lley could have taken refuge.

How the hearts of the Pelasgian wanderers must have bounded when their
exploring prows pushed into this nook, which offered them shelter from
all winds that blow! It was a site to gladden the eyes of those builders
of cities. Up above them, the bluff rock waiting for the layers of huge
stones,--the eastern nook of the port more perfectly protected than the
southern, which receives more or less the swell from the northerly
winds, and whose inner shore of hard sand tempted the weary
keels,--while all around stretched a wide, fertile, and then probably
forest-clad plain, doubtless abounding in the stags for which the
district was long famous. Here the restless race "located," and seem to
have prospered in the days of those brave men who lived before
Agamemnon, to whom and to whose allies in the Trojan war they seem to
have given much the same trouble that their reputed descendants, the
Sphakiotes, did to the Cretan Assembly of 1866, not being either then or
now over-devoted to Panhellenism, though never averse to a comfortable
fight.

Pashley quotes a Latin author to show that Cydonia was one of the most
ancient, if not the most ancient, of Cretan cities,--"Cnossus and
Erythraea, and, as the Greeks say, Cydonia, mother of cities." The
alleged foundation of the city by Agamemnon was clearly, if anything,
only a revival of the more ancient city; and after him successive
colonizations rolled their waves in on this beautiful shore, obedient to
its irresistible attraction. Dorian, Samiote, Roman, followed, adding
new blood, and perhaps new wealth; and when finally, in the degradation
of the Byzantine empire, Venice took possession of Crete, Cydonia had so
far passed into insignificance, that, "seeking a place to build a
fortress to quell the turbulent Greeks," she refounded Cydonia, and
called it Canea,--an evident corruption of the old name. With all this
building and rebuilding, nothing remains, of the ancient city. A mass of
masonry near the Mussulman cemetery, which Chevalier in 1699 saw covered
with a mosaic pavement, is still visible, but is Roman work, rubble and
mortar. As Pashley says, the modern walls of Canea would have been
sufficient to consume all vestiges of the ancient building. The
citations he gives ought to put at rest all question, of the identity of
Canea with Cydonia, and we shall presently see the only serious
objection which has been raised against it disappear under an
e