Greece is the easternmost of the three peninsulas projected southwards by Europe into the Mediterranean; and being for the most part limestone, is a continuation of the great mountain-system which stretches from Spain to Syria, encloses the basin of the Mediterranean with precipitous edges, and shuts off the three peninsulas from the continent. In no other country has the geography more influenced the history than in Greece; and the tendencies of this influence are expressed on the one hand in Wordsworth's lines:
Two Voices are there; one is of the Sea,
One of the Mountains; each a mighty Voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty! and on the other in Hegel's dictum: 'Mountains alone divide, seas unite.' Thus, as the west coast of Greece is mountainous and harbourless, whilst the east is full of bays, gulfs, and havens, Greece turned her back on Italy, and was brought into intimate communication with Asia Minor. The easternmost of the three basins into which the Mediterranean is divided became a Greek lake. The greatest factor in Greek unity was the Aegean Sea, for it united the Greeks of the mother-country with the Greeks of the isles and of the coast of Asia Minor. At the same time, as the coast is the first part of a new country to become civilised, and Greece has relatively a longer coast-line than any other country in Europe, just as Europe has more coast than any other quarter of the globe, the history of European civilisation begins with Greece. On the other hand, the spirit of liberty, which nerved the Greeks to resist the Persians, and so save the civilisation of the world, was due to the mountains of Greece; but the divisions between the Greeks themselves were also due to the mountains, which divided the land into cantons incapable of effectual combination against the Macedonian invader who conquered them all.
Let us then begin with the mountains, and, so to speak, articulate the skeleton of Greece. The range which in the north cuts off the peninsula from the continent of Europe is an extension of the Balkans. From it run chains from north to south, or rather from north-north-west to south-south-east, which form the skeleton of Greece. The most important of these is the range which forms the backbone of the country, separating first Illyria on the west from Macedonia on the east, and then Epirus on the west from Thessaly on the east. Thus the western boundary of Thessaly is formed by Pindus (7111 feet), the main offshoot of the Balkans. The eastern boundary is also marked not only by the sea, but by important mountains derived from the Balkan system. These are Olympus (9750 feet), Ossa, Mavrovuni, and Pelion. Returning to Pindus, we find that its tendency to the east becomes now more pronounced, and a branch of it, under the name of Othrys, starting from the mighty Tymphrestus (mod. Veluchi, 7606 feet), forms the south boundary of Thessaly. It then is continued in the celebrated mountains Parnassus (8036 feet) and Helicon, forms the land of Attica, and reappears as the islands of Ceos, Cythnos, Seriphos, and Siphnos. The subsequent course of that branch of the Balkans which we have mentioned as marking in part the eastern boundary of Thessaly is equally interesting, for it forms first the island of Eubœa, and then the isles of Andros, Tenos, Myconus, Naxos, and Amorgos. The Peloponnese, 'the island of Pelops,' or by its modern name the Morea, is connected with northern Greece merely by the narrow isthmus of Corinth, and is separated from it by the long narrow Gulf of Corinth on the west and the Saronic Gulf on the east. The commercial supremacy of ancient Corinth, standing as it did on 'two bright havens,' and on the road from Peloponnese to the mainland, was due to its position; and we need only add, in further explanation, that all the great trade routes from the Ural Mountains, the Black Sea, and Asia Minor to Sicily, Marseilles, and the West converged at Corinth.
The Peloponnese has a mountain-system which is derived, like the others of Greece, from the Balkans, runs parallel to and west of Pindus, and shows itself in the Acroceraunian Mountains and in Aracynthus. From the central group of mountains which surround Arcadia, and are highest on its north frontiers between Arcadia and Achœa—e.g. Cyllœne (Ziria), Aroania (Chelmos, 7724 feet), and Erymanthus (Olonus)—run two important chains, in the same north-north-west to south-south-east direction which we observed in the Pindus. Of these, the westernmost is the Taygetus (Hagios Elias, 7901 feet), the highest peak in the Peloponnese, which, after dividing Laconia on the east from Messenia on the west, ends in the promontory of Tænarum; while the eastern one separates Arcadia from Argolis, runs down Laconia under the name of Parnon (Malevo), and makes its last appearance as the island of Cythera. And here we may complete our account of the isles of Greece by adding that the Ionian Isles, Corcyra, Cephalenia, Leucas, and Zacynthus, off the west coast, follow the same north-north-west to south-south-east direction as the mountain-chains of the Peloponnese and the mainland.
