The geography of Thessaly is remarkable. According to a tradition already mentioned it was once a mountain-girt lake, the waters of which augmented by unusual rains burst their stupendous barriers and tore themselves a way through opposing rocks to the sea. Among the tribes of northern Hindùstân a similar tradition prevails respecting the formation of the Vale of Kashmèr; and whether in these cases the voice of fame has preserved or not an historical truth, such events may be regarded as not improbable in countries abounding with mountain lakes whose beds lie considerably above the level of the sea. The lofty ridge which skirts the shores of the Ægæan, and is said to have been rent in remote antiquity by the waters of the lake, presents a highly varied aspect to the approaching mariner. First on sailing northward Pelion comes in sight: a broad ridge rising from the waves like a huge uncrenalateduncrenalated wall, and covered in Homeric times with fiercely waving woods. To this succeeds Ossa, with its steep conical peak, clothed with durable snows and divided by a narrow dusky gap from Olympos. This gap is Tempe,^[175] whose savage beauties poets and sophists have vied with each other in describing, though the reality is still finer than their pictures. On entering the defiles of the mountains a narrow glen hemmed in by precipitous rocks, bare in some places, in others verdant with hanging oaks, receives the waters of the Peneios, which, like the Rhone at St. Maurice and the Nile at Silsilis, in some places fill up the whole breadth of the pass, leaving scarcely room for a straitened road carried over rocky ledges. Farther on they diffuse themselves over a broad pebbly bed, and narrow prospects are opened up through woody vistas into soft pastural recesses, carpeted with emerald turf, and perfumed with flowers and shrubs of the richest fragrance. Anon the vale contracts again, gloomy cliffs frown over the stream and sadden its surface with their shadows, until at length the whole chain is traversed and the Peneios precipitates its laughing waters into the Ægæan.^[176] Crossing the great range of Pindos we enter Epeiros,^[177] a country anciently divided into many provinces, and partly inhabited by semi-barbarous tribes, where on the borders of a lake singularly beautiful and picturesque stood the fane and oracle of Dodonæan Zeus. Homer, accustomed to the mild skies of Ionia, speaks of its climate as rude and severe. But Byron, born among the hungry rocks of Caledonia, and habituated to the savage features of the north, was smitten with its wild charms, and thus describes one of the scenes in the neighbourhood near the sources of the Acheron.

Clusters of islands clothed with poetical verdure stretch along the coast thickly indented by diminutive bays and embouchures of rivers. On a point of the Acarnanian shore^[178] in the mouth of the Ambracian gulf, the Commonwealth of Rome which had foundered so many rival states suffered final shipwreck, and the shores of avenged Hellas were strewed with the wrecks of Roman freedom. Ætolia, Doris, Locris, Phocis, in which was the mystic navel of Gaia,^[179] and the deep valley of Bœotia, divided from each other by mountains or by considerable rivers, minutely intersected by streams, and broken up into a perpetual succession of hill and dale, conduct us southward to the Corinthian Gulf and the borders of Attica.

Reserving this illustrious division of Hellas, and Megaris which originally formed a part of it, for the close of our rapid outline, we enter the Peloponnesos,—a country remarkable both for its physical configuration, and for the races which anciently inhabited it. Connected with the continent by the narrow isthmus of Corinth it immediately expands westward and southward into a peninsula of large dimensions, in form resembling a ragged plantain leaf or outstretched palm.^[180] Like the northern division of Hellas the Peloponnesos is rough with mountain chains, and belted round with cliffs. Towards the centre it swells into a lofty plateau, known to antiquity under the name of Arcadia. Foreign poets, misapprehending the nature of the country, have described this province as a succession of soft pastoral scenes.^[181] But its real character is very different, consisting chiefly of an extensive table-land, supported by vast mountain buttresses, which in some places tower into peaks of extraordinary elevation. It is broken up into innumerable valleys and deep glens, overhung with wild precipitous rocks, clothed with gloomy forests, and buried during a great part of the year in clouds and snow. The inhabitants were rough and unpromising as the soil, distinguished like the modern Swiss for no quality but bravery, which, like them too, they sold with a mercenary recklessness to the best bidder.^[182] Achaia is a slip of sea-coast sloping towards the north. Elis, a succession of beautiful plains with few eminences intervening, well watered and renowned for their fine breed of mares. This, the Holy land of the Hellenes, sacred every rood to Zeus, was to the Greeks a place of pilgrimage, as Mecca to the Arabs and Palestine to the Christians of the West. In the Homeric age it was confined within narrow limits, its sea-coast only extending from Buprasion to the promontory of Hyrminè, scarcely indeed, so far, as Myrsinos is said to be its last city towards the north, and Buprasion is mentioned rather as a separate state. It was divided from Achaia by Mount Scollis, which Homer calls “the rock Olenia,” and Aleision is the boundary to the south; consequently, neither Mount Pholöe nor Olympia, nor the Alpheios was then included in Elis, still less Triphylia.

Argolis, on the opposite side of the peninsula, is traversed by a broad ridge of hills, which, branching off from Mount Cyllene and Parthenion in Arcadia, abounds in deep ravines and spacious natural caverns. It contains, however, several plains of much fertility; but, though marshy and subject to malaria, the neighbourhood of the capital is deficient in good water. The fame of Argos^[183] rests almost wholly on a fabulous basis: it was great in the infancy of Greece; it took the lead in the Trojan war; but, with the irruption of the half-barbarous Dorians into the Peloponnesos, the glory of the old heroic race

waned visibly, and Argos and its twin city, Mycenæ, sank into comparative insignificance.

Laconia consists of a hollow valley, enclosed between two mountain chains, proceeding from the great Arcadian barrier, Parnon and Kronios, and stretching southward to the sea. Down the centre of this vale flows the Eurotas, whose sources lie above Belemina, among the steep recesses of Taygetos.^[184] Though enlarged by several tributary brooks, it preserves, until some way below Sparta, the character of a mountain torrent; but after precipitating itself in a romantic sparkling cascade, appears for some time to be lost in a morass. Escaping, however, from the swamp, it flows during the remainder of its course over a firm gravelly bed to the Laconian gulf. Immediately above Sparta the valley narrows exceedingly; but, at this point, the hills receding suddenly on both sides, sweep round a small circular plain, and, a short distance below the city, again approach, and press upon the bed of the Eurotas.^[185] The site of Sparta, therefore, resembles on a small scale that of the Egyptian Thebes, which is similarly hemmed round by the Arabian and Libyan mountains. It follows, too, that the condition of the atmosphere must to a certain extent be alike in both places; for the ridges of Taygetos and Thornax rising to a great height, not only intercept the cooler breezes from the west and north, but, bending amphitheatrically round the plain, concentrate the sun’s rays, which, being bare and rocky, they reflect with great force. In summer, therefore, the heat is intense: in winter, on the other hand, their great elevation suffices morning and evening to exclude the slanting beams, thus causing a degree of cold little inferior, perhaps, to what is felt in the highlands of Arcadia.

But though lofty and bleak, the uplands of Laconia are not incapable of cultivation, and in many places were anciently covered with forests of plane trees. Their eastern slopes were likewise clothed with vines, irrigated, as in Switzerland and Burgundy, by small rills, conducted through artificial channels from springs high up in the mountains.^[186] The summits of Taygetos are waste and wild; rent and shattered by frequent earthquakes, lashed by rain-storms, and here and there bored and undermined by gnawing streams, working their way to the valley, it presents the aspect of a fragment of nature in its decrepitude. South, however, of Mount Evoras the country opens into a plain of considerable fertility, extending eastward towards Mount Zarax and the sea. On the Messenian frontier, also, are many valleys highly productive. This portion of Lacedæmon obtained in the time of Augustus the name, given perhaps in mockery, of the land of the Eleuthero Lacones, or “Free Laconians.”^[187]

Protected on the land side by mountains difficult to be traversed, and presenting towards the sea an inhospitable harbourless coast, Laconia seems marked out by nature to be the abode of an unsocial people. Like that of many Swiss cantons, its climate is generally harsh and rude, vexed by cold winds alternating with burning heats, and appears to communicate analogous qualities to the minds of its inhabitants, who have been in all ages remarkable for valour untempered by humanity. In such a country the nobler arts can never be completely naturalised. The virus imbibed from nature will find its way into the character, and defy the influence of culture and of government.

