So large a troupe of actors played their parts in Greek history that the imagination demands a roomy stage. But the country is small. Were it not for the mountain barriers, the scale of distances would seem trivial. It is, for example, only some thirty miles in an air line from Thermopylæ to the Gulf of Corinth. Even on the leisurely and winding Piræus, Athens, and Peloponnesus Railway, it is only one day’s ride from Athens via the Isthmus down to Kalamata on the Bay of Messenia. The degrees of latitude that include the mainland of Central and Southern Greece span in the west only the Lipari Islands and Sicily; the thirty-eighth parallel that passes south of Palermo and the straits of Messina runs a little north of Athens; while the thirty-seventh parallel, running just south of Syracuse, passes still farther south of Kalamata and Sparta. Not only is the mainland of Greece contained in narrow geographical limits, but the Ægean itself is almost an inland lake enclosed within neighbouring coasts. In clear weather the sailor, without adventuring upon open sea, might pass from mainland to mainland as he watched from his advancing prow another island lift above the horizon before losing sight of the harbour left astern. In Greek literature there is no more striking reminder of the contiguity of the Asian coast to Greece proper than the well-known passage in the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus describing the swift telegraphy of the beacon signals that brought to Argos the news of the capture of Troy. The ten years’ absence of Agamemnon’s host tends to an instinctive extension of the distance, if the imagination is not checked by the actual scale of miles. Troy seems farther from Argos than the Holy Land from the homes of the Crusaders. Beacon telegraphy is a time-honored device. Many bright beacons doubtless blazed before Agamemnon, as well as since his time. Commentators have been at pains to justify by modern experiments with beacon fires on lofty heights the severest strain upon our optic nerves which Æschylus makes in the case of the light that leaped from Mount Athos to the high ridges of Eubœa. The distance is more than 100 miles, but, bearing in mind that the Eubœan mountain is some 4000 feet high and Athos more than 6000, we need not apply for any special license for our poet’s imagination. The devious course of the fire signals from Eubœa to Argos is one of the best illustrations of the jagged surface that Greece lifts skywards. As one stands on Mount Pentelicus and looks across to Eubœa, the intervening arm of the sea is hemmed in for the eye into narrow inland lakes. And Æschylus, sufficiently, though not officiously, realistic, makes the firelight zigzag irregularly to dodge the interfering ridges till it falls upon the palace roof at Argos,—not at Mycenæ, as is the not infrequent misrepresentation of the Æschylean story. Clytemnestra, to the chorus asking who could have brought the news so quickly, replies:—