Corinth, we have said, with its mountain citadel, is truly the central point of Greece. But we do not thoroughly feel how the Isthmus parts asunder two different spheres of Greek life and history till we find ourselves on the gulf which takes its name from the city on the Isthmus. We can, if we will, make our way to Athens first of all by way of the gulf; but we shall perhaps better understand the position in Grecian history which is held by the shores of the gulf, if we take them at a later stage of our journey. It may, in short, be well to leave Greece by the Corinthian gulf, to make it our way back again to the western islands from whence we started. It is impossible to study Greece in strict chronological order, unless we could anyhow drop from the clouds on the akropolis of MykÊnÊ. But by taking the Corinthian gulf and its shores late in our course, we shall be enabled to end our survey with those parts of Greece which, at least in the days of her old independence, were the last to come to the front. And by this course we shall perhaps better understand why those parts came to the front later than others.

Greece, the most eastern of the three great peninsulas of Europe, begins to play its part in the history of the world earlier than the peninsulas of Italy and Spain; and in the like sort, it is the eastern side of Greece which begins to play its part in the history of Greece earlier than the western side. Is it answered that the position of Athens, the most eastern part of the Greek continent, as a leading state in Greece, is of comparatively late date? As far as dominion goes, MykÊnÊ, Argos, Sparta, all came to the front before her. But it was Athens which, in some unrecorded age, made the first advance in Greek and in European political life by that union which made one commonwealth—we might say, one city—of Athens and Eleusis, of MarathÔn and Sounion. Here was in truth the beginning of political history, the foundation of a state of such happy dimensions as to become the model of city-commonwealths for all time. And as for the cities which came before Athens in dominion, they too lie, if not so far east as Athens, yet on the eastern side of their own peninsula. All the earliest greatness, the earliest history, of Greece gathers round her ÆgÆan, not round her western, shores. Her colonies go eastward and northward, covering all the eastern coast with an Hellenic fringe, while far distant KymÊ was the single outpost in the west. Down at least to Macedonian times the eastern side of Greece keeps its predominance; the western side is important mainly as the road to a distinct Hellenic world in Italy and Sicily. 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. It is only the great religious centres of the nation which in any sort cast their eyes towards the islands of the blessed. DÔdÔnÊ lies to the west, in a land whose Hellenic character was called in question. So does Olympia within PeloponnÊsos itself, while Delphoi, if it does not look absolutely westward, if its connexion with Thermopylai binds it in some sort to the eastern side of Greece, still looks directly on that central gulf which forms the great highway to the western shores. At Corinth indeed the rule is reversed; the city of the two seas and the two havens looks far more to her western than to her eastern outlet; but her great Isthmian sanctuary looks to the Saronic and not to the Corinthian gulf. The names are well chosen. The western gulf was the true gulf of Corinth. No other city of equal rank stood on its shore, while its waters formed the highway to the insular and quasi-insular dominion of Corinth on the western seas, to Leukas and Korkyra and long-lived Epidamnos, to Ambrakia, fated to be the capital of Pyrrhos, to mightier and more distant Syracuse, fated to be the capital of whole dynasties of tyrants and kings.

