THE ENVIRONMENT OF GRECIAN CULTURE. 195 



Greece, on the contrary, was multiple and diverse in space and 

 in time. The name is more particularly applied to the eastern- 

 most of the peninsulas that the European continent projects into 

 the Mediterranean toward Africa, in which the Grecian race, 

 while it spread itself widely abroad, was most compactly settled ; 

 in which its cities of greatest influence and most immortal fame 

 were built ; and where were celebrated the Olympian, Isthmian, 

 and Nemean games, to which all the scattered members of the 

 Hellenic family periodically resorted. But, besides the peninsula 

 of Hellas, as it was called, there were other Grecian lands, less 

 eminently conspicuous, perhaps, which also performed their part, 

 and that not an unimportant one, in the general movement of the 

 race. There was Asiatic Greece, which by virtue of its brilliant 

 and supple genius was more precocious than European Greece ; 

 which engaged first in the flights of poetry and art, and in gen- 

 eral and distant voyages. There was a Greece in Africa, at Nau- 

 cratis and the other cities among the mouths of the Nile, and in 

 Cyrenaica cities, protected by the desert against invasion, and 

 with its caravan-roads radiating in every direction into the inte- 

 rior, made it as a door opening toward the mysteries of the South- 

 ern continent. Thence a curiosity constantly on the alert brought 

 data by means of which the limits of the known world were 

 pushed further bach, and the idea of the variety of men and 

 climates was fostered. 



On the opposite shores were the Grecian colonies fringing the 

 gulfs and promontories of southern Italy, with their advanced 

 posts pushed to the coasts of Gaul and Spain. They had the 

 honor of being the earliest educators of Rome ; and the monu- 

 ments of architecture and sculpture which they have left are no 

 less beautiful than those which originated on the soil of the 

 mother-country. Between these Grecian lands, forming four well- 

 defined groups on the mainland, each of which had its distinct 

 existence, there was an insular Greece in the sea, including Sicily, 

 the islands of the Adriatic, the islands south and east of Hellas — 

 Cythera, Crete, the Cyclades and Sporades, Rhodes, Cyprus, Chios, 

 Lesbos, the islands near Thrace, and many others, large and small. 

 Men and merchandise, raw materials and manufactured goods, 

 sacred images with the ideas and feelings they represented, the 

 products of industry, and plastic types, were circulated and ex- 

 changed among these colonies with extraordinary facility ; and 

 happy meetings and fruitful contacts occurred in these hospita- 

 ble archipelagoes, between Greeks and barbarians, and between 

 Greeks of different stocks. 



The race that was developed in this fortunate situation, fa- 

 vored by circumstances and by the medium in which it grew up, 

 was perhaps the best endowed one that has participated in the 



