is an invention of a comparatively very late period. When Attica and Megaris are taken as one country, it is designated by the name of Ἀκτή. This, however, is not a proper name, but, as we have seen before, an appellative designating a country running out into the sea, without being united with the main land by means of an isthmus. I consider this name to be very ancient, because there can be no doubt that Ἀττικὴ was formed from Ἀκτικὴ on the same principle on which the Italian language substitutes _tt_ for the Latin _ct_. In the earliest traditions, however, the country has several names, the exact meaning and age of which we are unable to ascertain, but which, though they are preserved only in late writers, mostly Alexandrian poets, we ought not to disregard, for these authors fondly adopted those very things which were rare, and which were preserved only in ancient poems. The country, to mention one example, was also called _Mopsopia_, a name of which we can say absolutely nothing, though the country certainly bore it at one time. However, even though the Acte formed one whole, it does not follow by any means that it also formed one state. Much may be conjectured respecting the early history of Attica, if we rid ourselves of the later traditions about Cecrops and the Pandionids, which were transferred from the Atthids to the works of the Alexandrians, and have been handed down by them to our time,—if, I say, we rid ourselves of them so far as not to regard them altogether as history, and, on the other hand, not to indulge in too artificial and subtle explanations, but so as to take only certain facts which are clearly implied in the stories, and to let these speak for themselves. One tradition about the Acte, in which it extends as far as the Isthmus, is, that it was divided by the Pandionids into four states; and why should not this have been the case? Another division refers apparently to Attica, in the narrower sense of the name. I allude to that ascribed to Cecrops; here, too, we have a kind of tetrapolis, and thus far it agrees with the earlier division though the detail is different, for according to it Attica consisted of twelve (3 × 4) states. We accordingly find in Attica an historical trace of a division into twelve, like that of the Ionian Aegialos; it was also historically remembered, that these towns became united in Athens. The boundaries of Attica, as an Athenian state, stand in relation to those of Megaris, which, however, were changeable, and were moved sometimes forward and sometimes backward. At the time when Megaris was an extensive country, and Attica small, Salamis belonged to the former. Other changes in the Athenian possessions occur on the Boeotian side. But there certainly is some gap in our history of Attica, which we can hardly wonder at, seeing that the political history of the Greeks in general is very fragmentary. What I mean is this: in very ancient times all