We at last then bid farewell to Athens and Attica; and, in bidding farewell to Athens and Attica, we bid farewell to something more. We pass from one Hellenic world to another. We once more cross the head of the Saronic gulf to Kalamaki; thence carriages bear us, it may be to New Corinth, it may be to Loutraki to the north of it, according to exigencies of which the landsman is a poor judge. In either case we are carried far more distinctly away from one geographical and historical region to another than when we simply cross from one side of the Saronic gulf to another. As we are borne over the Isthmian hills, we look to PeloponnÊsos on one side, to Northern Greece on the other; we look forward on the Corinthian gulf, and we are borne along to all that it suggests in the further West. On the East we have turned our backs; and we feel that we have done something more than turn our backs in the way which the physical necessities of travel compel us to do. 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. We are in a world which their history touches only by fits and starts; we have sailed into the Greece of Polybios. We have made our way from the world of city-commonwealths into the world of federations; as we pass along, the lands of the two great Leagues lie on either side of us. Through nearly the whole of our journey we skirt the Achaian shore to the south, and what, in later times at least, became the AitÔlian shore to the north of us. Lesser Leagues, BoiÔtia—for in those later times BoiÔtia must count among lesser Leagues—PhÔkis, and Lokris, fill up whatever space AitÔlia left unannexed. And, when we have cleared the gulf and are fairly in the western sea, we draw near to another federal land on the shores of Akarnania. We may even cast, if not our eyes, at least our thoughts, to the great northern mainland which in those days had become both Hellenic and federal as the Confederation of Epeiros. Here then is a world where we go by many spots which call up both earlier and later associations, but where the main interest as distinctly belongs to the second and third centuries before our Æra as the main interest of the lands washed by the ÆgÆan belongs to the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries before our Æra.

We should be the last to shut out either the earlier or the later associations. We do not forget that AitÔlia, poor in early history, is rich in yet earlier legend, or that it reached the height of its legendary fame when the divine Epeians gave way to the AitÔlian colony which was to grow into the Eleian guardians of Olympia, the special servants of Zeus. As we skirt the inner bay of Krissa, we may think of all the sacred wars from SolÔn to AischinÊs. Naupaktos has its place alike in legend and in history; in the waters of the outer gulf we remember alike PhormiÔn of Athens and Don John of Austria. As we pass by Patras, we remember how well St. Andrew fought for his city against Slave and Saracen. As we look on the southern shore, we remember that there were once Frank Princes of Achaia no less than Frank Dukes of Athens. As we look to the northern shore, we remember that there was a day when the Empire of Servia stretched, without a break, from the Danube to the Corinthian gulf. And, beyond all this, as we skirt the northern shore of the outer gulf, we pass by a spot whose fame in later times outshines every other association from Meleagros to Don John. We pass by Mesolongi, the city of the two immortal sieges, of the long defence where the Fanariot Mavrokordatos, alone among his class, placed his name alongside of the men of Souli and the men of Hydra—of the night of the great sally which places the name of Mesolongi alongside of IthomÊ and Eira, of Saguntum, of Numantea, and of Zaragoza. All these memories go to make up the history of the shores along which we pass; still they lie outside its main and special interest. They come either before or after the days when the two shores of the gulf formed the main centre of Hellenic history. The Achaian cities line the shore, and, with our usual protest against vain attempts to call back a past which is gone for ever, for a moment we hardly regret that Slavonic Vostizza has again become Hellenic Aigion. But before we reach the older Achaian shore, we pass by the territory of the city but for whose help those Achaian cities, whose place in earlier history is so small, could never have risen to become one of the two leading powers of Greece. There is the land of SikyÔn, city of Aratos, deliverer and betrayer of Corinth to the right—the man who taught the cities to the left the art of ThemistoklÊs, the art which teaches how a small state may become a great one. And we see plainly written on the two shores, why, in the warfare of those times, the League of the North was commonly the aggressor, the League of the South was commonly the victim. Save here and there some more favoured spot, the shore of AitÔlia seems bare beyond the common bareness of Grecian hills; the shore of Achaia seems rich with a richness the like of which we have hardly seen on any other part of the Hellenic mainland. The narrow strait, the strait by which PhormiÔn won his glory, brings into that close neighbourhood which is so characteristic of Greek geography—a neighbourhood as near as that of Euboia to BoiÔtia at one point and to Northern Achaia at another—two races as unlike one another as any could be who worshipped the same ancestral gods and spoke dialects of the same ancestral tongue. The development and the rivalry of those two powers give us our second lesson in Grecian history, the lesson of the days when, if the scale of men is smaller, the scale of things is larger, when cities have grown into federations, when the range of Grecian politics is no longer shut up within the Grecian seas, but when Macedonia and Pergamos, Syria and Egypt, Carthage and Rome herself, have begun to appear as actors on the scene. The seas of Eastern Greece belong to the days of her more brilliant yet narrower fame, when Greece was her own world, when the teachings of her history are mainly teachings of example and analogy. The seas of Central and Western Greece belong to the days when Greece, less free it may be, less brilliant, less rich in great deeds and mighty men, had become part of a greater world, and when her destinies had become connected with the destinies of later days by a direct chain of cause and effect. The historical position of the Corinthian gulf is that it is, above all the waters of Hellas, the sea which washes the shores of the Federal lands.

