to the north, our range of sight is narrower. No colonist from Argos and its islands has made his way to Italy or Sicily; Akarnania is still part of the vague _Mainland_, the still undefined _Epeiros_; Korkyra is still a land of fable on which no settler from Corinth has set foot. But there are signs which already point to the kindred of the nations on both sides of the Ionian sea. The Sikel dwells on both coasts; even of the more mysterious Sikan we get a passing glimpse. The northern coast of the Ægæan is known; but that coast is not yet Hellenic; it significantly sends its warriors to fight on the Asiatic side. Further to the north, further to the west, all is wonder and mystery; we may as well ask whether the poet had any conception of the site of London as whether he had any conception of the site of Rome. The eyes of infant Greece are still fixed on the East; vague tidings had reached her of the wonders of the land by the river Ægypt; the men of Sidon were her visitors, her traffickers, in some sort her teachers. But the wary sons of Canaan were too wise to tell all they knew of Western lands and Western seas. The gold of Tartêssos was as yet for them only; for them only was the precious knowledge that the pillars of Hêraklês--if Greece had as yet heard their name--opened into no stream of Ocean parting the lands of the living and the dead, but into the boundless waters over which it was as yet for themselves alone to spread their sails. Let us take another glance at the Mediterranean world at a later time, a time when our historic evidence is still meagre and scattered, but when we have begun to leave mere legend behind us. It is one of the gains or losses of the wider study of history that it often teaches us to look at this and that period with different eyes from those with which we naturally look at them when we are engaged only in the narrower study of special times and places. I well remember learning, and I well remember being startled as I learned, from the teaching of Mr. Finlay, that the age which we commonly look on as the most glorious in Grecian history, the fifth century before Christ, was in truth an age of Greek decline. The truth is that it was the greatest age in the history of Athens, and a crowd of causes lead us at every moment to mistake the history of Athens for the history of Greece. What we sometimes fail to see Herodotus saw clearly. He saw that in the general history of the world the age of the Persian wars was, for the Greek people as a whole, the scattered Greek people all over the world, an age of decline. The fact that there was a Persian war, a Persian war waged in Greece, is enough to prove the saying. That fact of itself shows that that process had already begun which is still not ended, the long and gloomy work of which Finlay steeled himself to write the story, the History of Greece under Foreign Domination. It is enough to prove Finlay’s point that Milêtos had learned to groan, as thrice-betrayed