by
BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE
For many Englishmen of my background, Sparta isn't merely the city that defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War 2,400 years ago. It is a living memory. We, too, were separated from our mothers at age 7 and dispatched to austere academies to be trained to be men or, rather, Men. We too were placed in the charge of bullying prefects, made to play ferocious games and fed the counterpart of the food that provoked an ancient Athenian wit to remark that he knew why Spartans were eager to die in battle. That way, they could escape the black sop their cooks made from pig's blood.
Yet Sparta 1996 is a cathartic place to visit, and most unlikely to reactivate any childhood traumas. It is a sedate city that stands on a vast, lush plain below the jagged peaks of the Taygetus Mountains. Strolling along the wide boulevards, with orange trees separating the traffic lanes, or settling down in the town square to sip ouzo and enjoy the view, who would guess that the foothills to the west are where the ancient Spartans left their weaker infants to die? Who would imagine the children skipping outside the Bugs Bunny cafe might be distant cousins of the boy who rather than admit that he was hiding a fox beneath his cloak, it rip his stomach apart?
Some of them may indeed be descendants of Heracles, as the Spartans like to style themselves. But persistent invasions and social convulsions scattered the grim, bellicose people who so impressed and alarmed their fellow Greeks. Anyone who wishes to search for the Spartans and their legacy should venture afield: south to Mani, the arid peninsula to which many original citizens fled 1,600 years ago; Gytheion , the ancient town's port, and above all to Mistra, the spectacular ghost town that only a few centuries ago was believed to be Sparta itself.
Although the "Florence of the East,"as Mistra was once called, is deserted now by all but a few nun,s its Byzantine churches have earned the place three stars in the Michellin Guide to Greece, Mistra is only three miles west of contemporary Sparta, so I took a room at the Hotel Menelaion, an imposing edifice in the center of Paleologou, Sparta's main street. I spent three nights in a room that would have appalled my old schoolteachers and convinced any Spartan "whipmaster"that his city had been subjugated by milksops: comfy if simple furniture, television, bath even a swimming pool downstairs, From the Hotel Menelaion, I could look out on buses arriving from Athens,taxis leaving for Mistra and some of the neo-classical buildings that have survived both earthquakes and redevelopers to make Sparta the odd mix of the stately 19th century and the drab modern that it is today.
The real Menelaus was King of Sparta when Paris came to lure his wife, Helen, across the Aegean to Troy, causing the greatest of all archaic wars. After it had been won, and Helen brought home Odysseus's son Telemachus went to Sparta, seeking help against the suitors who were persecuting his mother, Penelope. Nobody knows where this took place, however the Spartans built a shrine to Helen on a ridge, and pregnant mothers went there to pray for well-formed children. The historian Herodotus describes how the love goddess herself appeared there and correctly told an ugly little girl that she would become a beautiful woman. At any rate, visitors can stand on the lump of hefty stone that may be the foundations of Helen's temple and imagine her yearning for the fleshpots of Troy.
The Memelaion , as the shrine is called, is a couple of miles southeast of the modern city. The remnants of classical Sparta are immediately to the north, behind a soccer stadium imposingly fronted by a heroic statue of Leonidas,the great general who died with all but two of his men at Thermopilae, saving Greece from the Persians. The bits of wall behind the stadium are mostly Byzantine, for the Spartans regarded fortifications as a sign of weakness, declaring that the strength of their men was barrier enough. Farther on, through olive groves, are fragments of temple, broken columns above them, the modest hill that was the city's acropolis. There's also a theater cut into the hillside; but that wasn't built until Hellenic times , when Spartan power had ended. In its sixth and fifth century heyday the city rejected all things artistic and became the place whose iron discipline would appeal to men as diverse as Plato, Napoleon and Durt Hagn, founder of Gordonstoun, the Scots public school where the current Due of Edinburgh and Prince of Wales were educated.
Why did Sparta go to such extremes? Because its 8,000-odd male citizens were vastly outnumbered by the helots, or slaves, who toiled in the surrounding country. To keep this restless underclass intimidated, they actually declared war on the once a year, sending their young men out to live like guerrillas in the hills around Mistra and kill any helots they saw. And at all times the city was an armed cam, with the men eating in mess halls and seeing their wives mainly for purposes of reproduction. Sexual sharing was also permissible if it might produce healthy children for Sparta.
The city, not the individual, was what mattered. Other Greeks marveled at the way the relative of men who had died in war looked joyous, while the wives and children of those who returned seemed depressed. If a man returned from battle intact, he might be ostracized, even punished if he were seen smiling.One such "coward" was murdered by his own mother, and the tow Spartans who survived the devastating battle at Thermopylae committed suicide. No wonder Hitler wrote rapturously of the city, down to its black soup, which he thought similar to a broth found among the peasants of Schleswing-Holstein.
Musing on such matters as I meandered through the ruins, I had to admit that, no my own background was not so severe. At even the most traditional English public school pupils were not forced to walk barefoot in winter; nor were we ritually flogged at any altar, let alone the altar of the goddess of the hunt. This seems mainly to have happened in the northeast of the present town, at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. There, you can still see the stones where Plutarch saw boys expire rather than concede defeat.
