Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

This was not a nook in Sparta, not a cranny, but bony fingers would intrude there. Even the newest-born baby was subjected to the proddings of old men. Should an infant be judged too sickly or deformed to make a future contribution to the city, then the elders would order its immediate termination. Since the investment required from the state to raise a citizen was considerable, this was regarded by most Spartans as only proper. Indeed, a mother might well play the eugenicist herself, washing her baby in wine, which, as everyone knew, was the surest test for epilepsy. What true Spartan parent, after all, would wish to raise a son who might suddenly collapse in a fit? Better an early bereavement than the risk of such disgrace. 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 encourager les autres. And no doubt, for those permitted to live, the tracery of tiny bones which littered the depths of the Apothetae must have served to concent...