Greece, the most eastern of the three great peninsulas of Europe, begins to play its part in the history of the world earlier than the peninsulas of Italy and Spain; and in the like sort, it is the eastern side of Greece which begins to play its part in the history of Greece earlier than the western side. Is it answered that the position of Athens, the most eastern part of the Greek continent, as a leading state in Greece, is of comparatively late date? As far as dominion goes, Mykênê, Argos, Sparta, all came to the front before her. But it was Athens which, in some unrecorded age, made the first advance in Greek and in European political life by that union which made one commonwealth--we might say, one city--of Athens and Eleusis, of Marathôn and Sounion. Here was in truth the beginning of political history, the foundation of a state of such happy dimensions as to become the model of city-commonwealths for all time. And as for the cities which came before Athens in dominion, they too lie, if not so far east as Athens, yet on the eastern side of their own peninsula. All the earliest greatness, the earliest history, of Greece gathers round her Ægæan, not round her western, shores. Her colonies go eastward and northward, covering all the eastern coast with an Hellenic fringe, while far distant Kymê was the single outpost in the west. Down at least to Macedonian times the eastern side of Greece keeps its predominance; the western side is important mainly as the road to a distinct Hellenic world in Italy and Sicily. Ever and anon this distinct western world influences the eastern Hellenic world, sometimes, as in the great Athenian overthrow before Syracuse, with terrible effect. But, on the whole, the western side of Greece, the side where Corinth was greater than either Sparta or Athens, remained secondary in Grecian affairs, while the Greek world still further to the west lived a life of its own, broken only by occasional dealings with the states of the older Hellenic land. Politically the older Greek world looks in the main eastward. It is only the great religious centres of the nation which in any sort cast their eyes towards the islands of the blessed. Dôdônê lies to the west, in a land whose Hellenic character was called in question. So does Olympia within Peloponnêsos itself, while Delphoi, if it does not look absolutely westward, if its connexion with Thermopylai binds it in some sort to the eastern side of Greece, still looks directly on that central gulf which forms the great highway to the western shores. At Corinth indeed the rule is reversed; the city of the two seas and the two havens looks far more to her western than to her eastern outlet; but her great Isthmian sanctuary looks to the Saronic and not to the Corinthian gulf. The names are well chosen. The western gulf was the true gulf of Corinth. No other city of equal rank stood on its shore, while its waters formed the highway to the insular and quasi-insular