The rivers of Greece are unimportant. They flow generally, both in the Peloponnese and the mainland, south or west. In the latter the four principal rivers have their source on Mount Lakmon, the starting-point of Pindus, and flow, the Aoos (Viosa) into the Adriatic, the Achelous (Aspropotamos) to the Gulf of Patræ, the Peneus (Salambrias) and Haliacmon into the Thermaic Gulf. The principal rivers of the Peloponnese rise near the north of Taygetus: the Alpheus (Ruphia) flows west, the Eurotas south.
People.—The ancient Greeks were a branch of that family which includes most European peoples, and also the Persians and the Hindus, and is variously called Indo-Germanic, Indo-European, and Aryan. The Indo-European family is not an ethnological division of the human race, but a linguistic: the languages spoken by the various Indo-Europeans are descended from one and the same original language (now lost), but the peoples who speak it, indeed the people who spoke the original language, need not necessarily, though they may quite possibly, be all of the same descent, for one nation may, directly or indirectly, compel another to adopt its language. Whether the original Indo-European home was in Europe or in Asia is a matter still in dispute. What is less open to doubt is that it was from the north that the Greeks entered Greece, and that they were nomad tribes depending for subsistence mainly on their flocks, though they knew how in extremity to cultivate the ground in a primitive fashion. Metals they were hardly acquainted with; they were still in the Stone Age. As they moved southwards in separate tribes, the foremost tribes were impelled forward by the pressure of those behind; and even when the whole of the peninsula had been for some time filled and fully occupied, a fresh wave of immigrants might wash over the whole country, disturbing everything. Such a wave was the 'Return of the Heraclidae,' or the 'Dorian Invasion.' The result was to drive emigrants on to and over the isles of Greece to plant Greek cities and Greek culture on the coasts of Asia Minor. At later times Sicily, the Black Sea, Libya, &c. were dotted with Greek colonies; and wherever Greeks were, there, to the Greek mind, was Hellas, which is thus an ethnological rather than a territorial term. As for the name of the Greeks, they called themselves Hellenes, a designation the origin of which is still unknown; the inhabitants of Italy called them Græci; the Orientals, Ionians; while in Homer they are called Danaans and Achæans.
The modern Greeks are by no means pure-bred descendants of the ancient Greeks. Indeed, it has been maintained by Fallmerayer that from the 7th century A.D. there have been no pure Greeks in the country, but only Slavs. It is, however, pretty certain that the 1½ million of modern inhabitants are descendants of the three races that occupied the soil at the time of the Roman Conquest—viz. Greeks, Thracians (mod. Wallachians), and Illyrians (Albanians).
Language.—The Indo-European family of speech includes, in addition to Greek, the following branches: Hindu-Persian, Armenian, Albanian, Italian, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavo-Baltic. Of these that with which Greek was supposed to have the most affinities was the other classical language, Latin; and the two peoples were accordingly supposed to have dwelt together after leaving the original home, and to have jointly gone through a Græco-Italian period. This view, however, is exposed to many difficulties: the inflections of the Latin verb are more closely connected with Celtic; the syntax of Greek bears more resemblance to that of Sanskrit; and while the vocabulary of Latin is more closely bound up with that of the Teutonic languages, the Greek coincides more frequently with the Hindu-Persian. The dialects into which the ancient language was divided may be grouped as follows: (1) Ionic and Attic; (2) Dorian (covering the Peloponnese and its colonies); (3) the North-western dialects (those of Phocis, Locris, Ætolia, Aœarnania, and Epirus); (4) Æolian (Lesbos, North Thessaly, Bœotia); (5) Elis; (6) Arcadian and Cyprian; (7) Pamphylian.
The ancient dialects continued to be spoken at any rate till the time of Tatian (adv. Græc. 171)—i.e. the end of the 2d century A.D. By 263 A.D.,