“Cities which were great aforetime now as a rule are mean, and those formerly were small which in my day have become great. Therefore, since I know that human prosperity never remains stationary, of both alike I shall make mention.” HERODOTUS. On the neck of land that unites Attica to the Peloponnesus two Dorian cities attained to prominence in the centuries intervening between Homeric civilization and the rivalries of Sparta and Athens, those great representatives of the Dorian and Ionian races who reduced all other cities to the position of allies or satellites. Only before the middle of the sixth century were Corinth and Megara powers of the first rank. They are now stations on the way to Athens for those who enter Greece at Patras. The railroad journey between these cities, along the coasts of the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs, ought to be taken in one direction or the other by every visitor to Greece, for scarcely any other displays to better advantage the combination of mountain, plain, and sea, which are the triad of Greek landscape. The waters of the Corinthian Gulf, in swift response to sun, wind, and cloud, vary from pellucid blue to vivid, foam-flecked emerald, marked by strange bands of deep wine red. Along its northern coast the mountains pile up in restrained and harmonious masses of blue or purple, crowned in winter or in spring with snowy white. At times the west wind from the ocean sweeps up this long narrow gulf as if through a cañon, beating the waves into fury and filling the air with cold moisture, even while the sun or the moon denies the presence of a storm. On the other side of the Isthmus the Saronic Gulf pushes far asunder the coasts of Attica and the Peloponnesus and skirts on the north the littoral of Megara. From its placid evening surface the mountains of Ægina and Salamis rise in curves and sharp peaks of cool violet and rose. Beyond the Bay of Eleusis the eye that has not yet seen Athens turns inland in strained waiting for the Acropolis. Rising out of a still distant plain and bearing upon its crest the half-realized ruins of the Parthenon, the hill of the pilgrim’s desires becomes a reality—“and from a dream, behold, it is a waking vision.”