1. The progress of Christianity.-II. The condition of the country.- III. The Chersonesus fortified and Choirodocastron erected by Justinian. Of the Strait of the Hellespont. I. Importance of its command under Mahomet the first.-II. Under Amu- HISTORY O F ILIUM OR TROY. INTRODUCTION. IN the work now submitted to the public, mention will frequently be made of an antient author and critic, who has been stiled by M. Chevalier, not more contemptuously and arrogantly than ignorantly, one Demetrius; and who has experienced nearly equal incivility from some of his followers. This person, a native of Scepsis, no mean city of Mount Ida, was contemporary with Crates and Aristarchus'. He was rich and well born, or, in modern phrase, a man of family. He was a great philologist and grammarian; of high reputation for learning; and especially noted for his study of Homer, and his topographical commentaries on the Ilias. He was not a common obscure individual. He was indeed one Demetrius, but of a class very different from that to which M. Chevalier would reduce him. He was one of the twenty on record, who had conferred lustre on his name 2. 2 Diogenes Laertius, 1. v. § 84. Strabo, p. Co9, 603. Demetrius, in a volume entitled The Array of the Trojan Army', consisting of thirty books, discussed the extent of the kingdom of Priam, to which the Scepsian territory had belonged, and described the people and cities subject to him. My design lies in a much smaller compass; respecting chiefly the heart and vitals. of his empire, the scat of government, and its vicinity; but, as this is intimately connected with the parts adjacent, will comprize a portion of the surrounding country. Avoiding the question concerning the limits of the Troia or Troas, about which authors have varied, I shall follow the very antient geographer Scylax of Caryanda, who makes it, as Strabo has observed, commence at Abydos; and, in Asia, shall confine my researches to the district, of which the coast, beginning at the junction of the Propontis with the Hellespont, reaches to Cape Lectos; including the region of Mount Ida connected with it, serving as it were for a back-ground to the landscape as beheld from the sea; and also some places situate on the opposite side: in Europe, to the corresponding coast of the Chersonesus of Thrace, ending in the promontory where the Hellespont falls into the Ægæan. I shall not enter at present on the local detail, but, referring the reader to the annexed map of the country, proceed with its history. • Τρωϊκος διακοσμός. 2 Strabo, p. 609. 3 Strabo, p. 574. + p. 583. CHAPTER CHAPTER I. Of the early Inhabitants of the Troia. THE HE Samothracians, a people reputed not of alien extraction, but Aborigines, whose island, in Homer called Samos, is in view of the Tröia, related, that the Pontic Sea had been once a vast pool of standing water; which, swollen by rivers running into it, first overflowed to the Cyaneæ, two rocks of the Thracian Bosphorus; and afterwards, forcing a way and flooding the champain country, formed the sea called the Hellespont❜. The Troia, if not occupied by an aboriginal race of men, like the Samothracian, connate and coeval with the soil, has been, in a remote age, without inhabitants. If it derived its population from the East, and more immediately from the region called afterwards The Greater Phrygia, which has been surmised, some tramontane adventurers may have looked down on it from the heights of Mount Ida, and beheld it a rude uncultivated desert. In the place of the Hellespont may then have been an inconsiderable stream, a marsh, or, perhaps, dry ground. If it was peopled before the inundation from the Pontus, those who escaped, when it happened, must, as in Samothrace, have fled for refuge to the mountains. Plato has been cited as having remarked, that, for some time after the early deluges, of which a memory was preserved by Diodorus Siculus, 1. 5. 2 Strabo, p. 594. B 2 tradition |