that the character of this sanctuary was unique to the best of his knowledge. At
Cythera, at the extreme edge of the territory, the goddess, under the name Ourania,
was given another sanctuary, supposedly the most ancient (archaiotaton) in Greece,
and here too she was represented as armed by herxoanon(3.22.1).
Furthermore, Sparta was protected by two statues of Apollo: one was to the north,
on Mount Thornax, and Pausanias specifies that it resembled the other great statue of
Apollo close to Sparta on the south side, that of Amyclae (3.10.8); this represented
Apollo carrying a helmet, spear, and bow (3.19.2).
The Spartans’ absolute mastery of their territory could find expression in their
processions. Plutarch tells that the newly elected members of thegerousia, for
example, would visit the gods, i.e. in their sanctuaries, and it seems likely that the
sanctuaries concerned were those of Sparta itself (Lycurgus26.6). To judge from
Thucydides’ discussion of an event datable to 425/4 BC, helots freed for their
contributions in war could, after being garlanded, make a tour of the sanctuaries
(Thucydides 4.80.30–4; for the date, see Richer 1998a:383–6; for the historicity of
the event, see the contradictory views of Paradiso 2004 and Harvey 2004). The
sanctuaries in question were probably those of Laconia, and the procedure could
be seen as the undertaking of a symbolic defensive mission to protect the territory by
circumambulating it from sacred place to sacred place.
More banally, processions from one part of the territory to another could be
organized on a regular basis in association with festivals, for example that from Sparta
to Amyclae during the Hyacinthia, or that from Helos to the Eleusinion at Bryseai or
Kalyvia tis Sochas in its modern toponym (for the sanctuary of Demeter surnamed
Eleusinian see Pausanias 3.20.5 and 7; for the games of the Laconian Eleusinia see
Parker 1988:101; for Demeter in Laconia see Richer forthcoming (a)).
But space was evidently not the only thing marked out with religious reference
points; time was too.
The calendar of Lacedaemonian festivals
In theLawsPlato stresses the importance of ‘‘the arrangement of days within the
period of month, the arrangement of months within the period of each year, so that
seasons and sacrifices and festivals, celebrated in due fashion because they will be
ordered as nature itself indicates [kata physin], may enliven the city and keep it alert,
give the gods the honors that are their due, and give men a clearer knowledge of all
this’’ (809d). To clarify what Plato means here, we may note that it is a fact made
explicit in antiquity (Geminus,Elementa astronomiae7.7–9 and 15) and acknow-
ledged by modern scholarship, that, in Caveing’s words, ‘‘the dates of religious
festivals are... strongly correlated in Greece with the phases of the moon, and
especially with the full moon. .. but at the same time religious ritual is co-ordinated
with the important moments of agricultural life, and it is crucial that it should be
performed exactly within its annual seasonal framework’’ (1996:9; cf. also Soubiran
1978:9). Now, since the solar year does not coincide with a complete number of lunar
months, in thirty-three solar years a date fixed according to a purely lunar calendar
passes through the whole seasonal cycle. Accordingly, it is probable that the Lace-
daemonians had, like other Greeks, to depend both on the movements of the moon
and on those of the sun at the same time, and also on the apparent movement of other
246 Nicolas Richer