more fertile" than those of Argolis and Attica (Études de mythologie et d'archéologie grecques, 1858, pp. 40–41); and again by Winwood Reade in The Martyrdom of Man (1872, p. 64): "A glance at the map is sufficient to explain why it was that Greece became civilised before the other European lands. It is nearest to those countries in which civilisation first arose … compelled to grow towards Asia as a tree grows towards the light." But to this generalisation should be put the qualifying clause (above, p. 55) that fertile coasts when developed are defensible only by a strongly organised community. Thus an early exploitation of Elis and Messenia would be checked by piracy.
The question as to the originality of Greek culture, it is interesting to note, was already discussed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's Characteristics, Misc. iii, ch. i.
(b) The Greek land as a whole, especially the Attic, was only moderately fertile, and therefore not so cheaply and redundantly populated as Egypt.
The bracing effect of their relative poverty was fully recognised by the Greeks themselves. Cp. Herodotus, vii, 102, and Thucydides, i, 123. See on the same point Heeren, Political History of Ancient Greece, Eng. tr. pp. 24–33; Thirlwall, History of Greece, small ed. i, 12; Duncker, Gesch. des Alterthums, iii, ch. i, § 1; Wachsmuth, Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks, § 8; Duruy, Hist. Grecque, 1851, p. 7; Grote, part ii, ch. i (ed. 1888, ii, 160); Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, B. i, c. 8; Niebuhr, Lectures, li (Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 265); Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece, 4th ed. pp. 137, 164–67. Dr. Grundy (Thucydides and the History of his Age, 1911, p. 58 sq.) lays stress on the fertility of the valleys, but recognises the smallness of the fertile areas.
(c) Hellas was further so decisively cut up into separate cantons by its mountain ranges, and again in respect of the multitude of the islands, that the Greek districts were largely foreign to each other,[152] and their cultures had thus the advantage of reacting and interacting, as against the disadvantage of their incurable political separateness—that disadvantage in turn being correlative with the advantage of insusceptibility to a despotism.
The effect of geographical conditions on Greek history is discussed at length in Conrad Bursian's essay, Ueber den Einfluss des griechischen Landes auf den Charakter seiner Bewohner, which I have been unable to procure or see; but I gather from his Geographie von Griechenlands that he takes the view here set forth. Cp. Senior's Journal kept in Turkey and Greece, 1859, p. 255, for a modern Greek's view of the state of his nation, "divided into small districts by mountain ranges intersecting each other in all directions without a road or canal"; the deduction from the same perception made by the young Arthur Stanley (Prothero's Life of Dean Stanley, 1-vol. ed. p. 143); and the impression retained from his travels by M. Bertrand, Études de mythologie et d'archéologie grecques, 1858, p. 199.
The profound importance of the geographical fact has been recognised more or less clearly and fully by many writers—e.g., Hume, essay Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and the Sciences (ed. 1825 of Essays, i, 115–16); Gillies, History of Greece, 1-vol. ed. p. 5; Heeren, as cited, pp. 35, 75; Duncker, as last cited, also ch. iii, § 12 (2te Aufl. 1860, p. 601); Duruy, ch. i; Cox, General History of Greece, bk. i, ch. i; Thirlwall, ch. x; Wachsmuth, Eng. tr. i, 87; Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive, Leçon 53ième; Grote, pt. ii, ch. i (ii, 155); Finlay, History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 28; K.O. Müller, Introd. to Scientific Mythology, Eng. tr. p. 179; Hegel, as last cited; