Greek Archipelago

“ The sea power of the Greek communities on the coast of Asia Minor and in the Archipelago began to be a formidable rival to the Phoenician soon after the time of Hanno and Himilco, and peculiar interest attaches to the first recorded Greek voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules. ”

“ There is scarcely a single point "where, in clear weather, a mariner would feel himself left in a solitude between sky and water; the eye reaches from island to island, and easy voyages of a day lead from bay to bay." Greek towns, including very ancient places, were scattered along the western coast of Asia Minor, between the mountains and the shore. The Aegean was studded with Greek islands. These, together with the islands in the Ionian Sea, on the west, formed a part of Greek territory. ”

“ The Phoenicians, and later the Greeks, were the pioneers of the new era. Tyre, Athens, Miletus, Rhodes, occupied the centre of the nascent world, and bound together Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, Sicily, and Italy in one mercantile system. A little later, Hellas itself enlarged, so as to include Syracuse, Byzantium, Alexandria, Cyrene, Cumae, Neapolis, Massilia. The inland sea became "a Greek lake." But as navigation thus slowly widened to the western Mediterranean basin, the centre of commerce had to shift perforce from Hellas to the mid-point of the new area. ”

“ I doubt whether there is anything in Greece, abounding as it is in enchanting scenery and interesting recollections, that can rival the Corinthiac Gulf. There is no lake scenery in Europe that can compete with it. Its coasts, broken into an infinite variety of outline by the ever-changing mixture of bold promontory, gentle slope, and cultivated level, are crowned on every side by lofty mountains of the most pleasing and majestic forms ”

“ The Hellas of which it speaks is a cluster of autonomous cities in the Peloponnesus, the Islands, and Northern Greece, together with their colonies scattered over the coasts of Italy, Sicily, Thrace, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and Africa. These cities care only to be independent, or at most to lord it over one another. Their political institutions, their religious ceremonies, their customs, are civic and local. Language, commerce, a common Pantheon, and a common art and poetry are the ties that bind them together. In its second phase, Greek history begins with the expedition of Alexander. ”

“ From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and deserted—a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all Greece in these latter ages. We saw no ploughed fields, very few villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and hardly ever an isolated house. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. ”

“ Water is the birthplace of civilisation, as of life itself, and the original home of the Ægean or Mycenæan civilisation is probably to be found in the island of Crete. It is crammed with remains of pre-Hellenic culture. It is a big stepping-stone from Greece to Asia Minor, Karpathos and Rhodes lying between. It is in the line of communication with Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt on the East, and with Sicily and the coastlines of the Western Mediterranean. The earliest Greek tradition looks back to Crete "as the home of divinely inspired legislation and the first centre of maritime dominion." ”

“ But the neighbouring islands equally form a part of continuous Greece; and the other coasts of the Ægæan, Asiatic as well as Thracian, were so thickly strewed with Greek colonies as to form, if not part of continuous Greece, yet part of the immediate Greek world. The western coast, as it is less peninsular, is also less insular, and the islands on the western side of Greece did not reach the same importance as those on the eastern side.{22} Still they too, the Ionian islands of modern geography, form in every sense a part of Greece. ”

“ One may now visit the more interesting sites of the Greek peninsula and even certain of the islands with perfect ease, at no greater cost in money or effort than is entailed by any other Mediterranean journey, and with the added satisfaction that one sees not only inspiring scenery, but hills and vales peopled with a thousand ghostly memories running far back of the dawn of history and losing themselves in pagan legend, in the misty past when the fabled gods of high Olympus strove, intrigued, loved, and ruled. ”

“ The map may do something; but no map can bring home to us the true nature of the Greek land till we have stood on a Greek hill-top, on the akropolis of Athens or the loftier akropolis of Corinth, and have seen how thoroughly the land was a land of valleys cut off by hills, of islands and peninsulas cut off by arms of sea, from their neighbours on either side. {1566} Or we might more truly say that, while the hills fenced them off from their neighbours, the arms of the sea laid them open to their neighbours. Their waters might bring either friends or enemies ”

“ Those who believe in Semitic or other foreign settlements in Greece are apt, though they have no legend like those of Pelops or Kekrops to help them, to quarter a Phœnician settlement on Akrokorinthos. A name or two is all that they have to show, and a hill called φοινίκαιον, and an Ἀθήνη Φοινίκη do not prove much. No site can be more thoroughly Greek; the hill-top, near the sea, but not on it, is the ideal position for a Greek coast town of the earliest type; and at Corinth we have the mightiest of hilltops, near but not on, not one sea only, but two. ”

“ We are forced to approach the historical period of Greece through a cloud-land of legend, in which atones of the gods are mingled with those of men, and the most marvellous of incidents are introduced as if they were everyday occurrences. The Argonautic expedition belongs to this age of myth, the vague vestibule of history. It embraces, as does the tale of the wanderings of Ulysses, very ancient ideas of geography, and many able men have treated it as the record of an actual voyage, one of the earliest ventures of the Greeks upon the unknown seas. ”

“ The hill-top itself offers a scene which is unsurpassed even among the remoter islands of the Greek seas. The intense brilliance of the very white marble columns 188under the cloudless sky is tempered by the somewhat sombre green of neighbouring trees. Afar are seen the broken coast and the varied mountains of the mainland from Megara to Sunium. Below, in capricious loveliness, now a tranquil plain of ultramarine, now a restless surface of sparkling crystal, stretches the Saronic Gulf. ”

