bred them, the weak and deformed would be slung into the depths of the chasm, condemned eternally to its tenebrous oblivion. This was no abandonment, as was conventionally practiced by other peoples, but a grim and formal rite of execution. There was no hope of deliverance—such as was said to have spared the infant Cyrus—for the unwanted Spartan child. He had to die, and be seen to die, pour
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