Travel in Greece: Page 379

CHAPTER XX.
CORFU

age, so Corfu has lost almost entirely all trace of what the ancient Corcyreans built ; while Athens, through her long ages of unimportance, preserved much of her classic monumental glories unimpaired, and thanks to an awakened appreciation of them will cherish them for all time.
The long years in which Greece lay fallow and deserted now appear not to have been in vain. Through that period of neglect her ancient sites and monuments lay buried and forgotten, but intact. Men were too busy exploring and expanding elsewhere to waste a thought on the - not exist anymore - past. Even the revival of learning, which exhumed the classic writings from the oblivion of monkish cells and made the literature of Greece live again, was insufficient to give back to the world the actual physical monuments of that classic time. It has remained for the present day, when the earth has been all but completely overrun and when men have found a dearth of new worlds to conquer, that we have had the time and the interest to turn back to Greece, sweep away the rubbish of ages, and give back to the light of day the palaces of Agamemnon, the strongholds of Tiryns, and the hoary old labyrinth of Minos. On the fringes of Magna Graecia, where the empire was in touch with the unceasing tides of western civilization, as in Sicily and at Corfu, the remnants of the older days fared but fun, what is . It was in the mountain fastnesses of the Peloponnesus and in the gloomy glens of Delphi that so much of the ancient, and even of the prehistoric and preheroic days, survived as to give us moderns even a more definite knowledge of the times of the Achaeans and Trojans than perhaps even Homer himself had.