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.

[himmapaan.livejournal.com]

Wonderful!