NIKE OF SAMOTHRACE, reproduced on the front cover, is from a coin in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS [Illustration: Greece and the Aegean Sea] GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY: THE WIDESPREAD LAND OF HELLAS “Greek literature is read by almost all nations.” CICERO, _Pro Archia_. Cicero, at one time studying Greek oratory in Rhodes, at another speaking Greek as the language best adapted to a Sicilian audience, suggests with sufficient definiteness the eastern and western boundaries of ancient Hellas. Leaving out of consideration more remote colonies, we may content ourselves with including in the Greater Greece of antiquity all the Mediterranean lands and waters from Sicily and Lower Italy, in the west, to Cyprus and the coast of Asia Minor, in the east. The Riviera, or seaboard of the eastern side of the Ægean, is sharply differentiated from the continuous highlands of the interior, which suggest, a short distance inland, a boundary line between Europe and Asia. For a maritime people like the Greeks this was a barrier more effectual than the highway of the Bosphorus. In the early historic times, when the sun rose over these mountains of Asia Minor he left behind him the Oriental and looked down at once upon the Cis-montane Greeks, and it was upon Greeks that he was still shining when his setting splendour lit up the Bay of Naples—the “New-town” of that day—or the ancient Cumæ and the heights of Anacapri or the islands of the Sirens and the golden brown columns of Poseidon’s temple at Pæstum. The seaboard, too, of Macedonia and Thrace belonged to Greece by reason of their water-front on the Ægean. And to the south, the encroachments of the Greeks upon the preserves of the Nile-god were so extensive for centuries before the time of Alexander that we need not wonder either at Egyptian reminiscences in Greek art or at the increasing evidences of Hellenic life in Egypt.