Name/Title
StereographEntry/Object ID
2023.055.3.0284Description
A black and white stereograph. Image is of a village, in the foregrand two women stand in a field while one is holding a baby, in the backgroun is a large mountain range. Above the image "T416 (Star)" is printed, below the image "V17122T West to the Heights of Taygetus-Looking over Modern Homes in Ancient Sparta Greece." is printed, to the left of the image "Keystone View Company Copyrighted, Underwood & Underwood, In. Manufacturers MADE IN U.S.A. Publishers" is printed, to the right of the image "Meadville, Pa., New York, N. Y., Chicago, Ill., London, England." is printed. On the reverse the following is printed:
V17122
LOOKING OVER MODERN HOMES IN ANCIENT SPARTA
We are in the southern Peloponnesus, looking westward over part of Sparta, next to Athens the most renowned state in Greece. On every side but the south the fertile plain is shut in by mountain walls.
From a slight elevation we look over the modern city of about four thousand inhabitants, a creation of King Otto, and perhaps the only made-to-order city that has really taken root and thrived in modern Greece. Before us is Taygetus rising in grandeur, its tops covered with clouds. It has several immense peaks, but some five of these being more conspicuous than the rest, it goes by the name of Pentedaktylon (the five-fingered mountain).
No city in Greece had such a background! What a pity that the Spartans were too busy, in fighting or preparing to fight, to raise their eyes and hearts to their grand surroundings! The Lycurgan constitution smothered individual human life. Sparta was in ancient times the antithesis of Athens. Strenuousness and freedom, the heavy load and the joy of life, were set over against each other. Let us, however, be just to the Spartans. If the neighbors dreaded the occasional issuing forth of Spartan armies through the passes leading northward, and suffered from their exactions, we are to remember that the stern military discipline in Sparta saved Greece in the Perisan War, especially at Plataea. It was not unitl the end of free Greece was near that the women of this plain ever "saw the smoke of an enemy's camp." No city has left less tangible evidence of its history. And yet this old plain was the nursery of heroes, the scene of an order of self-forgetting life that has scarcely been equaled elsewhere.
Copyright by The Keystone View CompanyCollection
Photograph Collection