Ancient Greece on the map
When looking at a map of Europe, Greece may appear as a skeleton-like hand stretching its crooked fingers out into the Mediterranean Sea.
- To the south, lies the Great Island of Crete; from which those grasping fingers captured in the second millennium before Christ, the beginnings of civilizations and culture.
- to the east, across the Aegean Sea, lies Asia Minor, throbbing with industry, commerce, and speculation.
- In the west, across the Ionian, Italy stands, like a leaning tower in the sea, with Sicily and Spain, each in those days with thriving Greek colonies; and at the end, the Pillars of Hercules, or Gibraltar.
- And on the north those still untamed and half-barbaric regions named Thessaly, Epirus, and Macedonia, from which the vigorous bands had come which fathered the geniuses of Homeric and Periclean Greece.
Look again, and you see countless indentations of coast and elevations of land. Greece was broken into isolated fragments by these natural barriers of sea and soil; with every valley developing its own self-sufficient economic life, its own sovereign government, its own institutions, dialect, culture and religion, In each case one or two cities, and around them stretching up the mountainslopes, and agricultural hinterland: such were the "city-states" of Euboea, Achaea, Argolis, Elis, Arcadia, Messenia, Laconia - with its Sparta, and Attica - with its Athens.
Athens was the farthest east of the larger cities of Ancient Greece; and functioned, in many ways, as door through which Greeks passed out to the busy cities of Asia Minor, and through which those elder cities sent their luxuries and their culture to then adolescent Greece.
Athens contained the admirable port of Piraeus, which housed a great maritime fleet.