[2] A collection of the classic authorities for the different attempts at cutting the canal through the isthmus of Corinth, may be interesting to some of our readers. PERIANDER'S Diogenes Laertius, i. 99--DEMETRIUS POLIORCETES, Strabo, vol. i. p. 86, ed. Tauch.--JULIUS CAESAR, Dion Cassius, xliv. 5. Plutarch in Caesar, lviii. Suetonius in Caesar. xliv.--CALIGULA, Suetonius in Calig. xxi.--NERO, Plinii, N.H. iv. 4. Lucian, Nero. Philostratus in vit. Apollon. Tyan. iv. 24. Zonaras, i. 570, ed. Paris.--HERODES ATTICUS, Philostratus in vit. Sophist. ii. 26. There was another canal in Greece which proved a sad stumbling-block to the Roman satirist Juvenal, whose unlucky accusation of "lying Greece," is founded on his own ignorance of a fact recorded by Herodotus and Thucydides. --"Creditur olim Velificatus Athos, et quicquid Graecia mendax Audet in historia." The words of Herodotus and Thucydides, would leave no doubt of Xerxes having made a canal through the isthmus to the north of Mount Athos, in the mind of any but a Roman.[1] But since there are modern travellers as ready to distrust the ancients, as a gentleman we once encountered at Athens was to doubt the moderns, we shall quote better evidence than any Greek. Our acquaintance of the Athenian inn, who had a very elegant appearance, appealed to us to confirm the _Graecia mendax_, saying, he had just returned from Marathon, and his guide had been telling him far greater lies than he ever heard from an Italian cicerone. "The fellow had the impudence to say, that his countrymen had defeated 500,000 Persians in the plain he showed me," said the gentleman in green. "Let alone the number--that fable might be pardoned--but he thought me such an egregious ass as not to know that the war was with the Turks, and not with the Persians at all." We bowed in amazement to find our English friend more ignorant than Juvenal. We shall now transcribe the observations of Colonel Leake, the most sharp-sighted and learned of the modern travellers who have visited the isthmus of Mount Athos:--"The modern name of this neck of land is _provlaka_, evidently the Romanic form of the word [Greek: proaulax], having reference to the canal _in front_ of the peninsula of Athos, which crossed the isthmus, and was excavated by Xerxes. It is a hollow between natural banks, which are well described by Herodotus as [Greek: kolonoi ou megaloi], the highest points of them being scarcely 100 feet above the sea. The lowest part of the hollow is only a few feet higher than that level. About the middle of the isthmus, where the bottom is highest, are some traces of the ancient canal; where the ground is lower, it is indicated only by hollows, now filled with water in consequence of the late rains. The canal seems to have been not more than sixty feet wide. As history does not mention that it was ever kept in repair after the time of Xerxes, the waters from the heights around have naturally filled it