CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE The character of every people is more or less closely connected with that of its land. The station which the Greeks filled among nations, the part which they acted, and the works which they accomplished, depended in a great measure on the position which they occupied on the face of the globe. The manner and degree in which the nature of the country affected the bodily and mental frame, and the social institutions of its inhabitants, may not be so easily determined; but its physical aspect is certainly not less important in a historical point of view, than it is striking and interesting in itself. An attentive survey of the geographical site of Greece, of its general divisions, and of the most prominent points on its surface, is an indispensable preparation for the study of its history. In the following sketch nothing more will be attempted, than to guide the reader’s eye over an accurate map of the country, and to direct his attention to some of those indelible features, which have survived all the revolutions by which it has been desolated. THE LAND The land which its sons called Hellas, and for which we have adopted the Roman name Greece,[2] lies on the southeast verge of Europe, and in length extends no further than from the thirty-sixth to the fortieth degree of latitude. It is distinguished among European countries by the same character which distinguishes Europe itself from the other continents--the great range of its coast compared with the extent of its surface; so that while in the latter respect it is considerably less than Portugal, in the former it exceeds the whole Pyrenean peninsula. The great eastern limb which projects from the main trunk of the continent of Europe grows more and more finely articulated as it advances towards the south, and terminates in the peninsula of Peloponnesus, the smaller half of Greece, which bears some resemblance to an outspread palm. Its southern extremity is at a nearly equal distance from the two neighbouring continents: it fronts one of the most beautiful and fertile regions of Africa, and is separated from the nearest point of Asia by the southern outlet of the Ægean Sea--the sea, by the Greeks familiarly called their own, which, after being contracted into a narrow stream by the approach of the opposite shores at the Hellespont, suddenly finds its liberty in an ample basin as they recede towards the east and the west, and at length, escaping between Cape Malea and Crete, confounds its waters with the broader main of the Mediterranean. Over that part of this sea which washes the coast of Greece, a chain of islands, beginning from the southern headland of Attica, Cape Sunium, first girds Delos with an irregular belt, the Cyclades, and then, in a waving line, links itself to a scattered group (the Sporades) which borders the Asiatic coast. Southward of these the interval between the two continents is broken by the larger islands Crete and Rhodes.