may be conceived to fix to the Ægean. The sea which divides Greece from Italy is contracted, between the Iapygian peninsula and the coast of Epirus, into a channel only thirty geographical miles in breadth; and the Italian coast may be seen not only from the mountains of Corcyra, but from the low headland of the Ceraunian hills.

Thus on two sides Greece is bounded by a narrow sea; but toward the north its limits were never precisely defined. The word Hellas did not convey to the Greeks the notion of a certain geographical surface, determined by natural or conventional boundaries: it denoted the country of the Hellenes, and was variously applied according to the different views entertained of the people which was entitled to that name. The original Hellas was included in the territory of a little tribe in the south of Thessaly. When these Hellenes had imparted their name to other tribes, with which they were allied by a community of language and manners, Hellas might properly be said to extend as far as these national features prevailed. Ephorus regarded Acarnania, including probably the southern coast of the Ambracian gulf up to Ambracia, as the first Grecian territory on the west.1 Northward of the gulf the irruption of barbarous hordes had stifled the germs of the Greek character in the ancient inhabitants of Epirus, and had transformed it into a foreign land; and it must have been rather the recollection of its ancient fame, as the primitive abode of the Hellenes, than the condition of its tribes after the Persian war, that induced Herodotus to speak of Thesprotia as part of Hellas.2 On the east, Greece was commonly held to terminate with Mount Homole at the mouth of the Peneus; the more scrupulous, however, excluded even Thessaly from the honour of the Hellenic name, while Strabo, with consistent laxity, admitted Macedonia. But from Ambracia to the mouth of the Peneus, when these were taken as the extreme northern points, it was still impossible to draw In Strabo, viii. 334.

2 ii. 56.

a precise line of demarcation; for the same reason which justified the exclusion of Epirus applied, perhaps much more forcibly, to the mountaineers in the interior of Ætolia, whose barbarous origin, or utter degeneracy, was proved by their savage manners, and a language which Thucydides describes as unintelligible. When the Etolians bad the last Philip withdraw from Hellas, the Macedonian king could justly retort, by asking where they would fix its boundaries? and by reminding them that of their own body a very small part was within the pale from which they wished to exclude him. "The tribe of the Agræans, of the Apodotians, and the Amphilochians," he emphatically observed, "is not Hellas."1

The northern part of Greece is traversed in its whole length by a range of mountains, the Greek Apennines, which issue from the same mighty root, the Thracian Scomius, in which Hamus, and Rhodopé, and the Illyrian Alps, likewise meet. This ridge first takes the name of Pindus, where it intersects the northern boundary of Greece, at a point where an ancient route still affords the least difficult passage from Epirus into Thessaly. 2 From Pindus two huge arms stretch toward the eastern sea, and enclose the vale of Thessaly, the largest and richest plain in Greece: on the north the Cambunian hills, after making a bend toward the south, terminate in the loftier heights of Olympus, which are scarcely ever entirely free from snow; the opposite and lower chain of Othrys parting, with its eastern extremity, the Malian from the Pagasæan gulf, sinks gently toward the coast. A fourth rampart, which runs parallel to Pindus, is formed by the range which includes the celebrated heights of Pelion and Ossa; the first a broad and nearly even ridge, the other towering into a steep conical peak, the neighbour and rival of Olympus, with which, in the songs of the

1 Polybius, xvii. 5.

2 That of Metzovo, particularly well described by Dr. Holland, Travels, pp. 216-218.

country, it is said to dispute the pre-eminence in the depth and duration of its snows.1 The mountain barrier with which Thessaly is thus encompassed is broken only at the north-east corner, by a deep and narrow cleft, which parts Ossa from Olympus; the defile so renowned in poetry as the vale, in history as the pass, of Tempe. The imagination of the ancient poets and declaimers delighted to dwell on the natural beauties of this romantic glen, and on the sanctity of the site, from which Apollo had transplanted his laurel to Delphi.2 From other points of view, the same spot no less forcibly claims the attention of the historian. It is the only pass through which an army can invade Thessaly from the north, without scaling the high and rugged ridges of its northern frontier. The whole glen is something less than five miles long, and opens gradually to the east into a spacious plain, stretching to the shore of the Thermaic gulf. On each side the rocks rise precipitously from the bed of the Peneus, and in some places only leave room between them for the stream; and the road, which at the narrowest point is cut in the rock, might in the opinion of the ancients be defended by ten men against a host. But Tempe is

Holland, p. 348. Clarke, vol. iv. p. 278.

2 Elian's description, V. H. iii. 1., may be compared with those of Clarke, vol. iv. pp. 290-297. Holland, pp. 291–295. Dodwell, pp. 109 117., who prefers Ælian's description to Pliny's, not only as more beautiful, but more faithful. Holland compares the scenery of Tempe to that of St. Vincent's Rocks at Clifton, Gell' (Itin, of Greece, p. 280.), to that of Matlock.