Messenia presents, in every respect, a contrast to Laconia. Along the sea-coast, indeed, particularly from Pylos to Cape Aeritas, its barrenness is complete; neither woods nor thickets, nor any vestige of verdure being visible upon the red cinder-like precipices beetling over the sea, or sloping off into grey mountains above. But having passed this Alpine barrier, we find the land sinking down into rich plains, which on the banks of the broad Pamisos were anciently, for their luxuriant fertility,^[188] denominated “the Happy.” North, and about the sources of the Balyra, the Amphitos, and the Neda the scenery grows highly romantic and picturesque, the eye commanding from almost every elevated point innumerable narrow meandering glens, each with its bubbling streamlet circling round green eminences, clothed to their summits with hanging woods. Messenia, which, as soon inhabited, must have been wealthy, appears to have been a favourite resort of poets in remote antiquity. Here the Thracian Thamyris, in a contest, as was fabled, with the Muses, lost his sight, together with the gift of song; and in a small rocky island on its coast,—the haunt, when I saw it, of sea-mews and cormorants,—Sparta received from an Athenian general of mean abilities one of the most galling defeats recorded in her annals.

Returning out of the Peloponnesos by way of the Isthmos, and quitting at the Laconian rocks the territories of Corinth, we enter the Megaris,^[189] originally, as I have before observed, a part of the Athenian territories. Attica is a triangular promontory, of small extent, projecting into the Myrtöan sea, between Argolis and Eubœa. A mountain chain, of no great elevation, forms, under several names, the boundary between this country and Bœotia; and Mount Kerata, in later times, divided it from Megaris. On every other side Attica is washed by the sea, which, together with nearly all the circumjacent islands, was, in antiquity, regarded as a part of its empire.^[190] This minute division of Greece, fertile in nothing but great men, is seldom viewed with any eye to the picturesque. Satisfied that Athens stood there, we commonly ask no more. Genius has breathed over it a perfume sweeter than the thyme of its own hills,—has painted it with a beauty surpassing that of earth,—rendered its atmosphere redolent for ever of human greatness and human glory,—and cast so dazzling an illusion over its very dust and ruins, that they appear more beautiful than the richest scenes and most perfect structures of other lands.

Independently, however, of its historical importance, Attica is invested with numerous charms. Consisting of an endless succession of hill and dale,^[191] with many small plains interspersed; and swelling towards its northern frontier into considerable mountains, it presents a miniature of the whole Hellenic land.^[192] In antiquity its uplands and ravines and secluded hollows were clothed with wood,—oaks, white poplars, wild olive-trees, or melancholy pines. The arbutus, the agnus castus, wild pear, heath, lentisk, and other flowering shrubs decked its hill-sides and glens; on the brow of every eminence wild thyme, sweet marjoram, with many different kinds of odoriferous plants exhaled their fragrance beneath the foot;^[193] while rills of the clearest and sweetest water in the world, leaped down the rocks, or conducted their sparkling currents through its romantic and richly cultivated valleys. Southward, among the mountains of scoriæ of the mining district, springs of silver^[194] may be said to have usurped the place of fountains. The face of the country is nearly everywhere arid and barren,—the plains are parched,—the gullies encumbered with loose shingle,—the eminences unpicturesque and dreary; yet wherever vegetation takes place, the virtue of the Attic soil displays itself in the production of fragrant flowers, whence the bee extracts the most delicious honey in the world, superior in quality to that of Hybla or Hymettos.

Comparative barrenness may, however, upon the whole, be considered as characteristic of Attica. Indeed, Plato,^[195] in a very curious passage, likens to a body emaciated by sickness the hungry district round the capital, where the soil has collapsed about the rocks. But from this innumerable advantages have arisen. The earth being light and porous permits whatever rain falls immediately to sink and disappear, as in Provence,^[196] which, more than any other part of Europe, resembles Attica. Hence, except in some few inconsiderable spots,^[197] no bogs, no marshes exist to poison the air with cold effluvia: a ridge of mountains protects it against the northern blasts: mild breezes from the ocean prevail in almost all seasons: snow seldom lies above a few hours on the ground. The atmosphere, accordingly, kept constantly free from terrene exhalations, is buoyant and sparkling as on the Libyan desert, when, at noon, every elevated rock appears to be encircled by a luminous halo.^[198] In air so pure the act of breathing is a luxury which produces a smile of satisfaction on the countenance; the mind performs its operations with ease and rapidity; and life, everywhere sweet, appears to have a finer relish than in countries exposed to watery and unwholesome fogs. It was perfectly philosophical, therefore, in Plato,^[199] to regard Attica as a place designed by nature to bring the human intellect to the greatest ripeness and perfection, a quality extended by Aristotle to Greece at large. The same atmospheric properties were favourable to health and long life, warding off many disorders common in other parts of the country.

