Greek PantheonCity
Sparta
The powerful warrior city-state, home of Helen whose abduction sparked the Trojan War, and Menelaus her husband.
About Sparta
Menelaus's house, Helen's departure
Homeric Sparta is Lacedaemon, Menelaus's palace, where Telemachus hears the war's leftovers in Odyssey 4. The Iliad makes Helen's leaving that house the cause of Troy. Later Sparta is a military city with cults of Artemis Orthia, Apollo Hyakinthios, and the Dioscuri. Those cults are not the Homeric plot. Tyrtaeus and Alcman belong to the historical city; the abduction belongs to epic. Do not collapse the two Spartas.
On the map
Sparta among other places of the Greek Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Homer, Odyssey 4
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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