Either they have not left Lacedaemon, or else, though they have brought their ships, they will not show themselves in battle for the shame and disgrace that I have brought upon them."
She knew not that both these heroes were already lying under the earth in their own land of Lacedaemon.
She took the form of an old woman who used to dress wool for her when she was still in Lacedaemon, and of whom she was very fond.
Never yet was I so passionately enamoured of you as at this moment--not even when I first carried you off from Lacedaemon and sailed away with you--not even when I had converse with you upon the couch of love in the island of Cranae was I so enthralled by desire of you as now." On this he led her towards the bed, and his wife went with him.
They think it strange, therefore, that Telemachus should not have met him when he went to
Lacedaemon. But the Cephallenian story may perhaps be the true one.
Go to him, therefore, by sea, and take your own men with you; or if you would rather travel by land you can have a chariot, you can have horses, and here are my sons who can escort you to Lacedaemon where Menelaus lives.
As for Telemachus, now that he is your guest, send him to Lacedaemon in a chariot, and let one of your sons go with him.
When
Lacedaemon was brought into the league by Philopoemen, it was attended with an abolition of the institutions and laws of Lycurgus, and an adoption of those of the Achaeans.
Alexandrus next lands in
Lacedaemon and is entertained by the sons of Tyndareus, and afterwards by Menelaus in Sparta, where in the course of a feast he gives gifts to Helen.
You had your choice, and might have gone either to
Lacedaemon or Crete, both which states are often praised by you for their good government, or to some other Hellenic or foreign state.
As Paul Rahe observes in The Spartan Regime (2016), "[t]he Spartans were acutely aware that they were interlopers in the Peloponnesus, that they had invaded and seized Laconia by force, and that their servants--the 'old helots' of the provinces--were descended from the original Achaean stock, which had ruled
Lacedaemon in the epoch described by Homer."
Rahe's account of the Spartan regime of the late archaic and early classical periods demonstrates how the peculiar social mores and resulting political values of this polis underpinned
Lacedaemon's strategic efficacy during its long Peloponnesian hegemony.