Travel in Greece: Page viii

PROLEGOMENA

have touched upon archaeological matters, I hope not to have led any reader far from the truth, although one admittedly an amateur in such matters runs grave risk in committing himself to paper where even the doctors themselves so often disagree. I hope especially to have escaped advancing mere personal opinions on moot points, since dilettanti in such a case have little business to own any opinions, and none at all to exploit them to the untutored as if they had importance or weight. Rather I have only the desire to arouse others to a consciousness that it is as easy now to view and enjoy the visible remnants of the glory that was Greece, as it is to view those of the grandeur that was Rome.
In the writing of these chapters an effort has been made to set forth in non-technical terms only what the writer himself has seen and observed among these haunts of remote antiquity, with the idea of confining the scope of this book to the needs of those who, like himself, possess a veneration for the old things, an amateur's life for the classics, and a desire to see and know that world which was born, lived, and died before our own was even dreamed of as existing. If by what is written herein others are led to. go and see for themselves, or are in any wise assisted in making their acquaintance with Greece, or, sport ter still, are enabled the more readily to recall days spent in that most fascinating of all the bygone nations, then this book, however unworthily dealing with a great subject, will not have been written in
vain.
PHILIP SANFORD MARDEN.
LOWELL, MASS., August, 1907.