In speaking of the word _plain_ as applied to Greece, we use it relatively, not as it would be employed in reference to Russia or Hungary, but as meaning the broader levels between the hills, and commonly towards the sea: such as those valleys of Scotland which are called _carses_, or those called _straths_. Now in the first place I know no other meaning of the word Ἄργος which will suit its various uses in Homer as Pelasgic Argos, Achaic Argos, Iasian Argos. What is the one common physical feature of the several regions that accounts for the common factor in these three compound expressions, if it be not that of plain, that is to say, cultivable, and cultivated, or settled country? Again, look at the relation of Ἄργος to Ἀργεῖοι. What except a physical and geographical meaning, still adhering to the word, and holding it somewhat short of the mature and familiar use of a proper name, can account for the fact that we have in the history and geography of Greece so many cases of an Argos, without Argives, that is local or provincial Argives, belonging to it? Achaic Argos indeed has Ἀργεῖοι belonging to it, but Pelasgic and Iasian Argos have none. Just so we might speak of the Highlands of Saxony, or of the Lowlands of Switzerland; but the inhabitants of the first are not known as Highlanders, nor those of the latter as Lowlanders[664]. I believe there are no phrases, which more nearly translate the words Ἄργος and Ἀργεῖοι, than Lowlands and Lowlanders respectively. For the word Lowlands means land not only lying low, but both lying low, and also being favourable for cultivation: and these ideas more truly represent the land fitted for the sort of settlement called Ἄργος, than the mere idea of level plains. If this be the idea of the word Argos, we see the propriety of its application to the city of Argos and its district. For this city stood, as a city of the town and more open country, in a certain opposition to Mycenæ, which nestled among the hills; and which bore geographically much the same relation to Argos, as Dardania to Ilion. It afterwards fell also into the same political analogy. In the phrase Ἀχαιïκὸν Ἄργος, Homer deals with a case where, as it is sometimes applied without an epithet, Ἄργος may justly be called a proper name, like the European _Pays-bas_; but there is no evidence of this in his ‘Pelasgic Argos,’ and ‘Iasian Argos,’ and it seems likely that he rather intends in those phrases to employ the term Argos as a word simply descriptive, and to speak of the Pelasgian Lowlands, and the Iasian Lowlands. The difference of sense is just that which we should indicate in English by the absence of the capital letter.