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course they’re Jews,” the Arcadian cried, turning on him. “All the villagers in Anavryti and Trypi are Jews. Always have been.” By now the reflected men were rolling about with unrestrained laughter at the idea of these two semitic villages on top of the Taygetus mountains.

    It was an outstanding bit of information. I had never heard of Jews in the Peloponnese. The only Jews in Greece, as far as I knew, were the Sephardim in the north—Salonika and a few mainland towns such as Yanina, Naoussa, Preveza and Arta and in a few of the islands—talking fifteenth-century Spanish and Ladino. Their story is well known. Expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Sultan had offered them hospitality in the areas of Constantinople and Salonika, just as the Medici had allowed them to take root and multiply in Grosseto and Leghorn. There is no anti-semitic feeling among the Greeks: Greek business men like to think they can outwit any Jew, or any Armenian for that matter; and, in the Karaghiozi shadow-play the Jewish puppets are amiably absurd figures in caftans and spiked beards called Yacob and Moïse, humorously whining broken Greek to each other in nasal squeaks. Their numbers have been cruelly reduced by the German occupation.
    I asked if the villagers of Anavryti spoke Spanish. A priest’s reflection leant forward clicking his tongue in the negative: he was the hairiest man I’ve ever seen. (What’s he doing in here, I wondered. Orthodox clergy are forbidden to shave or cut their hair.) Two dark eyes seemed to be peering into the looking-glass through a hole in a black hayrick.
    â€œNo,” he said, “they speak Greek like the rest of us. When Holy St. Nikon the Penitent, the apostle of the Laconians, converted our ancestors to Christianity, these people were living in the plain. They took refuge up in the goat-rocks, and have lived there ever since. They go to church, they take the sacraments. They are good people but they are Jews all right.”
    â€œOf course they are,” the old Arcadian repeated. Shaven and shorn now, and brushed clear of the wreckage, I prepared to go. The old man leant from the window into roasting Sparta and, waving his crook, shouted through grinning gums equipped with a solitary grey fang, a repetition of his warning that they would skin us alive.

    * * *
    The man who led the way to the mosaics—the only antiquity surviving inside the modern town of Sparta and a Graeco-Roman one at that—had the same tale to tell. They were a strange lot; and Jews.... We followed him down some steps under an improvised roof. With a tilt of his wrist, he emptied a pitcher on a grey blur of dusty floor. The water fell in a great black star, and, as it expanded to the edges, shapes defined themselves, colours came to life and delightful scenes emerged. Orpheus in a Phrygian-cap fingered his lyre in the heart of a spellbound menagerie of rabbits, lions, leopards, stags, serpents and tortoises. Then, as effeminate and as soft as Antinous, Achilles swam to the surface among the women of Scyros. Next door another splash spread further enchantments: Europa—lovely, Canova-like, with champagne-bottle shoulders and a wasp waist, heavy-thighed, callipygous and long-legged—sat side-saddle on the back of a fine bull breasting the foam to Crete.
    â€œHow pleased Zeus is to have her on his back,” the man observed. “See, he’s smiling to himself.”
    When we left, the water was drying on the first mosaics, and the flowers and figures and beasts had almost faded back into invisibility. In the time of Pausanias the town’s most treasured exhibit was a fragment of the shell of one of Leda’s two eggs, the portentous double-yolker from which Helen was hatched. (The other one enclosed Clytemnestra, each of them sharing a shell with one of the heavenly twins.)
    The fierceness of the blaze that had beaten on Sparta’s main street