It is a myth about the Spartans and babies.
You can blame Frank Miller’s 300 — or, if you are a more literary type, you can blame Plutarch — but the legend of Spartans’ killing sickly or deformed newborns by throwing them off a cliff or abandoning them to die alone in the wilderness doesn’t seem to be true. A spot once thought to be the place where unwanted children were thrown to their deaths did turn out to be full of human bones, but these were mostly the bones of adult men, and the site seems to have been a place of execution for criminals and prisoners of war. Another site was indeed found to be full of the bones of children, some of them newborns and some of them many months or a few years old, a discovery that is horrifyingly consistent with what we know and what we can guess about infant and childhood mortality in the ancient world, when as many as half of the children born died before reaching puberty.
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