A City Where the Last Hopes Gathered: Late Byzantine Mistra and Peloponnese and Their Functions and Reception by the Contemporaries

Cyriac of Ancona, considered by some as the founding father of modern classical archaeology, while traveling in the winter of 1447-48 in and around ancient Sparta and Mistra, wrote in his diaries the following verses that he says he heard from Calliope, singing in their “most delightful Italian tongue:” “Great Laconian city of Sparta,/ the glory of Greece, once example to the world/ of warfare and of chastity; gymnasium and temple/ and mirror and font of every noble virtue;/ if I contemplate your constitution, customs/ and human law together with you other moral virtues,/ then gaze upon you on the Eurotas, suddenly/ I exclaim to you patron Diana’s chorus:/ ‘Where are your excellent Lycurgus, where the Dioscuri,/ the dire twins, Castor and Pollux,/ Anaxandridas, Orthryadas and Gylippus,/ Eurystus and Leonidas? Where do you dwell/ son of Atreus and Pausanias, o famous leader, / Lysander, Aristo, Agesilaus, and Xanthippus? / Neither in Rome, nor with Philip,’/ it said: ‘But it is your tawdry age. I assign/ the turn to Mistra, under the leadership of Constantine.”^[1]