Missing History
Being in Arcadia makes me realize the vast gap in my own historical knowledge and education. Name a city in Arcadia! My colleagues who read Homer know the region from the Catalog of Ships, (Iliad, 2.603-2.614). Everyone knows about Sparta, which is sort-of adjacent to Arcadia, but down on a plain (I’m looking at it now, from my hotel balcony in Mystras).
Sparta was a big deal, in my education, until it wasn’t. Thebes, and the Theban general, the genius Epaminondas, defeated Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE. The Spartan King Agis III managed a brief revolt against Macedonian rule in 333 BCE. It failed, and Sparta lost the last vestiges of independence when King Nabis lost a war against the Achaean League in 191 BCE. Somewhere in there, my historical education started ignoring Sparta, Arcadia, and the whole Peloponnese.
The place became “vacation-land” for the Romans, with Sparta turning into “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show”, or (God help us) “Medieval Times”, where Roman tourists could see the Spartans do their crazy Spartan stuff.
Alaric the Visigoth sacked Sparta in 396 CE. And until this trip I could not have told anyone a single thing that happened in the Peloponnese until the 20th Century (and that would have been limited to “I think I visited Olympia in 1981, as a child).
I knew nothing of William II of Villehardouin brought the Peloponnese into the Frankish Principality of Achaea, nor how after 1259 CE it was the capital of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea.
I do know that every single village we walked through had a memorial to its sons and daughters who died in the Greek War of Independence. And I know that this region’s history was tied up with Greek, Roman, Frankish, Venetian, and Ottoman rulers for two thousand years, although I don’t know their names. So much to learn!