All the same, what a relief to leap across the centuries to civilized Mistra.The city probably got its name from a Spartan cheese made in the shape of a thin cone, and does indeed twist and spiral up one of Tygetus's steeper foothills to the remains of a castle, 2.070 feet high.This was built y the Frankish conqueror William of Villehardouin, Prince of Achaia, in 1249, and offers a marvelous view of Sparta and beyond. It was up here that Goethe imagined Faust uniting with Helen of Troy. He never visited Mistra himself but clearly thought if a romantic place, and wasn't so wrong when he placed his lovers in the "courtyard of a castle, surrounded with rich, fantastic buildings of the Middle Ages"
Much that straggles down the mountain side was rich and fantastic in the Middle Ages. When the Greeks took over Mistra in 1262, the last of the Spartans moved there, create a city that was eventually home to 40,000 people and the jewel of the Peloponnesus. I entered by the higher of the town's two heavily fortified gates and meandered down to what was once thought to be the palace of Menelaus, but it actually the Palace of the Despots, a gold-brown sprawl of majestic three-story stonework looming over the great square where the citizenry gathered for meetings of proclamations .Down the stony track I went, past the shells of scores of houses and mansions, visiting the restored churches, scattered about the hillside, the were once rated as impressive as any in the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople included.
I could see why as I looked down on those elaborate clusters of red_tiled domes, roofs and arches and the sometimes rounded, sometimes exotically angled-walls that, in the case of the Peribleptos Monastery, actually sprout from Mistra's rock face. I could certainly see why when I entered the monastery, or the Hodegetria, or the Metropolitan cathedral, or the Pantanassa nunnery, in most art historians' opinions the finest of all. Everywhere there are 14th or 15th century wall paintings of surpassing energy and, often realism. Look for the bystander fastidiously holding his nose as Jesus raises Lazarus(Pantanassa), or the phalanx of wonderfully lender, graceful martyrs(Hodegetria), or midwives pouring water and angels anxiously hovering as a huddled Virgin prepares to give birth amid wild crags(Peribleptos), or Jesus healing bashful, spotted lepers (Metropolis), or the serene yet watchful Jesus in the tiny St. Sophia.
Mistra was once second in importance only to Constantinople in the Byzantine empire. Constantine II, who was to lose his capital to Turks in 1453, was actually throwned there. Artists an scholars flocked here, among them the "second Plato" , Plethon, who preached new-paganism and in those honor the Medicis founded the academy in Florence. But the glory days didn't last. Turkish occupation lessened the city's significance. Albanian attacks reduced its size, and, after a Muslim army took devastating reprisals for the citizens participation in the Greek war of independence, Mistra was finished. What was left of its population moved to resurgent Sparta, which Greece's first king, Otto, patriotically built aside the site of old Sparta.
There's little of serious interest in the new Sparta except a smallish museum. Sadly it does not contain the shell of the egg from which the baby Helen emerged, as its ancient Romans counterpart reputedly did, but among its treasures is a fine fifth-century bust of a triumphantly grinning Leonidas. So I moved on, following the route the Sparta charioteers must regularly have made south to Gytheion, where their city's navy was once based. IT is a delightful drive, for Taygetus continues to jut and beetle to the right, and the port town itself is well worth a wander. Strolling past the pleasantly shabby 19th century buildings lining the harbor, or the narrow streets high above it, I could imagine the Athenians Coming g to set fire to Spartan ships, or the crack Spartan troops, disguised as visiting athletes, returning to retake the town. And the tiny islet just outside the harbor was the very place where legend says Paris and Helen spent their first night before eloping to Troy.
Continuing south, I entered the Mani, there to divide 10 days between two hostelries? Lela's Tavern in the seaside village of Kardamili in the north, and the Vathia Town Hotel of Vathia, a cluster of mostly abandoned stone buildings that stands on a hill in the extreme south.
Mani hangs like a long, gnarled xxx above the surrounding sea, a stark, mountainous region whose 155 square miles contain scores of tiny villages, many of them high, hard to reach and, thanks to the lure of the cities, pretty much deserted. A vastly improved coastal road means that the developers are moving in, bringing camping sites and the odd apartment complex , and before long tourists will well outnumber the native population, which has been fallen from 30,000 to 5,000 in the last 200 years. nevertheless, there are Manote women still to be seen in their long black smocks and traditional broad-brimmed hats' Maniote men still trudge the arid fields and still claim descent from the desperate people who fled ancient Sparta and Gygheion wen Alaric's Visigoths and, later Slav warlords came to conquer an pillage.
This legend makes sense, for tow reasons. First Sparta's holiest place was at the tip of the peninsula, Cape Matapan, a temple of Poseidon with an oracle nearby. Steps, marble stones and even mosaics remain, but it takes a long, tough walk to find them, and most people now limit themselves to wandering the adjoining hills. Near here Heracles brought the hell-bound Cerberus into the sunlight, and here the lyre player Arion, who had been thrown overboard by sailors, was safely landed by music-loving dolphins. Here , too, a fifth-century Spartan leader called Pausanias was discovered taking bribes from the Persians and forced to return home, where he took refuge in a temple, was walled up by the citizens, and starved to death.
The other reason the Maniotes have been identified with the Spartans is their fierce independence and history of violence. This is the only part of Greece never subdued by any invader, even the Turks. On the contrary, the people thrived by attacking their weaker neighbors and robbing passing ships; when they were not doing that, they were warring with each other. Blood feuds between families could start for trivial reasons and continue for decades. Among the most astonishing sights in Greece are the tall, square towers in which the Maniotes lived and from which they hurled boulders at their enemies. There are clusters of thee dwellings in VAthia, Kita and the other villages that lie between Cape Matapan and Manis's aptly named capital Areopolis.
Actually, this small, unassuming town was given the war god's name only in the 19th century. That was in honor of Mani's greatest general , Petrobey Mavromichalis, or Black Michael. He struck the very first blows against the Turks in the war of independence, abut later proved so unruly that he was imprisoned by the leader of the new Greek state, who was then himself assassinated by Mavromichalis nephews. Black Michael called himself a Spartan. His people were addressed as "worthy Spartan's" by Napoleon when, some years earlier, he sent ambassadors to the Mani. The spirit of the ancient city was not dead; it had merely moved on.
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