The Independent Review (Volume 7) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GEMISTUS PLETHO THE traveller who has gone into the Peloponnese for the purpose of visiting ancient Sparta, will find his attention diverted from classical scenes to a place whose name is probably unfamiliar to him, and whose appearance is certainly unexpected. From the base of Mount Taygetus a small but steep hill projects into the plain, bearing the ruins of a castle on its summit, and the ruins of churches, palaces, and monasteries on its sides. The castle is surprisingly big, and, though the churches are surprisingly tiny, each has, or has had, its little dome and battered marble pillars, its mosaic pavement under foot, its perishing frescoes of mysterious saints upon the walls. Fifteen people live here now, and act as guides. But the place was once closely?perhaps too closely?populated, and has witnessed an elaborate if defective civilization. Such a place has no business in Greece. Yet the traveller may possibly neglect the Sparta museum, where he had intended to spend so much time over the archaic reliefs, and wander instead through the remnants of this unfamiliar world, nearer in its date than the world of Lycurgus, yet in its spirit even more remote. The great castle looks up a gorge into the white ridges of Taygetus behind, and in front it looks over the broad blue valley of the Eurotas: over New Sparta with its large pink cathedral and dreary boulevards; over the spacious site of Old Sparta, whose simple buildings have crumbled into the plain and are buried underneath the corn. But, when we enquire into the history of a place which is so wonderful in itself and in its situation, we meet with disappointment. We read that the Franks built it in the thirteenth century and 211 2 called it Misithras or Mistra; that it became the chief fortress in the Pelopon...