We have now passed through Greece from the southernmost point of Peloponnesus as far as mount Olympus, the Thessalian mountains and Tempe.[68] In casting our eyes back upon Greece, it is surprising to find how few of those nations share in the great renown of the Greeks in literature and the arts. In the earliest times poetry was the common property of all rather than of individuals: epic poetry was chiefly cultivated among the Ionians in Asia Minor; lyric poetry among the Aeolians, in Lesbos, Boeotia, Sicily, and Magna Graecia (Himera, Rhegium), and afterwards also among the Dorians; dramatic poetry was in reality confined to Athens. After Pindar, no part of Greece, except Athens, produced poets, prose writers, and orators, until the latest times again wrought a change; for then, after the real life and flourishing period of the arts had already disappeared, there came forward Polybius, a most respectable author indeed, though not beyond the point which we ourselves may attain. The renown in the plastic arts was shared by Corinth and Sicyon, at an earlier period also by Boeotia and Aegina, and in a less degree by Argos. Thessaly is a perfectly rude country, in which genius has created nothing. I shall now pass on to the Greek islands, first to Euboea, next to the islands in the Aegean, and then to Tenedos and Lesbos, whose whole character is Asiatic, the Cyclades, Crete, and the Sporades. I shall then discuss the Ionic, Doric, and Aeolic settlements in Asia Minor, the colonies on the coast of Thrace, on the Euxine, and on the southern coast of Asia Minor. Of most of the islands very little can be said. EUBOEA.