from Abydos itself; and the cliffs and ravines which surround the plateau with a steep and high scarp on every side rendered it one of the strongest fortresses of the ancient world. So long as it served for the base of a powerful fleet, Abydos was at its mercy, and Athens had absolute command of the passage, protecting the whole course of her merchant ships as they passed up with merchandise for the rich Euxine colonies and returned with the indispensable wheat for the granaries of the Piræus.

No wonder Abydos always hated Athens, as Demosthenes says she did. The turn of Abydos came after the great Athenian disaster before Syracuse. Abydos was one of the first towns to throw off her allegiance to the Attic confederacy; and from that moment the last act of the Peloponnesian War consists of the desperate struggle of Athens to hold the Hellespont from Sestos alone against the hostility of Abydos. The fortunes of war varied for some years; Athens gained naval victories in the Straits themselves, one of them in 411 off the promontory of Cynossema, which we now call Kilid-ul-bahr. In 406 the victory of Arginusæ seemed to give Athens the definite naval predominance. But Sparta produced, as usual, the commander of genius who reversed the position. Lysander, with the aid of Persian gold, built a new fleet, and in 405, after various manœuvres to throw the Athenians off their guard, entered the Hellespont unattacked. Here he showed the strategic insight which his predecessors had lacked. The Spartans had hitherto confined themselves to defending Abydos, so accepting all the disadvantages of the position. Lysander boldly sailed up the Straits to the northern end, and, with the aid of a land force, stormed and held the important town of Lampsacus.

The Athenian fleet, sailing in pursuit, found on its arrival at Sestos that it was for the first time in a strategically inferior position. Lysander, with stream and wind to back him, had the weather-gage, with all the advantage of the initiative, and could attack at his pleasure. An Athenian admiral might, one would think, have two alternatives. He might either attempt to seize Callipolis (Gallipoli), where he would at once have recovered the initiative, with a good harbour and the

weather-gage for his ships; or he might decide to remain on the defensive at Sestos, with at least a strongly fortified base. But the Athenians had no admiral; they had a committee of admirals, and the committee made the usual compromise; they neither went to Callipolis nor stayed at Sestos, but went half way to the little stream of Egospotami. They thus ingeniously put themselves at every possible disadvantage. They had no harbour; their ships were moored off a muddy delta, with no sort of protection. They were still down wind and stream, and at a distance which made observation and sudden attack easier than ever; and, worst of all, they were cut off from their base at Sestos, with no organised means of supplies. There was neither market nor town near them; and they could provision themselves only by the primitive method of sending the crews to forage in the country.

Day by day they made in the morning ineffective attempts to lure Lysander to fight; they could not attack the Spartan fleet as it lay close to land protected by a strong army, and Lysander was too wise to be drawn. The afternoons had to be spent in foraging expeditions. On the fifth day Lysander ordered his swift scouts to heliograph to him, by the simple device of hoisting a bright shield on the mast, as soon as the Athenian crews were well on shore. Then he

made his pounce. He was on the empty ships long before the crews could be re-embarked; and, while the Athenians looked on in helpless rage from the shore, the fleet was annihilated. Sestos fell at once; and Athens, with her food supply cut off, had no choice but to surrender at discretion. So it was that the winds and currents of the Hellespont destroyed an empire at the very spot where it had been founded.

The subsequent history of the defence of the Straits based on Sestos and Abydos, the stage which, because in the days of Athens it had the greatest significance for the world, we have called the Athenian period, must be briefly dismissed. Two generations after Egospotami Athens recovered sufficiently to found a second empire; and this again was based on the Hellespont. Students of Demosthenes will remember the weary maze of fighting and

intrigue which led to the culmination of this brief and unstable renascence in the recapture of Sestos. But the new confederation went to pieces almost at once. The Hellespont fell into the hands of Alexander without a blow after his conquest of mainland Greece; the Persians waited for him to cross, and struck too late. It was not till 200 B.C., when Rome was stretching her hands eastwards, that the Straits assumed a momentary importance. Philip V of Macedon, anticipating an attack by the combined forces of Rome and Attalus of Pergamon, decided to seize the Straits as a measure of defence; his campaign ended with the capture of Abydos after a siege memorable among the sieges of the world for the desperate resistance of the inhabitants, and their universal suicide when the walls at last fell. But this serves only to illustrate the fact that the Straits are unimportant as a line of defence; the Romans had no thought of attacking on this side, and it was not on the Hellespont but in Thessaly that they crushed Philip. Thereafter their power over Asia grew steadily by the land routes. Abydos settled down, when Asia Minor had become Roman, into the comfortable position of a commercial town and chief toll-station; the taxes on shipping formed an important part of the revenue of the empire for many centuries. The purely military position of Sestos became useless, and we hear little or nothing of it till the days of Justinian. He, finding so naturally strong a site neglected and deserted, built there an 'impregnable castle.' But it was, like much of Justinian's work, a piece of mere ostentation. The enemies he had to resist were pressing from the north and the east, not from the west. It may have been a recognition of the uselessness of the fortress that brought it the not very complimentary name of Choiridokastron, 'Pig's Castle.'

