Mantinea

Listen first. Out here on the plain, the loudest sound is often the wind moving through dry grass and low shrubs. Under your feet the ground is flat and open, ringed by bare grey mountains. You are standing on the floor of a high Arcadian basin, a short drive north of Tripoli. It looks like quiet farmland. But this plain held one of the most fought-over cities of ancient Greece.

Arcadia is the mountainous heart of the Peloponnese, the large peninsula that forms southern Greece. In poetry it later became a symbol of simple rural life. The real Arcadia was tougher than that. Mantinea sat on a natural crossroads, with routes running towards Sparta in the south, Argos in the east and Tegea close by. Control of this plain meant control of movement through the whole region. That position brought the city wealth, and it also brought armies.

Look for the line of the ancient walls. The city was laid out as a wide oval on the flat ground, which is unusual. Most Greek cities climbed a hill for defence. Mantinea had no hill, so it relied on its circuit wall instead. Today you can still trace the stone footings and the bases of many towers set at regular intervals. The upper parts of the wall were once built of sun-dried mud brick on top of these stone courses.

That mud brick is the key to a strange story. In the early fourth century before the Common Era, Sparta besieged the city. The ancient historian Xenophon tells how the Spartan king dammed the local river so that its water pooled against the walls. The mud bricks softened and began to collapse... and the city surrendered. Sparta then broke Mantinea apart and forced its people to live in scattered villages. A city was dismantled, not by fire, but by water.

The story did not end there. After Sparta lost its great defeat to Thebes at Leuctra, the Mantineans came back together and rebuilt their city. The oval wall you can trace today belongs largely to this refounding. This time the builders knew their lesson. They set the mud brick on a solid stone base, and they kept the river channelled around the walls, away from the vulnerable foundations.

This plain also gave its name to more than one major battle. The first famous one came in 418 before the Common Era, during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Mantinea joined an alliance with Argos and Athens against the Spartans. Sparta won, and the victory restored its military reputation across Greece. The historian Thucydides wrote a detailed account of the fighting, one of the most vivid battle descriptions to survive from the ancient world.

The second great battle, in 362 before the Common Era, is the one most people remember. The Theban general Epaminondas was perhaps the finest military mind of his age. He had broken Spartan power years before. Here at Mantinea his army won the field. But Epaminondas was mortally wounded during the fighting. Ancient writers say he died soon after, and with him the brief period of Theban leadership in Greece faded. A victory, and at the same moment, an ending.

Now turn towards the remains inside the walls. Near the centre of the old city are traces of the agora, the open public square where citizens met, traded and argued politics. Close by sits the theatre. Unlike most Greek theatres, which were cut into a natural slope, this one had to be partly built up on the level ground. Look at the stone retaining wall that supported its seats. On a plain without hills, even the audience needed engineering.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. In Plato's dialogue the Symposium, the philosopher Socrates says he learned his ideas about love from a wise woman called Diotima of Mantinea. Scholars still debate whether she was a real person or a figure Plato invented. Either way, one of the most famous passages on love in Western philosophy is credited to a woman from this city. Stand among these stones and that link to Plato feels a little closer.

Mantinea's later history kept changing its name. In the late third century before the Common Era, the city was captured and harshly treated by the Achaean League, a federation of Greek cities, together with the Macedonian king Antigonus. It was renamed Antigoneia in his honour. Centuries later the Roman emperor Hadrian restored the old name, Mantinea. Hadrian had personal reasons. His beloved companion Antinous came from a city that claimed Mantinean origins, and a cult to Antinous was established here.

Much of what we know about the visible ruins comes from French archaeologists who excavated here in the late nineteenth century. The ancient travel writer Pausanias, who toured Greece in the Roman period, also described the city's temples and monuments. Many of the buildings he saw have left only foundations. So use your imagination. Picture painted temples, statues in the agora and crowds filling the theatre, all inside that oval ring of towers.

Before you leave, glance at the church standing near the site. This is the modern church of Saint Photini, built in the twentieth century. It surprises almost everyone. Its builder mixed styles freely, combining Byzantine forms with echoes of ancient Greek and even Egyptian design. You will see colourful stonework, carved details and decorative touches in unexpected places. Some visitors love it and some find it odd. It is certainly unlike any other church you will see in Arcadia.

The contrast is worth a moment of thought. On one side, the low foundations of a city that was flooded, rebuilt, renamed and fought over. On the other, a modern church built by someone who wanted to bring the ancient world back into stone. Both sit on the same quiet plain, under the same wide sky. The site is open and exposed, so you will feel the sun and the wind much as soldiers and farmers did here long ago.

As you walk back, look once more at the flat ground stretching to the mountains. Notice how easily an army could cross it, and how a river could be turned against a wall. Notice the line of tower bases, patient and low in the grass. Mantinea does not shout. It asks you to read the land. And now, standing here, you can read it.