3 Dr. Cramer (Description of Ancient Greece, vol. i. p. $79.) conceives, from Livy's description, xliv. 6, that before the time of Julius Cæsar the road through Tempe was carried along the heights on the left bank of the Peneus, and that the modern road was constructed by the proconsul L. Cassius Longinus, of whom an inscription, cut in the face of the rock by the road side near the narrowest part, records "Tempe munivit," Gell, Itin. of Greece, p 278., has confounded this L. Cassius with the C. Cassius who was consul A.U.C. 581. But I do not find that any traveller has been struck by the same thought with Dr. Cramer; and it seems scarcely cre dible that the ancient road on the northern side should have continued till now entirely forgotten. Dodwell's interpretation of the inscription, according to which Longinus repaired the forts of Tempe, is at least quite as probable; and since the remains of a fort exactly answering to one of those mentioned by Livy are still visible on the right of the river (Dodwell, vol. ii. p. 112. Gell, p. 278.), it can hardly be doubted that they all stood on the same side. If it had been otherwise, how could Livy have avoided noticing the new southern road, which must have rendered his description ambiguous, and, in fact, incorrect?

at least equally interesting as the only channel which nature has provided for discharging the waters which descend from the Thessalian mountains into the sea. An opinion, grounded perhaps rather on observation and reflection than on tradition, prevailed among the ancients, that these waters had once been imprisoned, and had covered the country with a vast lake, of which those of Nessonis and Babois, at the foot of Pelion, were considered as remains, till an outlet was opened for them by a sudden shock, which rent the rocks of Tempe assunder. This beneficent convulsion was ascribed by the legends to the arm of Hercules, or the trident of the god Poseidon or Neptune: the appearance of the plain and of the pass has impressed modern travellers with a similar conviction of the fact. The Peneus itself, though it is fed by all the most considerable rivers of Thessaly, is a very diminutive stream; and though, when swollen by the melting of the snows, it sometimes floods the surrounding plains, in its ordinary state is sluggish and shallow. The vale through which it flows from the north-west corner of Thessaly is contracted in its upper part between the lower ridges of Pindus and an extensive range of hills branching off from the Cambunian chain, the highlands of Hestiæotis. Near the rocks of Meteora, in the neighbourhood of Homer's craggy Ithomé, the basin of the Peneus expands into a vast level toward the south-east. At Tricca the river takes an easterly direction, and the plain widens on the right, but is still confined by the hills on the left, until within about ten miles from Larissa, where it is bounded on the north only by the skirts of Olympus, and extends a gently undulating surface southward to the foot of Othrys: a tract not less than fifty miles in length, comprehending, as its central part, the districts called Thessaliotis, and Pelasgiotis, or the Pelasgian Argos; the territory of the Perrhæbians in the north, and in the south the inland part of Achaia, or Phthiotis, the region which included the ancient Hellas. On the eastern side of

the ridge which stretches from Tempe to the gulf of Pagasa, a narrow strip of land, called Magnesia, is intercepted between the mountains and the sea, broken by lofty headlands and the beds of torrents, and exposed without a harbour to the fury of the north-east gales. A chain of rocky islands, beginning near the eastern cape of Magnesia, and in full view of Mount Athos, seems to point the way toward Lemnos and the Hellespont. The shores of the gulf of Pagasa, which open into some rich plains bounded by a range of low hills, which link Pelion with Othrys, may be considered as one of the most favoured regions of Greece; and its natural beauty and singular advantages, which fitted it to become the cradle of Greek navigation, were undoubtedly associated by more than an accidental connection with its mythical glories. In the overhanging forests of Pelion the fated tree was felled, which first found a way through the Cyanean rocks to revive the dormant feud between Europe and Asia; and on the same ground the Muses met at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, to predict the birth of Achilles and the ruin of Troy.

1

South of this gulf the coast is again deeply indented by that of Malia, into which the Spercheius, rising from Mount Tymphrestus, a continuation of Pindus, winds through a long narrow vale, which, though considered as a part of Thessaly, forms a se-parate region, widely distinguished from the rest by its physical features. It is intercepted between Othrys and Eta, a huge rugged pile, which, stretching from Pindus to the sea at Thermopyla, forms the inner barrier of Greece, as the Cambunian range is the outer, to which it corresponds in direction, and is nearly equal in height. From Mount Callidromus, a southern limb of Eta, the same range is continued without interruption, though under various names, and different degrees of elevation, along the coast of the Eubean sea, passing through the countries of the Locrian tribes, which Euripides, Med. 3. Iphig. A. 1040.