Sails up the Gulf of Aigina

As the traveller for the first time in his life sails up the Gulf of Aigina, and his straining eyes at last behold Attica and Athens, the impression is always the same. How magnificent is the amphitheatre in the centre of which stands the Acropolis; how majestic and upsoaring is the grandest of all ruins on its immortal steep; how incredibly near together are placed these mighty memorials and historic sites; how marvellously small is the stage on which these undying dramas were played! How sublime is ancient Athens in its loneliness: how infinitesimally small is the space it occupied on the earth!

The situation of Athens is far grander than that of Rome, or Florence, perhaps even that of Naples, and of any city in Europe except Constantinople, which is a wholly different thing.

The nearness and the continuity of the mountain amphitheatre round Athens, the great height and grand form of the mountains, the splendid mass and elevation of the Acropolis in the centre, produce an im-pression more strange, simple, and imposing than any city of the West. From the distance at sea, what we behold is a vast ruin on a noble cliff. If we do not so much consider beauty and picturesque charm such as that of Naples, Palermo, Verona, and Venice, but mass, unity, and weight of stroke in the impression, we may well feel that in simple, and it may be almost painful, majesty, nothing in Western Europe can equal the first sight of Athens. And what a mere shelf of rock it looks, buttressed round by mountains on all sides but towards the sea! Like the rock of Gibraltar, Athens stands an imposing mass towering out of the sea, lonely, unapproachable by landward, and hardly habitable apart from the sea; suggesting at first sight far off empire across the sea, useless and unintelligible, except as the impregnable fastness of a sea-born race bulgaria trips.

Attica itself

Attica itself is a mere rocky shelf opening down to the sea, but with nothing around it or behind it landwards, except jagged mountain peaks, defiles, and citadels- held by her enemies and rivals. As we stand on the Propylaea and survey the magnificent panorama of rock, promontory, crags, gorges, and mountain ranges one beyond the other, rising into the sky, 5000, 6000, even 8000 feet, we are looking on soil trodden by the fiercest enemies of Athens in the days of her greatest strength, by Boeotians, Argives, Corinthians, Achaeans, and Arcadians.

An Athenian thus lived ever in full ‘view of the home of his enemies, and could behold some of the most memorable scenes in his own history, and also the birthplace and the tombs of some of his most famous chiefs. The history of Athens, its triumphs and its weakness, had for its cradle one single rocky amphitheatre. And yet, as Comte has finely put it, it was easier for her to conquer a wide empire on the seas, than it was to subdue a neighbouring state within a day’s march of her citadel. She could plant her trophies, her colonies, and her subject cities all over the Mediterranean, from Sicily in the West, to the Propontis on the North, and to Crete and Rhodes in the East; but she never could subdue many a petty republic, whose territory could be seen as the citizens climbed the great staircase to the shrine of Athene.