Beyond Chalkidikê to the west, the specially Greek peninsula projects to the south, being itself again composed of peninsulas within peninsulas. ♦Greece proper and its peninsulas.♦ The _Ambrakian Gulf_ on the west and the _Pagasaian_ on the east again fence off a peninsula to the south, by which the more purely Greek lands are fenced off from _Macedonia_, _Epeiros_, and _Thessaly_. Within this peninsula again another may be marked off by a line drawn from _Thermopylai_ to the _Corinthian_ gulf near Delphoi. This again shuts out to the east _Akarnania_, _Aitolia_, and some other of the more backward divisions of the Greek name. ♦Peloponnêsos.♦ Thus _Phôkis_, _Boiôtia_, and _Attica_ form a great promontory, from which Attica projects as a further promontory to the south-east, while the great peninsula of _Peloponnêsos_—itself made up on its eastern and southern sides of smaller peninsulas—is joined on by the narrow isthmus of Corinth. In this way, from Haimos to _Tainaros_, the land is ever becoming more and more broken up by greater or smaller inlets of the sea. And in proportion as the land becomes more strictly peninsular, it also becomes more strictly Greek, till in Peloponnêsos we reach the natural citadel of the Greek nation. § 2. _Insular and Asiatic Greece._ ♦Continuous Hellas.♦ Greece Proper then, what the ancient geographers called _Continuous Hellas_ as distinguished from the Greek colonies planted on barbarian shores, is, so far as it is part of the mainland, made up of a system of peninsulas stretching south from the general mass of eastern Europe. But the neighbouring islands equally form a part of continuous Greece; and the other coasts of the Ægæan, Asiatic as well as Thracian, were so thickly strewed with Greek colonies as to form, if not part of continuous Greece, yet part of the immediate Greek world. The western coast, as it is less peninsular, is also less insular, and the islands on the western side of Greece did not reach the same importance as those on the eastern side. Still they too, the Ionian islands of modern geography, form in every sense a part of Greece. ♦The Islands.♦ To the north of _Korkyra_ or _Corfu_ there are only detached Greek colonies, whether on the mainland or in the islands; but all the islands of the Ægæan are, during historical times, as much part of Greece as the mainland; and one island on each side, _Leukas_ on the west and the greater island of _Euboia_ on the east, might almost be counted as parts of the mainland, as peninsulas rather than islands. To the south the long narrow island of _Crete_ forms a sort of barrier between Greek and barbarian seas. It is the most southern of the purely Greek lands. _Sicily_ to the east and _Cyprus_ to the west received many Greek colonies, but they never became purely Greek in the same way as Crete and the islands to the north of it. ♦Asiatic Greece.♦