III. THE LESSER STATES

In the western mainlands of Greece life was content to be rural and subdued throughout Greek history—and is so today. In Locris, Aetolia, Acarnania, and Aeniania men were too close to primitive realities, too far from the quickening currents of communication and trade, to have time or skill for literature, philosophy, or art; even the gymnasium and the theater, so dear to Attica, found no home here; and the temples were artless village shrines stirring no national sentiment. At long intervals modest towns arose, like Amphissa in Locris, or Aetolian Naupactus, or little Calydon, where once Meleager had hunted the boar with Atalanta.* On the west coast near Calydon is the modern Mesolongion, or Missolonghi, where Marco Bozzaris fought and Byron died.

Between Acarnania and Aetolia runs the greatest river of Hellas—the Achelous, which the imaginative Greeks worshiped as a god, and appeased with prayer and sacrifice. Near its sources in Epirus rises the Spercheus, along whose banks in the little state of Aeniania once lived the pre-Homeric Achaeans, and a small tribe called Hellenes, whose name, by the whims of usage, was adopted by all the Greeks. Towards the east lay Thermopylae, called “Hot Gates” because of its warm sulphur springs and its narrow strategic pass, from north to south, between mountains and the Malic Gulf. Then over Mt. Othrys and through Achaea Phthiotis one descends into the great plains of Thessaly.

Here at Pharsalus Caesar’s weary troops wiped out the forces of Pompey. Nowhere else in Greece were the crops so rich as in Thessaly, or the horses so spirited, or the arts so poor. Rivers ran from all directions into the Peneus, making a fertile alluvial soil from the southern boundary of the state to the foot of the northern ranges. Through these mountains the Peneus slashes its way across Thessaly to the Thracian Sea. Between the peaks of Ossa and Olympus it carves the Vale of Tempe (i.e., a cutting), where for four miles the angry river is-hemmed in by precipitous cliffs rising a thousand feet above the stream. Along the great rivers were many cities—Pherae, Crannon, Tricca, Larisa, Gyrton, Elatea—ruled by feudal barons living on the toil of serfs. Here, in the extreme north, is Mt. Olympus, tallest of Greek peaks, and home of the Olympian gods. On its northern and eastern slopes lay Pieria, where the Muses had dwelt before they moved to Helicon.* Southward, and along the gulf, ran Magnesia, piling up mountains from Ossa to Pelion.

Beginning a few miles across the strait from Magnesia, the great island of Euboea stretches its length along the shores of the mainland between inner gulfs and outer Aegean, and pivots itself on a peninsula at Chalcis that almost binds it to Boeotia. The island’s backbone is a range that continues Olympus, Ossa, Pelion, and Othrys, and ends in the Cyclades. Its coastal plains were rich enough to lure Ionians from Attica in the days of the Dorian invasion, and to lead to its conquest by Athens in 506 on the plea that Athens, if blockaded at the Piraeus, would starve without Euboean grain. Neighboring deposits of copper and iron and banks of murex shells gave Chalcis its wealth and its name; for a time it was the chief center of the metallurgical industry in Greece, making unrivaled swords and excellent vases of bronze. The trade of the island, helped by one of the first Greek coinages, passed out from Chalcis, enriched its citizens, and led them to found commercial colonies in Thrace, Italy, and Sicily. The Euboean system of weights and measures became almost universal in Greece; and the alphabet of Chalcis, given to Rome by the Euboean colony of Italian Cumae, became through Latin the alphabet of modern Europe. A few miles to the south of Chalcis was its ancient rival, Eretria. There Menedemus, a pupil of Plato, established a school of philosophy, but for the rest neither Eretria nor Chalcis wrote its name very distinctly into the record of Greek thought or art.

From Chalcis a bridge, lineal descendant of the wooden span built in 411 B.C., leads the traveler across the Euripus strait back into Boeotia. A few miles south on the Boeotian coast lay the little town of Aulis, where Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to the gods. In this region once lived an insignificant tribe, the Graii, who joined the Euboeans in sending a colony to Cumae, near Naples; from them the Romans gave to all the Hellenes whom they encountered the name Graici, Greeks; and from that circumstance all the world came to know Hellas by a term which its own inhabitants never applied to themselves.²⁵ Farther south is Tanagra, whose poetess Corinna won the prize from Pindar about 500 B.C., and whose potters, in the fifth and fourth centuries, would make the most famous statuettes in history. Five miles south again and we are in Attica. From the peaks of the Parnes range we can make out the hills of Athens.