Many a visitor, led to Athens by interest in its associations and its art, has been surprised by its great physical beauty. The drive from Piræus, through the banal outskirts of the growing city, is, indeed, a disenchanting approach, but one has only to walk to the Corinthian columns of the Olympieum to obtain a satisfying view of the Acropolis, embedded like a crystal in its proper matrix of encompassing air and plain and sea and mountains. Future journeys in Greece will but reënforce the conviction of the noble loveliness of the Attic plain. The atmosphere is singularly clear and vibrant, and within it colour and form are sharply defined. The Ægean at its shores adds movement and space. And here more than anywhere else Sir Richard Jebb’s description of the Greek hills seems inevitable. Their forms “are at once so bold and so chastened, the onward sweep of their ranges is at once so elastic and so calm, each member of every group is at once so individual and so finely helpful to the ethereal expressiveness of the rest, that the harmony of their undulations and the cadences in which they fall combine the charm of sculpture with the life and variety of a sunlit sea.” In making such a study of this city as is demanded for turning the quick appreciation of its external charm into the more permanent possession of its underlying qualities, we must submit to some analysis of the great moments in its history and its literature. When Athenian literature begins with Solon, in the sixth century, B. C., the Greeks have emerged from a dim antiquity. In the two preceding centuries, the mother cities of Achæan and Dorian Greece had been sending out colonists east and west, not merely in a spirit of Phœnician commercialism, but also with adventuresome, intellectual curiosity. The heroes of their earliest traditional literature sailed with them. Associations half slumbering in the popular consciousness thrilled them as they steered again over the course of the Argo or as they followed once more the later track of Odysseus to the west, and in lower Italy and Sicily reëstablished Great Hellas as an integral part of Hellenic civilization. In this earlier colonization Athens participated only vicariously, but it was into this larger Hellas that Solon the lawgiver and poet was born. Fire, brought from the mother cities, was blazing on the hearths of Greek colonies from the Crimea to Sicily. The Ionians of Asia Minor had long since joined in the movement of expansion; they were presently to colonize the site of modern Marseilles; they were already converting to their own use the distant outposts of the “Tyrian trader.” Athens meanwhile was slowly developing. Later she would herself be mistress of the sea.