ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the historical and literary problem of dating the Spartan royal genealogy, after discussing a passage that Pausanias significantly puts at the beginning of his description of Laconia. The legendary founder of Amyklai obviously does not remain celibate: he marries Diomede, who through her father Lapithes, founder of the genos of the Lapiths, links the house of the Spartan kings with the Thessalian genealogy. On the Spartan side, one can witness the same contradictory concomitance of the work of refounding the city with abnormal and polemical relationships between the representatives of political power. The re-institutionalisation of Spartan power is begun by Tyndareus in the dynamisation of relationships between the protagonists of the genealogy and continues with a narrative in a polemical key. The ideological function of the Spartan genealogy is to represent, not only a space with its given political limits and social values, but also the manner in which the spatial situation was gradually brought about.
