Taking the great range of mountains which divides southern from central Europe as the northern boundary of the eastern or Greek peninsula, it may be said to take in the lands which are cut off from the central mass by the _Dalmatian Alps_ and the range of _Haimos_ or _Balkan_. It is washed to the east, west, or south, by various parts of the Mediterranean and its great gulf the Euxine. But the northern part of this region, all that lies north of the Ægæan Sea, taking in therefore the whole of the Euxine coast, still keeps much of the character of the great central mass of Europe, and forms a land intermediate between that and the more strictly peninsular lands to the south. Still the boundary is a real one, for all the lands south of this range have come more or less within Greek influences, and have played their part in Grecian history. But when we get beyond the mountains, into the valley of the Danube, we find ourselves in lands which, excepting a few colonies on the coast, have hardly at all come under Greek influences till quite modern times. This region between Haimos and the more strictly Greek lands takes in _Thrace_, _Paionia_, and _Illyria_. Of these, Thrace and Illyria, having a sea coast, received many Greek colonies, especially on the northern coast of the Ægæan and on the _Propontis_ or Sea of Marmora. The Thracian part of this region, as bordering on these more distinctly Grecian seas, became more truly a part of the Grecian world than the other lands to the west of it. ♦Thrace and Illyria.♦ Yet geographically Thrace is more widely cut off from Greece than Illyria is. For there is no such great break on the western shore of the great peninsula as that which, on the eastern side, marks the point where we must draw the line between Greece and its immediate neighbours and the lands to the north of them. This is at the point where a peninsula within a peninsula breaks off to the south, comprising _Greece_, _Macedonia_, and _Epeiros_. There is here no very special break on the Illyrian coast, but the Ægæan coast of Thrace is fenced in as it were at its two ends, to the east by the long narrow peninsula known specially as the _Chersonêsos_, and to the west by the group of peninsulas called _Chalkidikê_. These have nothing answering to them on the Illyrian side beyond the mere bend in the coast above Epidamnos. This last point however marks the extent of the earlier Greek colonization in those regions, and which has become a still more important boundary in later times.