rds the Mediterranean, received the appellation of Bosphorus,
a name not less celebrated in the history, than in the fables, of
antiquity. [3] A crowd of temples and of votive altars, profusely
scattered along its steep and woody banks, attested the unskilfulness,
the terrors, and the devotion of the Grecian navigators, who, after
the example of the Argonauts, explored the dangers of the inhospitable
Euxine. On these banks tradition long preserved the memory of the palace
of Phineus, infested by the obscene harpies; [4] and of the sylvan reign
of Amycus, who defied the son of Leda to the combat of the cestus. [5]
The straits of the Bosphorus are terminated by the Cyanean rocks, which,
according to the description of the poets, had once floated on the face
of the waters; and were destined by the gods to protect the entrance of
the Euxine against the eye of profane curiosity. [6] From the Cyanean
rocks to the point and harbor of Byzantium, the winding length of the
Bosphorus extends about sixteen miles, [7] and its most ordinary breadth
may be computed at about one mile and a half. The new castles of Europe
and Asia are constructed, on either continent, upon the foundations
of two celebrated temples, of Serapis and of Jupiter Urius. The old
castles, a work of the Greek emperors, command the narrowest part of the
channel in a place where the opposite banks advance within five hundred
paces of each other. These fortresses were destroyed and strengthened by
Mahomet the Second, when he meditated the siege of Constantinople: [8]
but the Turkish conqueror was most probably ignorant, that near two
thousand years before his reign, Darius had chosen the same situation to
connect the two continents by a bridge of boats. [9] At a small distance
from the old castles we discover the little town of Chrysopolis,
or Scutari, which may almost be considered as the Asiatic suburb of
Constantinople. The Bosphorus, as it begins to open into the Propontis,
passes between Byzantium and Chalcedon. The latter of those cities was
built by the Greeks, a few years before the former; and the blindness
of its founders, who overlooked the superior advantages of the opposite
coast, has been stigmatized by a proverbial expression of contempt. [10]

[Footnote 3: The Bosphorus has been very minutely described by Dionysius
of Byzantium, who lived in the time of Domitian, (Hudson, Geograph
Minor, tom. iii.,) and by Gilles or Gyllius, a French traveller of the