[3] In compliance, according to tradition, with an invitation which the Spartans sent to him in obedience to an oracle, he removed to Sparta, where, by the sacred character of his paeans, and the humanizing influence of his music, he appeased the wrath of Apollo, who had visited the city with a plague, and composed the factions of the citizens, who were at enmity with each other.
[4] At Sparta he became the head of a new school (katastasis) of music, which appears never afterwards to have been supplanted, and the influence of which was maintained also by Xenodamus of Cythera, Xenocritus of Locris, Polymnestus of Colophon, and Sacadas of Argos.
Add to this the great probability that later writers mistook the sense of the word nomos in the ancient accounts of Thaletas; and his association with Lycurgus is explained.
From these testimonies we obtain the result that Thaletas was younger than Archilochus and Terpander, but older than Polymnestus and Alcman, that he was the first of the poets of the second Spartan school of music, by whose influence the great Dorian festivals which have been mentioned were either established, or, what is the more probable meaning, were systematically arranged in respect of the choruses which were performed at them.
[17] Plutarch and other writers speak of him as a lyric poet, and Suidas mentions, as his works, mele kai poiemata tina mythica, and it is pretty certain that the musical compositions of his age and school were often combined with suitable original poems, though sometimes, as we are expressly told of many of the names of Terpander, they were adapted to the verses of Homer.