But where Homer, Sappho, and Alcæus lived and labored and where once their immortal works were used as textbooks in the schools of Asia Minor; where Zeuxis and Appelles and Parrhasius were surrounded by crowds of admiring pupils; where Hippocrates and Galen of Pergamon, long the supreme authorities in medical science, were born; where Hipparchus of Nicæa, founder of scientific astronomy, first became famous; where Aristarchus of Samothrace, the most celebrated critic and grammarian of antiquity, began his brilliant career, there is now little more than an intellectual wilderness and but scant knowledge even of the names of those who were once the glory of Hellas, as well as of Anatolia. The erstwhile homes of art, science, and literature in Asia Minor have shared the same fate as Olympia, Carthage, and Syracuse. Only a few broken columns and mutilated statues remain of what were once the great cultural centers of the ancient world. How often does not the explorer in Anatolia unexpectedly come upon a dead city on a mountain slope or in a hidden hollow, which was abandoned a thousand years ago, whose streets are choked with brushwood, whose palaces and theaters are covered with a tangle of vegetation, whose marble tombs are hidden by brambles, where the only human being ever seen is a wandering shepherd who is absolutely indifferent to these marvelous vestiges of a marvelous past? And what traveler in Anatolia has not frequently seen mutilated columns and statues built into walls and houses, and beautifully carved friezes and capitals put to the most ignoble uses? Nor is this all. Everywhere in this land of countless Pompeis untold treasures of the most delicately chiseled marbles have been cast into lime kilns--marbles which in the days of the art-loving Greeks and Romans were above price and which, for generations, were the pride of the cities which they embellished and the chief adornment of the superb structures of which they formed a part. But, if the ruins of Anatolia awake memories of the former grandeur of cities which were once renowned centers of art, science, and letters, they likewise carry us back to the days when the Osmanli chieftains became the heirs of the Eastern Cæsars and when they gained the mastery of that portion of the world which from the dawn of history has transcended all others in human interest; the territory in which were located the proud cities of Tyre and Sidon, Nineveh, Babylon, Thebes, and Memphis, Athens, Carthage, and Alexandria; the lands which witnessed the decisive battles of Greek against Asiatic--_Græcia barbariæ lento collisa duello_--Salamis, Platæa, Marathon, Arbela; the regions, in a word, in which was enacted nearly all of what is embraced in the term “Ancient History.”