DISCOVERY 



15 



Greeks were an open-air people. Their climate encour- 

 ages the open-air life. They had a correspondingly 

 high standard of physical fitness. They disliked 

 working indoors, and they condemned its physical 

 results. A man's health, they argued, must suffer 

 from being shut up out of the sunlight all day, possibly 

 beside a fire or furnace. And if his bcdj- suffered, his 

 mind would suffer too. Such occupations would stunt 

 his mental and moral growth. Industry indoors was 

 no life for a free man. If he has to earn his living, he 

 will do so, they thought, most honourably in the open 

 air asa farmer or sailor.^ An epitaph in the Anthology 

 gives us the alternatives : 



tain-tops of bare limestone, and therefore it was in 

 these fiockets, isolated from each other by sea and 

 mountain, in which settlements grew up. This phy- 

 sical isolation bred the peculiar virtues and defects 

 of the city-state : on the one hand an intense love 

 of independence, and on the other the inability to 

 form a successful political combination upon a larger 

 scale. Further, the indented coast-line of Greece, 

 with its main harbours opening towards the homes of 

 older civilisations in the East, and the chains of 

 islands, which offered ready shelter to the early 

 mariner, and, what was even more important to one 

 who hnd II" Co!!!] I ill ].. rpiUial guidance of land- 



TYPICAL, GREEK VIEW. 



" I am Eteocles, whom the hopes of the sea drew 

 from husbandry and made a merchant in place of 

 what I was by nature. I wao travelling on the surface 

 of the Tyrrhenian Sea, but with my ship I sunk head- 

 long into the depths, in a sudden fierce squall. It is 

 not then the same wind which blows on the threshing 

 floor as that which fills the sails." = 



The lines of Greek development had, in fact, been 

 largely moulded by the phj'sical features of the Balkan 

 Peninsula. About looo B.C. the ferment caused by 

 the invasion of the iron-using tribes from Central 

 Europe = gradually subsided ; and the iEgean area, 

 which had been a seething cauldron of migratory 

 peoples, began to settle down. Now, Greece consists 

 of a tangled mountainous mass with little pockets of 

 plain between its crags. Man cannot live upon moun- 



' See. for example, the treatise of Xenophon already re- 

 ferred to 



' Greek Anthology, vii. p. 532 (translated by W. R. Paton 

 in the Loeb Series). 



' See Discovery, vol. i, pp. 226 and 3.) 2. 



marks, made the /E{.iean Sea an ideal nursery for early 

 navigation. 



The people then settled down in these little plains 

 hedged in by mountains and the sea. It is a law of 

 nature that everything, in order to survive, must adapt 

 itself to its circumstances. So the Northerners had 

 to change their way of life. The Homeric chieftains 

 were still tamers of horses, a pastoral people who 

 reckoned their wealth in oxen ; e.g., when Diomed 

 changed armour with Glaucus, Homer remarks what 

 a fool he was to give away arms worth a hundred oxen 

 for arms worth nine. But the country in which the 

 " tamers of horses " were now settled has no wide 

 pasture-lands. Beyond the small arable plain is the 

 rocky mountain. Its prickly scrub will give summer 

 feed for goats and sheep, but is of little use for horses 

 or cattle. In consequence the Greeks ceased to be a 

 pastoral people, and became agricultural. 



Below the bare rock of the mountain summits there 

 is a belt of forest, with springs round which green shrubs 

 will grow in the summer when the plain below is parched 



