The protecting dead
Thus the Spartans seem to have accorded a great importance to their dead because
they saw them as possible protectors of the living. This way of thinking is illustrated,
for example, by some Laconian heroic reliefs from the sixth century, in which tiny
figures bring offerings to a much larger seated couple, perhaps Agamemnon and
Cassandra (Figure 15.4; Andronikos 1956 identified the people represented as Hades
and Demeter, Stibbe 1978 as Dionysus and Demeter, whereas Salapata 1993 believes
that the couple originally represented in this sort of configuration must have been
Agamemnon and Alexandra/Cassandra).
Furthermore, Pausanias tells of the stele at Sparta inscribed with the names and
patronymics of the warriors who fell at Thermopylae (3.14.1). Such a list must have
made it possible to evocate the dead (for a similar practice at Plataea see Plutarch,
Aristides21.5). Since the Lacedaemonian kings, when dead, were honored not as
men but as heroes, according to Xenophon (Constitution of the Lacedaemonians
15.9), to read out a list of kings of Sparta was to invoke heroes to secure the city’s
prosperity. This particular status of the kings could help to explain why the royal role
survived at Sparta up until the death of Nabis in 192 BC. Religious life and political
life, which moderns distinguish, were, accordingly, tightly associated in Sparta.
Figure 15.4 Agamemnon and Cassandra (?). Relief from Chrysapha. Berlin, Staatliche
Museum no.731. Based on Tod and Wace 1906:102 fig. 1 (catalog ‘‘a’’)
The Religious System at Sparta 251