Reserving this illustrious division of Hellas, and Megaris which originally formed a part of it, for the close of our rapid outline, we enter the Peloponnesos,—a country remarkable both for its physical configuration, and for the races which anciently inhabited it. Connected with the continent by the narrow isthmus of Corinth it immediately expands westward and southward into a peninsula of large dimensions, in form resembling a ragged plantain leaf or outstretched palm.[180] Like the northern division of Hellas the Peloponnesos is rough with mountain chains, and belted round with cliffs. Towards the centre it swells into a lofty plateau, known to antiquity under the name of Arcadia. Foreign poets, misapprehending the nature of the country, have described this province as a succession of soft pastoral scenes.[181] But its real character is very different, consisting chiefly of an extensive table-land, supported by vast mountain buttresses, which in some places tower into peaks of extraordinary elevation. It is broken up into innumerable valleys and deep glens, overhung with wild precipitous rocks, clothed with gloomy forests, and buried during a great part of the year in clouds and snow. The inhabitants were rough and unpromising as the soil, distinguished like the modern Swiss for no quality but bravery, which, like them too, they sold with a mercenary recklessness to the best bidder.[182] Achaia is a slip of sea-coast sloping towards the north. Elis, a succession of beautiful plains with few eminences intervening, well watered and renowned for their fine breed of mares. This, the Holy land of the Hellenes, sacred every rood to Zeus, was to the Greeks a place of pilgrimage, as Mecca to the Arabs and Palestine to the Christians of the West. In the Homeric age it was confined within narrow limits, its sea-coast only extending from Buprasion to the promontory of Hyrminè, scarcely indeed, so far, as Myrsinos is said to be its last city towards the north, and Buprasion is mentioned rather as a separate state. It was divided from Achaia by Mount Scollis, which Homer calls “the rock Olenia,” and Aleision is the boundary to the south; consequently, neither Mount Pholöe nor Olympia, nor the Alpheios was then included in Elis, still less Triphylia. Footnote 180: Strb. viii. 2. 140. Dion. Perieg. ap. Palm. Gr. Ant. 16. Footnote 181: Cf. Palm. Gr. Ant. 61. On the climate of Arcadia see Aristot. Problem. xxvii. 60. He observes that the winds, blowing in from the sea, were not colder there than in other parts of Greece; but that during calms the exhalations from the stagnant waters were particularly chill. See also Hippoc. de Aër. et Loc. § 120. Footnote 182: Cf. Steph. Byzant. _v._ Ἀρκας. p. 166. b. seq.