Greece - A Rand McNally pocket guide Author:John Harrison Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: map, and say: This was Hellas, or that was Hellas. Hellas meant any place, colony, or island inhabited by Greeks; it meant a nation of people, who spoke alike, a... more »nd used the same language,?not a particular country, or geographical division. Hence it is truly said that a Greek colony in Sicily or Africa had as much right to be called Hellas as either Attica or Lacedaemon. Shall I try to give you an idea how large Greece was ? Hundreds and thousands of books have been written about this little country, which is only about five times the size of Connecticut (if we count by square miles), or three times the size of Massachusetts. The Hudson River is 300 miles long, and if it flowed through Greece, you would have to run out one of the claws of the Peloponnesus fifty miles farther into the Mediterranean, to make it long enough, from north to south, to hold the river. If you dropped a line from Lake Erie across the west of Pennsylvania, to the extreme southern point of that State, it would be about as long as Greece is wide at its widest point?180 miles. But you must recollect that in these measurements many islands are included, such as Euboea, on the east; the Ionian islands, on the west; Crete and Cyprus, in the south; and the Cyclades and Sporades, that are scattered across the mouth of the Egaean in a thick and striking chain, link on link, as if blown by the winds from the southeast headlands of Attica and Euboea. Just think of the whole eight states of the Peloponnesus, about which so many thousands of pages have been written, being no larger than York and Lancaster, in England, orabout two and a half times larger than our National Yellowstone Park! The Peloponnesus is, indeed, about the size of New Hampshire. And Attica, the most wonderful of all the Greek states, might be slip...« less