Cape Tainaron

A headland at the end of the Mani

Cape Tainaron is the headland at the southern tip of the Mani, in ancient Laconia. Ancient writers called it Taenarum or Taenarus. Greek poets said that the hero Heracles brought Cerberus, the hound of Hades, up from the world of the dead at this point.

A sanctuary of the god Poseidon stood on the headland. A sanctuary is sacred ground set apart for a god. This one held a right of asylum, which means it gave protection to anyone who took refuge in it. Such a person was called a suppliant: someone who sat at the god’s altar and asked for that protection. To harm a suppliant there was to offend the god. Two of the stories told about Tainaron turn on this right.

Sparta drags suppliants from Poseidon’s protection

A group of Helots once took refuge as suppliants in Poseidon’s sanctuary at Taenarum. The Spartans dragged them out and killed them. The historian Thucydides records both the act and what people remembered of its result. Later a great earthquake levelled Sparta, and the Spartans themselves blamed it on this crime.

The Athenians later used the memory against Sparta in diplomacy. They demanded that Sparta expel “the curse of Taenarus”. The sanctuary at the end of the Mani was an entrance to the underworld in myth. It was also protected ground, and the breach of that protection could explain a disaster for a whole city.

The same asylum, turned into a trap

A generation later the sanctuary served the opposite purpose. Pausanias was a Spartan regent and the victor of the battle of Plataea. By then he was under suspicion of treason with Persia. He is a different man from Pausanias the travel writer, who appears further on.

The Ephors, officials of Sparta, sent an agent to Taenarum. The agent went there as a suppliant and built himself a hut with a hidden partition inside it. The Ephors hid behind the partition. When the regent Pausanias came, they heard him admit the whole plot in his own words. His own standing as a suppliant at that altar was what let him walk free of the trap that day (History 1.133).

What Herodotus says stood on the cape

The historian Herodotus tells a gentler story set on the same ground. It concerns the poet Arion. A Corinthian crew meant to rob him, and he was thrown overboard. He sang one last song and leapt into the sea. A dolphin carried him to Taenarum. From there he walked to Corinth to confront the men who had left him for dead.

Herodotus reports that in his own time a small bronze memorial stood on Taenarum to mark the rescue. It showed a man riding a dolphin (Histories 1.24).

Where Strabo and Pausanias part ways

Two ancient writers on the geography of Greece describe the headland. One is Strabo. The other is Pausanias the travel writer, who went to see the cave for himself. Both describe a temple of Poseidon on the headland and a cave that went with it. Neither calls the cave an oracle, a place where people put questions to a god. They do not agree on what stood where.

Strabo places the temple in a grove on the point, with the cave nearby. He gives the Heracles story to “the myth writers” and does not vouch for it himself (Geography 8.5.1). Pausanias instead describes a temple built like a cave, with a statue of Poseidon standing in front of it.

Pausanias finds no road below

Pausanias states plainly that no road leads underground through the cave. He writes that he does not find it easy to believe the gods keep an underground dwelling where souls collect. He prefers the explanation of the writer Hecataeus of Miletus. In that account a venomous serpent lived on the cape. People called it the hound of Hades because its bite killed at once (Description of Greece 3.25.4-5).

By 1854 the temple’s remains had been built into a ruined church. There was no trace of any passage underground.

Other doors claimed for the same story

Taenarum was not the only cave in the Peloponnese put to this use. Pausanias records two others.

At Hermione he records a chasm behind the temple of Chthonia, in a precinct, or sacred enclosure, that the Hermionians called that of Clymenus. Their own local tradition said Heracles brought up the hound of Hell through it (Description of Greece 2.35.10).

At Lerna he records a lake that the Argives called bottomless. They said the god Dionysus went down through it to bring up Semele. The emperor Nero is said to have tested it with lead-weighted ropes and failed to find the bottom (Description of Greece 2.37.5).