Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Eurotas.
The gallery
Leda and the Swan (detail: the personifications of Eurotas and Sparta), mosaic from the House of Aion
Unknown (Roman mosaicist), mid-4th century AD
In this richly coloured floor mosaic from the House of Aion at Nea Paphos in Cyprus, the Spartan river Eurotas appears not as a mere landscape but in fully human form. The panel stages the myth of Leda, queen of Sparta, who is about to bathe in the Eurotas when Zeus, transformed into a swan, approaches her; flanking the scene stand the personifications of the river-god Eurotas himself and of Lakedaimonia (Sparta), the land and city named for his daughter. The detail shown here isolates Eurotas beside his offspring Sparta, a Late Antique pagan composition (c. 350 AD) that gives the eponymous founder of Laconia a rare individual likeness.
Statue of Eurotas, Leonidas Monument at Thermopylae
Unknown (modern monument; photograph by Vaggelis Vlahos), 20th–21st century (photographed 2007)
Part of the modern commemorative monument to Leonidas I at Thermopylae, this sculpture personifies Eurotas, the pre-Dorian king of Laconia who, according to Pausanias, drained the marsh-water of the plain by cutting a channel to the sea and gave his name to the river that remained. Set among the heroic figures honouring Sparta, the statue casts the mythic ancestor of the Spartan land as a foundational presence behind the city that later defended the pass, linking the legendary founder of the Eurotas valley to the historical Spartans who fought there.