geographical remoteness made yet more remote by barriers of mountain and
sea. This is the long reach which weakens the arm of authority, no
matter what the race or country or epoch.

[Sidenote: Effect of proximity.]

As with geographical remoteness, so it is with geographical proximity.
The history of the Greek peninsula and the Greek people, because of
their location at the threshold of the Orient, has contained a
constantly recurring Asiatic element. This comes out most often as a
note of warning; like the _motif_ of Ortrud in the opera of
"Lohengrin," it mingles ominously in every chorus of Hellenic
enterprise or paean of Hellenic victory, and finally swells into a
national dirge at the Turkish conquest of the peninsula. It comes out
in the legendary history of the Argonautic Expedition and the Trojan
War; in the arrival of Phoenician Cadmus and Phrygian Pelops in
Grecian lands; in the appearance of Tyrian ships on the coast of the
Peloponnesus, where they gather the purple-yielding murex and kidnap
Greek women. It appears more conspicuously in the Asiatic sources of
Greek culture; more dramatically in the Persian Wars, in the retreat
of Xenophon's Ten Thousand, in Alexander's conquest of Asia, and
Hellenic domination of Asiatic trade through Syria to the
Mediterranean. Again in the thirteenth century the lure of the
Levantine trade led Venice and Genoa to appropriate certain islands
and promontories of Greece as commercial bases nearer to Asia. In 1396
begins the absorption of Greece into the Asiatic empire of the Turks,
the long dark eclipse of sunny Hellas, till it issues from the shadow
in 1832 with the achievement of Greek independence.

[Sidenote: Persistent effect of natural barriers.]