A learned and ingenious but fanciful writer^[200] considers Peloponnesos to have been the heart of Greece. Following up this idea, we must unquestionably pronounce Athens to have been the head, the seat of thought, the place where its arts and its wisdom ripened. But ere we touch upon the capital, which cannot be slided over with a cursory remark, it will be necessary to enter into some little detail respecting the demi or country towns of Attica,^[201] of which in the flourishing times of the republic there existed upwards of one hundred and seventy-four. Of these small municipal communities, of which too little is known, several were places of considerable importance, possessing their temples, their Agoræ, their theatres, filled with walks and surrounded by impregnable fortifications. The Athenians regarded Athens, indeed, as the Hebrews did Jerusalem, in the light of their great and holy city, the sanctuary of their religion and of their freedom. But this did not prevent their preferring the calm simplicity of a country life to the noisier pleasures of the town. Many distinguished families, accordingly, had houses in these demi, or villas in their vicinity. Here, also, several of the greatest men of Athens were born: Thucydides was a native of Halimos,^[202] Sophocles of Colonos, Epicurus of Gargettos, Plato of Ægina, Xenophon of Erchia, Tyrtæos, Harmodios, and Aristogeiton of Aphidnæ, Antiphon of Rhamnos, and Æschylus of Eleusis.

In other points of view, also, the towns and villages of Attica possessed great interest. They long continued to be the seats of the primitive worship of the country, where the tutelar deities of particular districts, of earth-born race, were adored with that affectionate faith and that fervency of devotion which peculiarly belong to small religious communities. The gods they worshipped appeared almost to be their fellow citizens, and to exist only for their protection. In fact, they were the patron saints of the villages. Fabulous legends and historical traditions combined with religion to shed celebrity over the Attic demi. There was hardly in the whole land a single inhabited spot which did not figure in their poetry or in their annals as the scene of some memorable exploit. Aphidnæ^[203] was renowned, for example, as the place whence the Dioscuri bore away their sister Helen, after her rape by Theseus, in revenge for which the youthful heroes devastated the whole district. “Grey Marathon,”^[204] as Byron aptly terms it, was embalmed for ever in Persian blood, and rendered holy by the vast barrows raised there by the state over the ashes of its fallen warriors. Rhamnos on the Attic Dardanelles became famous for its statue of Nemesis, originally of Aphrodite, the work of Diodotos or Agoracritos of Paros, not unworthy to be compared for size and beauty with the productions of Pheidias. The irruption of the Peloponnesians conferred a melancholy celebrity on Deceleia,^[205] and Phylæ obtained a place in history as the stronghold where Thrasybulos gathered together the small but gallant band which avenged the cause of freedom upon the thirty. Of Eleusis,^[206] it is enough to say that there the ceremonies of initiation into the mysteries were performed.

The capital of Megara, like Athens, stood a short distance from the sea; but was joined by long walls to its harbour Nisæa, protected from the weather by the Minoan promontory. In sailing thence to the Peiræeus we pass several islands, none of which, however, are of any magnitude, save Salamis, in remote antiquity a separate state governed by its own laws. The old capital, already deserted in the time of Strabo, stood on the southern coast over against Ægina; but the principal town of later times was situated on a bay at the root of a tongue of land projecting toward that part of Attica^[207] where Xerxes sat to behold his imperial armada annihilated by the republicans of Hellas. Salamis was known of old under various names,—Skiras, Cychræa and Pituoussa, from the Pitus, or pine tree, by which its rocks and glens were in many places shaded. Immediately before the engagement in which his navy was destroyed, the Persian monarch sought to unite Salamis to the continent by a dam two stadia in length; his project, had it succeeded, would have ruined the ferrymen of Amphialè, a class of individuals whose operations Solon judged of sufficient importance to be regulated by a particular article in his code. Of the smaller islets that form the outworks of the Attic coast, little need be said, since they were nearly all barren, and inhabited only by a few legendary traditions. The tomb of Circe was shown on the larger of the Pharmacoussæ; and the island of Helena, east of the Samian promontory obtained the reputation of having been the spot where the faithless queen of Menelaus consummated her guilt.^[208]

