In all of greek literature, there are few places more famous than Pylos. "Sandy Pylos" is Homer's epithet in the Iliad for the kingdom of Nestor, the garrulous old warrior-king who gives the other Greek captains so much unwanted advice before the walls of Troy. In the Odyssey, Telemachus begins his search for his lost father, Odysseus, at Nestor's palace. Perched at the southwestern tip of modern-day Greece, Pylos was also the site of a scandalous event during the Pelopon-nesian War: the surrender, in 425 B.C., of some 120 armed Spartan officers of the hoplite infantry to the Athenians. "Nothing that happened in the war," the historian Thucydides noted, "surprised the Hellenes as much as this."
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