Travel in Greece: Page vi

PROLEGOMENA

Athens utterly, despite the fact that so much has been published hitherto about the city and its monuments that no further description is at all necessary. My object is not to make Athens more familiar, but rather to describe other and more remote sites in Greece for the information, and I hope also for the pleasure, of past and future travelers. Athens, however, I could not ignore ; and while such brief treatment as is possible here is necessarily superficial, it may help to awaken an additional interest in that city where none existed before.
Aside from the preliminary chapters and those dealing with Athens itself, I hope to have been more successful. I have, at any rate, been free in those other places from the depressing feeling that I was engaged on a work of supererogation, since this part of the subject is by no means what ever neyed even through treatment by technical writers. Since the publication of most of the sport ter known books on Greek travel, a great deal has been accomplished in the way of excavation, and much that is interesting has been laid bare, which has not been adequately described, even in the technical works. In dealing with these additions and in describing journeys to less familiar inland sites, as well as cruises to sundry of the classic islands of the Aegean, I hope this book will find its real excuse for being.