“ Then across the narrow entrance to the Pagasæan and Malian gulfs the system is continued by the sharp dorsal fins of the island of Eubœa, that stretches like a sea-monster along the shores of Locris, Bœotia, and Attica, to reappear at intervals far to the southeast in the islands Andros, Tenos, Myconos, Delos, Naxos, Amorgos, and Astypalæa. On the west of Thessaly the great Pindus ridge, descending through the centre of northern Greece, details on the rugged system of peaks and ranges which fill central Greece southward to the Gulf of Corinth and which in general run from west to east. ”

“ The fruitful plain, the height of Mount Voïdia in the background, the splendid waterfront facing the mountainous Ætolian coast combine to give a suitable welcome to Greece. This entrance is never fairer than in the hour when the silver gray of dawn is obliterated by the clear bloom in the sky that heralds the rising sun. The morning light reveals outlines in naked distinctness, and tinges all surfaces with a colour so fresh and buoyant that an immediate conviction arises of the joyous nobility of 195Greek scenery and of the youthfulness which a race so nurtured might maintain. ”

“ Time is certain to remove the objection of the comparative isolation of Greece still more than it has done at this writing, no doubt. It is still true that Greece is, to all intents and purposes, an island, despite its physical connection with the mainland of Europe. The northern mountains, with the wild and semi-barbaric inhabitants thereamong, serve to insulate the kingdom effectually on the mainland side, just as the ocean insulates it on every other hand, so that one is really more out of the world at Athens than in Palermo. ”

“ Having said so much on the subject of the leading Greek cities of Asia Minor, or rather of some of them, we shall notice, but as briefly as possible, the principal islands adjacent to its shores; and as the space at our disposal compels us to contract our narrative within the closest limits, we shall refer only to Lesbos, Samos, Chios, Rhodus, and Cyprus. Crete, as a matter of fact, is generally attached, geographically, to the continent of Greece, but, in any case, would require a volume to itself that adequate justice should be done to its ancient and modern story. ”

“ We begin to understand that the northern, the southern, and the western view really make up a system in which the lands and seas which we leave behind us have no share. And when we once find ourselves on the waters of the Corinthian gulf, we begin to feel ourselves in another world from the world of the eastern Hellas, the world of Athens and Sparta. In both of the great divisions of the inland sea, within and without the straits, in the gulf of Krissa and in the gulf of Patrai, we feel that we have left the Greece of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophôn behind us. ”

“ Now countries which are great plains or which have as a chief means of transport some great river like the Euphrates or Nile tend to become united under some common rule. The cities of Egypt and the cities of Sumeria, for example, ran together under one system of government. But the Greek peoples were cut up among islands and mountain valleys; both Greece and Magna Græcia are very mountainous; and the tendency was all the other way. When the Greeks come into history they are divided up into a number of little states which showed no signs of coalescence. They are different even in race. ”

“ Central Greece, extending from the southern limits of Northern Greece to the gulfs of Corinth and Aegina; (iii.) the peninsula of the Peloponnesus or Morea, attached to the mainland by the Isthmus of Corinth; (iv.) the Ionian Islands on the west coasts of Epirus and Greece; (v.) The islands of the Aegean Sea, including Euboea, the Cyclades and the northern Sporades.
In the complexity of its contour and the variety of its natural features Greece surpasses every country in Europe, as Europe surpasses every continent in the world. The broken character of its coast-line is unique ”

“ Ever and anon this distinct western world influences the eastern Hellenic world, sometimes, as in the great Athenian overthrow before Syracuse, with terrible effect. But, on the whole, the western side of Greece, the side where Corinth was greater than either Sparta or Athens, remained secondary in Grecian affairs, while the Greek world still further to the west lived a life of its own, broken only by occasional dealings with the states of the older Hellenic land. Politically the older Greek world looks in the main eastward. ”

“ But the mountain, even on its gentler side, is far from being gradual, and is only less steep than toward the inner basin. The “blessed mutter of the mass” in Greek is so unintelligible to foreign ears that it soon drove us forth into the air outside and then to the little museum next door, where were displayed the rather overwhelming antiquities of the place,—mainly vases that had been made and used long before the eruption which destroyed the island’s original form so many thousand years before. ”

“ Curiously enough, the Greek in ordinary station is likely to think you wish to see modern rather than ancient things. He cannot understand why you go every evening to the Acropolis and muse on the steps of the Parthenon while you omit to visit the villas of Kephissià or Tatoïs. He would rather show you a tawdry pseudo-Byzantine church than a ruined temple. But the cordial spirit is there, and everybody who ever visited Greece has had occasion to know it and admire it.
There remains necessary a word as to the choice of routes to Greece. ”

“ Local institutions thus developed themselves freely, and even the smallest island of the Archipelago has its great representatives in history. But whilst there thus exists the greatest diversity, owing to the configuration of the ground and the multitude of islands, the sea acts as a binding element, washes every coast, and penetrates far inland. These gulfs and numerous harbours have made the maritime inhabitants of Greece a nation of sailors—amphibiæ, as Strabo called them. From the most remote times the passion for travel has always been strong amongst them. ”

“ The most remarkable characteristic of Greek is one conditioned by the geographical aspect of the land. Few countries are so broken up with mountains as Greece. Not only do mountain ranges as elsewhere on the European continent run east and west, but other ranges cross them from north to south, thus dividing the portions of Greece at some distance from the sea into hollows without outlet, every valley being separated for a considerable part of the year from contact with every other, and inter-communication at all seasons being rendered difficult. ”