Long before any Venetian clerk catalogued the village, the people who lived here were the Skiritai. Not quite Spartan citizens, not quite independent — they occupied a middle category the Greeks called Perioikoi-adjacent, dependent on Sparta but distinct from it. What they contributed was military. According to the tenth-century encyclopedia known as the Suda, the Skiritai battalion numbered six hundred men, and in every engagement they took the most dangerous position: the left wing, first into battle and last to withdraw. Xenophon recorded that their allegiance to Sparta reached back before the time of the lawgiver Lycurgus — which is to say, back into the mythic depths of Spartan history. Oeum, the primary town of Sciritis, sat directly on the Sparta-Tegea road, which made it strategically indispensable. Armies passed through here. Messengers passed through here. The Skiritai, who guarded this passage, were not ornamental fighters. They were the ones sent in first.

By the 1460s, Arcadia had fallen to the Ottoman Empire, and Vlachokerasia was no longer a strategic garrison town but simply a taxable village among many. The Ottomans held it for roughly two centuries before the Republic of Venice wrested the Peloponnese away in the Morean War of 1688. The Venetians renamed the peninsula the Regno di Morea and divided it into four administrative provinces. Vlachokerasia fell under the district of Tripolizza in the northeastern province they called Romania. What the Venetians left behind, apart from records, was resentment. Their tithe-collection system failed badly: within the province of Romania, hundreds of families fled their debts each year. The population of Vlachokerasia itself stood at two hundred people in forty-eight families when Francesco Grimani took his census in 1700 — a count that tells us the village survived, if not exactly flourished, under foreign administration. When the Ottomans retook Morea in 1715, the local population did not resist.

Modern administrative history has its own rhythm of consolidation and redrawing. In 1835, newly independent Greece counted Vlachokerasia at 289 inhabitants — 123 families — and designated it the seat of the municipality of Manthyrea within the province of Mantineia. Six years later, a wave of municipal consolidations swept through the region and the municipality of Manthyreas was abolished; the village merged into Kaltezon. Then in 1912, the Greek state established a new rule: any settlement with more than three hundred inhabitants and an elementary school could become an independent community. Vlachokerasia qualified and did so. By the 2021 census, its population stood at 385. The trajectory from ancient Oeum to modern Vlachokerasia is one of almost continuous habitation across roughly three thousand years — through Spartan dependence, Ottoman taxation, Venetian bureaucracy, and the slow reorganizations of the Greek state.

Archaeological excavations in the area around Vlachokerasia have turned up finds from the ancient settlement of Oeum. Those objects — whatever they are, whatever they tell us of daily life among the Skiritai and their predecessors — are now held at the Archaeological Museum of Tegea, about fifteen kilometers to the north. The museum is itself worth a visit: it holds, among other things, sculptures by the fourth-century BC master Skopas from the temple of Athena Alea. The connection between Vlachokerasia and Tegea is more than archival. This was always Tegea's hinterland, the rugged southern approach to the Arcadian plain. The road that the Skiritai guarded still runs, more or less, in the same direction — northeast toward Tripoli, the modern capital of Arcadia.