Ægina belonged to Attica only by conquest; but as when subdued its subjection was complete and lasting, it must not be altogether omitted in this glance over the home territories of the Great Demos. Like Attica itself, the island lying in the Saronic Gulf is of a triangular shape. By proximity it belongs to the Peloponnesos, being within thirty stadia of the Methanæan Chersonesos, while to Salamis is a voyage of ninety stadia, and to the Peiræeus one hundred and twenty. But the sea itself having been considered a part of Attica, whose flag, like that of England, streamed for ages triumphantly over its billows, the islands also which it surrounded fell one by one into the hands of the people, and this small Doric isle among the rest. A number of diminutive islets, or rather rocks, cluster round the shores of Ægina, some barren and treeless, others indued with a certain degree of fertility and verdant with pine woods.

The most remarkable objects in Ægina were placed at the angles of the island. The city and harbour towards the west, on the east looking towards Attica the temple of Athena, and, near its southern extremity, “a magnificent conical mountain, which from its grandeur, its form, and its historical recollections, is the most remarkable among the natural features of Ægina.”^[209] An eminence so lofty and in shape so beautiful would naturally be an object of much interest in so small an island. The local superstitions would necessarily cluster round it, as around Ida in Crete and Olympos in Thessaly. Accordingly on the summit of this mountain the fables of Ægina represent King Æacos praying, in the name of the whole Hellenic nation, to Zeus for rain, as the prophet prayed for the Israelites, and with equal success. Here, therefore, a recent traveller has with great judgment fixed the site of the Panhellenion, near the spot where a chapel, dedicated to the prophet Elias, now stands. In dimensions Ægina, according to Scylax, ranked twelfth among the isles of Hellas. Strabo attributes to it a circumference of one hundred and eighty stadia; but Sir WilliamWilliam Gell, in his Argolis,^[210] considers its perimeter, not including the fluctuations of the bays and creeks, to be not less than two hundred and ten stadia, and its square contents three thousand one hundred and sixty-four stadia, or forty-one square miles.^[211] The interior is rocky, rough, and perforated with caverns, in which, according to fabulous legends, the Myrmidons resided, and Chabrias afterwards lay in ambush for the Spartan Gorgopos and his Æginetan allies.^[212] A light thin soil nourishes but sparing vegetation on the mountains, but several of the small valleys, filled with earth washed down by rains from the uplands, are rich and fertile, watered by springs and rivulets, and beautified with groves of imperishable verdure.^[213]

Much has been written on the extent and population of Attica, respecting which most of the philosophers of the last generation entertained very erroneous ideas. An examination of their statements might still, perhaps, be interesting; but it would lead me far beside the scope of my present work, and occupy space that can be better filled up. According to the most careful calculation Attica contained seven hundred and twenty square miles, or taking into account the island of Salamis seven hundred and forty-eight. The whole of this extremely limited space swarmed, however, with population; for even so late^[214] as 317 B. C. after all the calamities which the republic had undergone, Attica still contained five hundred and twenty-seven thousand six hundred and sixty persons, or nearly seven hundred and seventy-three to the square mile, a proportion much higher than is found in the most thickly peopled counties of England.

This, however, taking into account the form of government, the industrious habits, and extreme frugality of the people, is entirely within the bounds of probability. But in what is related of the population of Ægina, the calculations current among learned authors are so extravagant as to exceed all belief. Müller and Boeckh,^[215] who on other occasions, and sometimes very unseasonably affect scepticism, unhesitatingly admit the account in Athenæus, which attributes four hundred and seventy thousand slaves to the Æginetans.^[216] To these the former adds a free population of forty thousand, making the whole amount to upwards of half a million, or twelve thousand four hundred and fifty-seven to the square mile. Mr. Clinton,^[217] clearly perceiving the absurdity of this calculation, proposes to read seventy thousand, which will leave a population in the proportion of two thousand six hundred and eighty-two to the square mile. The passage in Athenæus is no doubt, as Bochart suspects,^[218] corrupt, and this being the case nothing is left but to determine from analogy the population of Ægina, which, supposing it equally dense with that of Attica would have amounted to something more than thirty thousand souls.