Sown Men

[porphyry]

The oldest and most prestigious families of Thebes traced their ancestry back to the Spartoi, men who had grown fully armed from the earth like crops when Cadmus sowed dragon’s teeth in the land of Boiotia. The word itself means literally ‘those who have been sown' and is cognate with English words like disperse.

Very likely some such myth also lies behind the national name of the Spartans of Laconia, though the story is not well attested. A quick Google search suggests that the first king of Sparta, Lelex (hence Laconia), some generations before Menelaus sprang from the soil. At the moment I have no idea of the source for this, but in any case the myth was not as importnat in Classical times in Sparta as it was in Thebes or Athens (where there was a whole series of earth-born kings, including Cecrops who had snakes for feet).

Last winter when the Chinese Restaurant at the foot of our driveway closed they hauled away its guardian dragon back to the dragon-barn, but A. found one of its teeth broken and fallen to the ground (either that or it was a stone that looked like a dragon's tooth). Not wishing to go too deeply with him into Greek philology and comparative mythology, I simply told him that if we planted the dragon’s tooth in the flower bed, it might well grow into a Spartan.

This is indeed what happened over the weekend when Mme. Malkhos planted some flowers—the tooth must have germinated in response to her watering the seedlings:



Naturally A. was thrilled to harvest his new playmate. Today the little Spartan single handedly slaughtered a half-dozen Japanese movie monsters.

Comments

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

It's not uncommon for mythical ancestors of Greek peoples to be described as earth-born; simply as an expression of the claims of that people to be autochthonous, as residents of the land from time immemorial rather than wanderers from outside. Rather more complex in the case of the Spartans because it was an acknowledged fact that they had entered the Peloponnese from the outside, but through this legend of the autochthony of Lelex, as the primordial ancestor of the Spartan royal family, and the legend of the return of the Heraklidai, which presented the Spartan royal family as reclaiming an ancient right at the time of the Dorian invasion, it was claimed that the Spartan royal lines at least were primordially Spartan. This legend of Lelex has the feel of a relatively late invention; he is simply the eponym of the Lelegai, and it is probably not accidental that he is not mentioned in any surviving archaic source.

It's a dangerous business bringing these manic warriors back to life again; I hope he doesn't grow any bigger.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

I wonder if these legends were stimulated in ancient times by the exposure, through erosion or ploughing, of even more ancient burials of armed warriors.

[petrusplancius.livejournal.com]

Discoveries of that kind certainly did have an influence on the development of Greek heroic legend, and people did think on occasion that he they had found the remains of an ancient hero, e.g. Thesesus on Skyros in 475BC, with bronze spear and sword, must have been an ancient burial. Some people think that discovery of Tertiary fossils may also have encouraged the idea that people of the heroic age were much bigger (from deer - or mammoth! - bones or the like; someone has written a book on this). The idea of ancestors being born from the earth and thus from their native soil is more basic and naive I think, and wouldn't have needed a stimulus from outside. What surely did have an immense influence on later Greek ideas about the heroic age were the surviving remains of the monumental architecture of the Myceneaean period.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Mayor Adrienne, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Pricneton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Now for my vague memory, Plutarch says somewhere that we can know the ancients were larger and therefore mankind is constatnly diminishing in size from the size of ancient doorways.

Euripedes Medea was commisioned after execavations in Corinth turned up a burial group that was taken to be her murdered childern.

The claim about sown men also has a political dimension, asserting land rights. This is strangely operative on the fringes of American politics. Many American Indian myths include a national origin in a group of sown men. Even today some Indians insist that such myths are literaly true and that the Indians are a special creation native to North America. And this has interfered with archaeology. In particualr there are a few fossils which indicate that the first American population was a people related to the Ainu of Hokkaido (not surprising since this group occupied much of east Asia before being supplanted by modern Asiatics and the presnet Ainu are a left-over enclave like he Basque of the pre-Indoeuropeans in Europe). Some tribal groups claim hwoever that this is not trueand the remains must be Indian adn therefore should be returned to them under laws protecting Indian remains for secret burial.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I agree. Now that Benicek has inspired Malkhos to pit Zeus against Jesus (if you want to see the picture and attendant conversation, see the Zeus post for follow up), I'm thinking I need to have Joan of Arc take care of this Spartan.

[himmapaan.livejournal.com]

Wonderful!