THE ENVIRONMENT OF GRECIAN CULTURE. 197 



the rocky coasts ; the beaches on which vessels can be run to rest 

 on the sands ; landlocked harbors like that of the Piraeus., capable 

 of accommodating hundreds of ships — make Greece a country 

 where the sea is so mingled with the land, insinuates itself into it 

 and penetrates it in so many ways, that the inhabitants could not 

 fail to trust themselves upon it as soon as they could hollow out a 

 pirogue, familiarize themselves with the sea, and make it their 

 highway. When the Greeks first appeared to view — in their epic 

 poems — they were already bold sailors, fond of telling of the 

 arduous voyages they had made and of the distant countries they 

 had visited. They still keep their compact with the sea and excel 

 as sailors ; and their marine is an important element of Mediter- 

 ranean commerce. 



The roughness of their land made the Greeks all the more 

 ready to accept the invitation offered them by the sea. The whole 

 country is a single mountain mass of complicated construction 

 and irregular expanse, the different summits of which have their 

 several names ; furrowed and carved by innumerable ravines and 

 split by deep chasms, which often present precipitous walls. It 

 has no high, broad, table-lands or large valleys ; what are called 

 plains there, except in Thessaly, where they are larger, being only 

 narrow spaces nearly hemmed in by the mountains around, and 

 notched by their intruding spurs. Where one must be always 

 climbing, and descending to go up again, and is stopped at every 

 few steps by some formidable obstacle, communication by land is 

 not easy. It was therefore of great advantage and assistance to 

 have the sea at hand to take one wherever he might wish to go, 

 and, in order to enjoy it to the fullest, the Grecian colonists estab- 

 lished themselves in such situations that each group should have 

 at least one seaport. Only one considerable community, the Arca- 

 dians, had a wholly inland home, and they were regarded as gen- 

 erally behind the others in enterprise, learning, and civilization. 

 Without the sea and the outlets it offered, the peoples who occu- 

 pied the Hellenic peninsula would probably have continued in a 

 condition of barbarism and anarchy, like that with which their 

 relatives, the Albanians, are still struggling ; without it they must 

 have been doomed to that indefinite state of division in which the 

 clan rules. The passage by land from one district to another was 

 always arduous and often impossible. The local groups seemed 

 doomed to live in perpetual isolation, with no room for a truly 

 large and fruitful national development. That their influence 

 became more prominent than might have been anticipated was 

 because of a special feature that modified the effects of the general 

 configuration of the land. Nearly all the mountain-walled dis- 

 tricts of Greece had one side open to the sea, and that gave pas- 

 sage to everything — persons, goods, and ideas. Storms could close 



