The centre and west of the Peloponnesus is a mass of peaks and mountain ridges tangled up at abrupt angles but bounded on the north by a formidable chain, generally parallel with the Gulf of Corinth and dominated by Erymanthus and Cyllene to the west and east respectively. Around and against this chain great mountains are piled up like petrified billows. In this part of Greece plains few but important are interspersed, as at Megalopolis or Olympia. Along the northwest coast there is the wider sea-margin of “Hollow” Elis, while along the Corinthian Gulf Ægialus, the “coast-land,” seems often little more than a grudging marina subjacent to the foothills of Erymanthus and Cyllene.
From north to south, from east to west the Greek landscape lends itself to panoramic views. Lucian in his “Charon” makes Hermes seat himself on one of the twin peaks of Parnassus and Charon upon the other. With eyes anointed with Homeric eye-salve, the Ferryman, on his furlough from the under-world, is able to see not only the Greater Greece outspread around him,—from Asia Minor to Sicily, from the Danube to Crete,—but to look off beyond to the Orient and to Egypt. These wide outlooks are enhanced by the distinctness of the sky-line, everywhere an important factor. “The hard limestone of which the mountains are composed is apt to break away, and thus produces those sharply-cut outlines which stand out so clearly against the transparent sky of Greece.”
So large a troupe of actors played their parts in Greek history that the imagination demands a roomy stage. But the country is small. Were it not for the mountain barriers, the scale of distances would seem trivial. It is, for example, only some thirty miles in an air line from Thermopylæ to the Gulf of Corinth. Even on the leisurely and winding Piræus, Athens, and Peloponnesus Railway, it is only one day’s ride from Athens via the Isthmus down to Kalamata on the Bay of Messenia. The degrees of latitude that include the mainland of Central and Southern Greece span in the west only the Lipari Islands and Sicily; the thirty-eighth parallel that passes south of Palermo and the straits of Messina runs a little north of Athens; while the thirty-seventh parallel, running just south of Syracuse, passes still farther south of Kalamata and Sparta.
Not only is the mainland of Greece contained in narrow geographical limits, but the Ægean itself is almost an inland lake enclosed within neighbouring coasts. In clear weather the sailor, without adventuring upon open sea, might pass from mainland to mainland as he watched from his advancing prow another island lift above the horizon before losing sight of the harbour left astern. In Greek literature there is no more striking reminder of the contiguity of the Asian coast to Greece proper than the well-known passage in the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus describing the swift telegraphy of the beacon signals that brought to Argos the news of the capture of Troy. The ten years’ absence of Agamemnon’s host tends to an instinctive extension of the distance, if the imagination is not checked by the actual scale of miles. Troy seems farther from Argos than the Holy Land from the homes of the Crusaders.
Beacon telegraphy is a time-honored device. Many bright beacons doubtless blazed before Agamemnon, as well as since his time. Commentators have been at pains to justify by modern experiments with beacon fires on lofty heights the severest strain upon our optic nerves which Æschylus makes in the case of the light that leaped from Mount Athos to the high ridges of Eubœa. The distance is more than 100 miles, but, bearing in mind that the Eubœan mountain is some 4000 feet high and Athos more than 6000, we need not apply for any special license for our poet’s imagination. The devious course of the fire signals from Eubœa to Argos is one of the best illustrations of the jagged surface that Greece lifts skywards. As one stands on Mount Pentelicus and looks across to Eubœa, the intervening arm of the sea is hemmed in for the eye into narrow inland lakes. And Æschylus, sufficiently, though not officiously, realistic, makes the firelight zigzag irregularly to dodge the interfering ridges till it falls upon the palace roof at Argos,—not at Mycenæ, as is the not infrequent misrepresentation of the Æschylean story.
Clytemnestra, to the chorus asking who could have brought the news so quickly, replies:—
“Hephæstus, on from Ida sending brilliant gleam,
And hither beacon beacon sped with courier flame.
First Ida to the Hermæan crag of Lemnos sent,
Then from the island was received the mighty flame