Presently, I got beside a Greek gentleman, from whom I was anxiously picking up the first necessary phrases and politenesses of modern Greek, and, by way of amusement, put to him the same question. I got the answer I expected. “Ah!” said he, “the Turks, the Turks! When I think how these miscreants have ruined our beautiful country! How could a land thrive or prosper under such odious tyranny?” I ventured to suggest that the Turks were now gone five and forty years, and that it was high time to see the fruits of recovered liberty in the Greeks. No, it was still too soon. The Turks had cut down all the woods, and so ruined the climate; they had destroyed the cities, broken up the roads, encouraged the bandits—in fact, they had left the country in such a state that centuries would not cure it. The verdict of Europe is in favor of the Greek gentleman; but it might have been suggested, had we been so disposed, that the greatest and the most hopeless of all these sorrows—the utter depopulation of the country—is not due to either modern Greeks or Turks, nor even to the Slav hordes of the Middle Ages. It was a calamity which came upon Greece almost suddenly, immediately after the loss of her independence, and which historians and physiologists have as yet been only partially able to explain.(5) Of this very coast upon which we were then gazing, the geographer Strabo, about the time of Christ, says, “that of old, Lacedæmon had numbered one hundred cities; in his day there were but ten remaining.” So, then, the sum of the crimes of both Greeks and Turks may be diminished by one. But I, perceiving that each of them would have been extremely indignant at this historical palliation of the other’s guilt, “kept silence, even from good words.” These dialogues beguiled us till we found ourselves, almost suddenly, facing the promontory of Malea, with the island of Cythera (Cerigo) on our right. The island is little celebrated in history. The Phœnicians seem, in very old times, to have had a settlement there for the working of their purple shell-fishery, for which the coasts of Laconia were celebrated; and they doubtless founded there the worship of the Sidonian goddess, who was transformed by the Greeks into Aphrodite (Venus). During the Peloponnesian War we hear of the Athenians using it as a station for their fleet, when they were ravaging the adjacent coasts. It was, in fact, used by their naval power as the same sort of blister (_ἐπιτείχισις_) on Sparta that Dekelea was when occupied by the Spartans in Attica.