The Ancient Shape of Attica

Abstract

The physical shape of Attica has not altered appreciably since ancient times; Attica is far too well founded for that in the remote geological structure of the Aegean. But Attica is a promontory, an akté, plunged in the sea at the far end of the main watershed of peninsular Greece; and filled also with abrupt and lofty mountains, which prevent it from being ‘easy to oversee’ (eusynoptos) in the sense prescribed by Aristotle for his ideal city-state. Consequently the ground-plan, the ‘shape’ of Attica on a map of Greece, has been differently interpreted by different observers.On the modern map, based on ‘trigonometrical’ measurement of angles subtended by bases of exactly measured length, Attica appears as a wedge-shaped promontory, one side of which lies between Piraeus and C. Sunium, the other between Sunium and the bend of the coast south of Rhamnus. The angle between these two coasts is about 45 °, or half of a right angle. West of Piraeus, the island of Salamis, seen from the sea, not only looks like part of Attica, but conceals the great ingression of the Saronic Gulf into the Bay of Eleusis. And north of Rhamnus, even on the modern map, few people realize that the coast runs much more nearly west than north—bearing about 300° from Rhamnus to the Euripus Strait; so completely does Euboea insist on its immemorial connexion with Attica, and disguise the fact that from Parnassus east-ward into Attica the Greek mainland is an isthmus, lying nearly east and west, and only about 24 miles broad between the bays of Livadostro (anc. Creüsa) on the Corinthian Gulf, and Skroponeri on the Euboean channel, on the border between Boeotia and Locris.