The pressure from the west began again in the 11th century; and nothing can better mark the imbecility of Byzantine government than the fact that the Eastern empire never seems to have made any attempt to defend itself in the really vital point. Pretenders to the throne, Franks, Genoese, Crusaders, seem to have passed up and down the Straits with hardly even a show of resistance, The Fourth Crusade' established itself in 1204 at Abydos, a town moult bele et moult bien

assise,' as Villehardouin describes it, for the attack on Constantinople. A century later, in 1306, Gallipoli was captured by the roving, body of free lances called the 'Grand Company of the Catalans.' They held on to the place as long as they cared; they stood a siege or two, defeated every army sent against them, and, after bleeding the country white, retired at their leisure to seek new fields for plunder.

And then came the Turks. They had already secured, with small exceptions, the whole of Asia Minor; their capital was at Brussa, and they had a wide choice of directions from which to make their final attack on Constantinople. They were led by their military instinct to fix on the Straits, and on Sestos as the vital point. When Suleiman Pasha, the son of Orkhan, decided on the great adventure in 1356, he did not even take an army. With a picked body of a few hundred heroes, he crossed the Straits on rafts by night, and surprised Justinian's impregnable castle of Choiridokastron. The fall of the place was worthy of its name; it is said that most of the garrison were absent, employed on agricultural work, and the walls were easily scaled over a great heap of manure stacked against them. Next year the Turks, working northwards from Sestos, had seized Gallipoli, and made it their bridge-head for a further advance. By 1361 Adrianople was in their hands, and the capital was cut off from the west. The final fall of Constantinople was delayed for nearly a century by the astounding and wholly unforeseen attack of Timur aud his Mongols on the Turkish rear, and the defeat and capture of Bayezid; but none the less the fatal blow to Constantinople, as to Athens, was delivered at Sestos. It is characteristic of Byzantine fatuity that the Emperor John Palæologos should have received the news of the capture of Choiridokastron with the inane jest, 'After all, they have only taken a pigsty.'

Constantinople fell at last in 1453. Mohammed the Conqueror was not the man to neglect a vital point in the defence of his new capital as his predecessors had done; and his victory was hardly won when he set about securing the Straits. But the year 1453 marked in many ways the beginning of a new era, the end of the Middle Ages; among others, it had established the

power of heavy artillery. Mohammed had no need to waste a fleet in holding the Straits now that they could be commanded by guns. But new conditions involved a new point of defence. It was the harbours which fixed the naval point at Sestos and Abydos. But for guns the question depended upon range, and the Straits were not narrowest here. The general width at the upper end of the Narrows is about 2500 yards, and is nowhere less than 2200. Four miles lower down, the Straits contract to 1400 yards; and it was here that Mohammed the Conqueror placed his two forts, the Old Castles' of Chanak and Kilid-ul-bahr. Till February last both stood intact; Chanak, with a massive square central keep, faced by Kilid, a picturesque tower planned in the shape of a trefoil or heart. Both were armed with guns throwing huge stone shot up to 1000 lb. weight, incapable of being trained, and discharged only as a ship came into the line of fire.

The toll-station and seat of administration moved down to the forts; and the population followed. The town of Chanak or Dardanelles sprang up; and Sestos and Abydos were finally deserted. The site of Abydos now holds only forts and their garrisons. No foreigner is allowed to land there; but a century ago almost all remains of antiquity had disappeared. The stones had been carried off to build the houses of Chanak; and it is doubtful if the most diligent archæologist would now find anything to reward a search. The site of Sestos is a ploughed field; the only visible remains are the walls of 'Pig's Castle'; and the only inhabitants are the family of the farmer who is employed not only in tilling the soil, but in tending the 'tekkeh' which stands before the gate of the castle-the tomb of one of the Turkish heroes who fell in the assault.

The two forts stopped the passage, but they could not prevent approach. Venetian fleets more than once sailed up to and threatened the Narrows; and in the 17th century the range of guns had improved sufficiently to make it worth while to defend the outer entrance. The two New Castles' of Kum Kale and Sedd-ul-bahr were built by the Vizier Köprülü just after the middle of the century, and strengthened in the 18th by Baron de Tott, who added also the battery on the site of the