Studies of Travel: GreeceFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Greece
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Greece -- Description and travel
dominion of Corinth on the western seas, to Leukas and Korkyra and
long-lived Epidamnos, to Ambrakia, fated to be the capital of Pyrrhos,
to mightier and more distant Syracuse, fated to be the capital of whole
dynasties of tyrants and kings.
We at last then bid farewell to Athens and Attica; and, in bidding
farewell to Athens and Attica, we bid farewell to something more. We
pass from one Hellenic world to another. We once more cross the head
of the Saronic gulf to Kalamaki; thence carriages bear us, it may be
to New Corinth, it may be to Loutraki to the north of it, according
to exigencies of which the landsman is a poor judge. In either case
we are carried far more distinctly away from one geographical and
historical region to another than when we simply cross from one side of
the Saronic gulf to another. As we are borne over the Isthmian hills,
we look to Peloponnêsos on one side, to Northern Greece on the other;
we look forward on the Corinthian gulf, and we are borne along to all
that it suggests in the further West. On the East we have turned our
backs; and we feel that we have done something more than turn our backs
in the way which the physical necessities of travel compel us to do. We
begin to understand that the northern, the southern, and the western
view really make up a system in which the lands and seas which we
leave behind us have no share. And when we once find ourselves on the
waters of the Corinthian gulf, we begin to feel ourselves in another
world from the world of the eastern Hellas, the world of Athens and
Sparta. In both of the great divisions of the inland sea, within and
without the straits, in the gulf of Krissa and in the gulf of Patrai,
we feel that we have left the Greece of Herodotus, Thucydides, and
Xenophôn behind us. We are in a world which their history touches
only by fits and starts; we have sailed into the Greece of Polybios.
We have made our way from the world of city-commonwealths into the
world of federations; as we pass along, the lands of the two great
Leagues lie on either side of us. Through nearly the whole of our
journey we skirt the Achaian shore to the south, and what, in later
times at least, became the Aitôlian shore to the north of us. Lesser
Leagues, Boiôtia--for in those later times Boiôtia must count among
lesser Leagues--Phôkis, and Lokris, fill up whatever space Aitôlia
left unannexed. And, when we have cleared the gulf and are fairly in
the western sea, we draw near to another federal land on the shores of
Akarnania. We may even cast, if not our eyes, at least our thoughts,
to the great northern mainland which in those days had become both
Hellenic and federal as the Confederation of Epeiros. Here then is a
world where we go by many spots which call up both earlier and later
associations, but where the main interest as distinctly belongs to
the second and third centuries before our æra as the main interest of
the lands washed by the Ægæan belongs to the fourth, fifth, and sixth
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