, have surveyed the
form and extent of the Hellespont, assign about sixty miles for the
winding course, and about three miles for the ordinary breadth of those
celebrated straits. But the narrowest part of the channel is found to
the northward of the old Turkish castles between the cities of Sestus
and Abydus. It was here that the adventurous Leander braved the passage
of the flood for the possession of his mistress. It was here likewise,
in a place where the distance between the opposite banks cannot exceed
five hundred paces, that Xerxes imposed a stupendous bridge of boats,
for the purpose of transporting into Europe a hundred and seventy
myriads of barbarians. A sea contracted within such narrow limits may
seem but ill to deserve the singular epithet of broad, which Homer, as
well as Orpheus, has frequently bestowed on the Hellespont. * But
our ideas of greatness are of a relative nature: the traveller, and
especially the poet, who sailed along the Hellespont, who pursued
the windings of the stream, and contemplated the rural scenery, which
appeared on every side to terminate the prospect, insensibly lost the
remembrance of the sea; and his fancy painted those celebrated straits,
with all the attributes of a mighty river flowing with a swift current,
in the midst of a woody and inland country, and at length, through a
wide mouth, discharging itself into the AEgean or Archipelago. Ancient
Troy, seated on a an eminence at the foot of Mount Ida, overlooked the
mouth of the Hellespont, which scarcely received an accession of waters
from the tribute of those immortal rivulets the Simois and Scamander.
The Grecian camp had stretched twelve miles along the shore from the
Sigaean to the Rhaetean promontory; and the flanks of the army were
guarded by the bravest chiefs who fought under the banners of Agamemnon.
The first of those promontories was occupied by Achilles with his
invincible myrmidons, and the dauntless Ajax pitched his tents on the
other. After Ajax had fallen a sacrifice to his disappointed pride,
and to the ingratitude of the Greeks, his sepulchre was erected on the
ground where he had defended the navy against the rage of Jove and of
Hector; and the citizens of the rising town of Rhaeteum celebrated his
memory with divine honors. Before Constantine gave a just preference to
the situation of Byzantium, he had conceived the design of erecting the
seat of empire on this celebrated spot, from whence the Romans deri