If he is obliged to ride for several hours and meet a carriage at Karytæna, the grim guardian of the mountainous road to Andritsena, where he is to spend the night, he will have cause to be thankful for an experience that has put him on more familiar terms with rude Arcadia, and has made him more sensitive to the change from monotonous lowland to vast, solitary mountains and deep ravines. The town of Karytæna lies on the slopes of one of the low hills that form the northern boundary of the plain of Megalopolis. Above it, on the hill’s summit, loom the ruins of an old Frankish castle, once the seat of a barony which contributed many a romantic story to the history of the Peloponnesus in the Middle Ages. Rarely in Greece is the harmony of historical impression interrupted. But here, like highwaymen to challenge intellectual security, feudalism and the mediæval world stalk out upon the unwary. The spectacle is unique. Karytæna stands at the point where the flat plain startlingly breaks into almost terrifying mountains. Mount Lycæus towers on the left, and all around serrated heights rise grandly above the castle, without detracting from its own defiant dignity. Past the foot of the hill flows, on its way to Elis, the Alpheus, here spanned by a striking bridge of six arches, bearing a Frankish inscription. The ruins of the old barony of Geoffrey de Villehardouin equal any feudal remains in Europe in their reminiscent suggestiveness of the romantic and violent life of the Middle Ages. But even while the traveller fears that he will become confused among memories of the Frankish dukes and princes of the Peloponnesus, of donjons and keeps, of chivalry and knighthood, of all the insignia and the emotions and the ideals which make the thirteenth century A. D. seem more remote from us than the fifth century B. C., he finds himself restrained and pacified. Whatever Greece lays her hands upon seems to lose its ephemeral or unrelated character and to take its place, individual, to be sure, but tributary in an harmonious whole. The ruined mediæval castle fits into the surrounding landscape as no disturbing factor, but rather as an integral part of what had helped also to shape the ancient life of Arcadia into its distinguishing forms. The age when the autochthonous Arcadians were resisting the inroads of Sparta and the age when the Slavic inhabitants were yielding to the attacks of the irresistible Franks seem to have had a common parentage in physical conditions. And the brawling stream of the Alpheus below seems to make the jousts and the romances of Geoffrey de Karytena’s court as much their own as were the festivals of Zeus and the love affairs of Pan and the nymphs.