As we get clear of the gulf, by the mouth of AchelÔos, the White River of later nomenclature, we are again among the Western islands, though we now see them from wholly different points, and in wholly different relations to one another from those in which we saw them as we first made our way from Corfu round PeloponnÊsos. Our course is somewhat erratic; but it enables us to see a coast which has a character of its own and a history of its own. We skirt the shore of Akarnania. Here is a land which has no place in the Homeric Catalogue—a land therefore which has no place in the Hellas of those days, so far as we have any right in these days to make use of the name of Hellas at all. It was then the Epeiros, the nameless mainland, the non-Hellenic shore, as opposed to the Hellenic islands, the realms of MegÊs and of Odysseus. In the Federal age we find it a Federal commonwealth, weak besides its robber neighbours of AitÔlia, but holding the first place in Greece for what Livy calls the “fides insita genti,” the people who never broke their faith to either friend or enemy. Yet they had enough of worldly wisdom to plead their absence from the Catalogue as a merit in Roman eyes. AitÔlians, Achaians, all the rest, had a share in the overthrow of the mother city of Rome; Akarnania was guiltless. Here is a special history, and the coast has a special character. It is, like other Grecian coasts, a coast of bays and islands and peninsulas; but nowhere else have we seen such a crowd of small islands, mere spots of rock some of them, among which we thread our way, reminding us less of anything that we have seen in Greece than of the northern and more desolate part of the Dalmatian archipelago. There are the Echinades, the Oxeiai, the sharp islands, the urchin islands of later times; but can these dots be Doulichion and the holy Echinai, islands which sent forty ships to the war of Ilios? We pass in and out among them, steering northward between Leukas and the mainland, with the Epeirot mountains in the distant view; but we ourselves do not even reach the channel—after so many changes it is a channel—which divides Leukas or Santa Maura from the mainland. We turn; above the smaller islands rises IthakÊ; above IthakÊ rises KephallÊnia. We enter the haven, as we would believe, of the realm of Odysseus, but not without feeling a difficulty how an island which clearly lies to the north-east can be said to lie p??? ??f??. We pass in and in, hardly dreaming beforehand of the windings of the deep bay which so truly bears the name of Bathy. Scepticism vanishes for a time, and we cannot keep ourselves from greeting the men of IthakÊ as countrymen of the elder Odysseus.

But there is still one spot of the mainland to be seen. Before we leave the Hellenic islands, we have still to make another, a more momentary, incursion on the PeloponnÊsian mainland. We have seen the sites of Isthmian and Nemeian games; we have still to take a glimpse of the scene of the great festival of Zeus himself. We have passed by the AitÔlian shore; we must visit the great AitÔlian colony. Our last record of Hellenic travel must draw its inspiration from the spot where—

It is hard to conceive the rude AitÔlian discharging such a duty. We may be inclined to fall back on the doctrine of oppressed nationalities, to say,

?t?? ??sa ?? ????,

but to deny all place as his ministers to strangers from the northern shore of the gulf. What if we make our way to Olympia, under the belief that the Olympiad of B.C. 364, held by genuine Pisatans under the protection of Arkadian spears, was the only lawful celebration of the festival within historic times?