Elytis said, "All my ideas turn out looking like islands." Poets are sprinkled, like the islands so many of them came from, all across the eastern Mediterranean. The first stop after Ios on the way to Piraeus is Paros, home to Archilochos (the sergeant-major), soldier and egotistic poet of the mid-7th century BC. Now fat from tourism, Paros — famous for the best marble in classical times — offered only a scratchy living in Archilochos's day. He died fighting, for money, on Thassos, the bristle-backed island in the far north of the Aegean which he said looked like a donkey on heat. His work bristles too. He was the man who said, "The fox has many tricks, the hedgehog only one; but it's a beauty." Archilochos was a hedgehog whose trick was writing barbed, immortal verses. He could make poetry out of failures of all kinds: in bed and on the battlefield. He actually boasted about throwing away his shield (he could always get another one, he said).

Greece is regarded by the screen-scanning number-crunchers who sprout and spout in Brussels as a little country with small prospect of ever emerging from debt. What else can you expect when geek meets Greek? When you are there, the country is boundlessly rich. There are always places and islands you have yet to see, or see again. For me, the southern Peloponnese is among them. We rented a car in Piraeus and headed for the "the island of Pelops" along the great euro-funded highway which has gashed a wide, easy way — too easy, some say — down to the fertile valley of the Eurotas, where Sparta's helots — fellow Greeks whom the Spartans had enslaved — did the work which left their masters free to develop their martial art. 

The Spartans became a by-word, among their admirers (from Plato to English schoolmasters), for austerity and self-discipline. In fact, despite their bleak diet, their kings had an insatiable appetite for gold. Their city — in reality an unwalled collection of villages — lacked anything to rival the Athenian Parthenon, but its rulers had richly-lined pockets. The story is that they had to import their national poet, Tyrtaeus, from Athens, but it is, of course, only Athenians who say so. Trust a Greek not to trust another Greek. Today, you can buy a good picnic (hot or cold) at the supermarket, which the old Spartans would have considered dangerous for morale. The best ghosts in the area are a few miles from the old city, in Mistra, the Byzantine bishopric stacked on the flank of the Taygetus mountains. Its sad ruined choirs and dilapidated houses make up a sort of vertical Pompeii, stepping up towards the Venetian fort high above the abandoned city. Higher still, on the horizon, are the hideous wind-turbines which look as though they are trying to lift the Taygetus range into the blue heavens.