XVII. The Prospect from Acro-Corinth.—

The view from the summit of Acro-Corinth has been famous since the days of Strabo, who has accurately described it. The brilliant foreground, indeed, on which he looked down has vanished. The stately city with its temples, its terraced gardens, its colonnades, its fountains, is no more. In its place there is spread out at our feet the flat yellowish expanse of the Isthmus, stretching like a bridge across the sea to the point where the Geranian mountains, their slopes clothed with the sombre green of the pine-forests, rise abruptly like a massive barrier at its farther end, sending out on their western side a long promontory, which cuts far into the blue waters of the Corinthian Gulf. Across the Gulf tower on the north the bold sharp peaks of Cithaeron and Helicon in Boeotia. On the north-west Parnassus lifts its mighty head, glistering with snow into late spring, but grey and bare in summer. In the far west loom the Locrian and Aetolian mountains, seeming to unite with the mountains of Peloponnese on the south, and thus apparently converting the Gulf of Corinth into an inland mountain-girdled lake. To the south-west, above ranges of grey limestone hills dotted with dark pines, soar the snowy peaks of Cyllene and Aroania in Arcadia. On the south the prospect is shut in by the high tablelands and hills of Argolis, range beyond range, the lower slopes of the valleys covered in spring with corn-fields, their upper slopes with tracts of brushwood. Eastward Salamis and the sharp-peaked Aegina are conspicuous. In this direction the view is bounded by the hills of Attica—the long ridge of Hymettus and the more pointed summits of Pentelicus and Parnes, while below them in clear weather the Parthenon is distinctly visible on the Acropolis nearly fifty miles away, the pinnacle of Lycabettus rising over it crowned with its white far-gleaming chapel.