GREECE. 



363 



cation arising between its Government and 

 France and Italy concerning the mines of Lau- 

 rium. This question has not only been the 

 cause of the downfall of several Greek minis- 

 tries, but, continuing unsettled at the close of 

 the year 1872, threatened to bring the country 

 into a most dangerous position. The follow- 

 ing is a brief statement of the Laurium ques- 

 tion : In May, 1863, a Frenchman and an Ital- 

 ian disembarked in the bay of Ergastiria, or, 

 as it is written in our maps, Agastira, at the 

 foot of the southern promontory of Attica, 

 where Cape Colonna stretches seaward, with 

 the columns of the Temple of Sunium visible in 

 the distance. As the representatives of one of 

 the most important commercial houses of Mar- 

 seilles, and the proprietors of valuable mines 

 in Spain and Sardinia, they came to examine 

 the present condition of those ancient lead, 

 zinc, and antimony deposits, which, according 

 to Pliny, were discovered by Ericthonius, King 

 of Athens, in the fifteenth century B. c., which 

 were being successfully worked in the days of 



Themistocles, and which, still later, under Per- 

 icles, seemed to have obtained their maximum 

 development. At the time of Strabo they 

 were considered exhausted, and the last notice 

 we have of them, by Pausanius, 174 years af- 

 ter Christ, speaks of them as a fact of by-gone 

 history. The two explorers cleared away the 

 superincumbent rubbish, and, descending into 

 one of the excavations of the original mines, 

 were the first human beings who had entered it 

 for 2,000 years. Here they found an iron pick- 

 axe without its handle, an earthen-ware lamp, 

 and rude tracings with some sharp instrument, 

 now filled with a calcareous deposit, and they 



* The island of Kythira (Cerigo) was, after the annexa- 

 tion of the Ionian islands to Greece, at first, formed with 

 Zante into a nomarchy ; in the census of 1865 it appears 

 united with the nomarchy of Lakonia (probably on ac- 

 count of its geographical situation) ; according to the 

 census of 1870 it is an eparchy of Argolis and Korinthia, 

 probably in consequence of the more convenient steam- 

 boat connection with Cerigo and Crete. 



t Levkas and Itaki constituted, until 1867, a nomarchy 

 of their own. Their incorporation with the nomarchies 

 of Kerkyra and Kep 

 chies from 14 to 13. 



