108 Politics and Geopolitics
daemon.^26 In the eighth century, the Agiad king Teleklos is also likely to have
followed one of these paths—when he conducted Sparta’s colonists to the
Nedon valley upstream from ancient Pherae on the mountain’s western slopes,
when he seized or colonized Pherae itself, and when he journeyed to the sanc-
tuary of Artemis Limnatis—for the Dentheliatis region, wherein the Nedon
valley is to be found, and the sanctuary near the head of the Choireios gorge
can both easily be reached from the more southerly of these two tracks. The
journey there cannot, however, have been easy.
Sixteen miles directly south of Sparta, there is another pass over Taygetus
—over which a road, made to accommodate carts, ran from the modern vil-
lage of Xirokambi—where, at Agios Vasileios, a Mycenaean palace, fragments
of frescoes, and Linear B tablets have recently been discovered^27 —across the
mountain to Kardamyle well south of Pherae on the Messenian Gulf. But it is
a trek more demanding yet. Neither pass was well-suited to an army made up
of heavily armed infantrymen, for at times they would have had to march in
something approaching single file, and they would have been highly vulner-
able to ambush by light-armed troops experienced in a species of combat bet-
ter suited to the terrain. Something of the sort was true as well for the path
leading from the modern village of Georgitsi, on the eastern slope of Taygetus
some eighteen miles to the northwest of Sparta, over a high mountain pass
to its counterparts Neochori and Dyrrhachi on the western slope, then down
from there. For, although less daunting, this path was also ill-suited to soldiers
loaded down with the hoplite panoply and with other gear.
Further south, there is today another modern road linking the ancient
Lacedaemonian port of Gytheion on the Laconian Gulf with the modern vil-
lage of Areopolis on the Messenian Gulf. But if this route was perfectly man-
ageable for travelers, it was far from ideal for an army, for the trek that one
would have had to make was laborious and long. Southwest one would have
marched from Gytheion to Las, then across the peninsula to ancient Oitylos,
and north along the Messenian Gulf past Thalamai, Pephnus, Leuctron, and
Kardamyle. From there, one would have had to round the spur of Taygetus
called Kalathion and make one’s way up along the coast, inland around the
Choireios gorge, then westward back to the coast, and northward again along
the Messenian Gulf below Kalamai to Pherae at the bottom of the great plain
called Makaria in the lower Pamisos valley.
In an emergency, Spartans intent on reaching the Pamisos valley in a
hurry will almost certainly have taken the Langadha Pass or the path just to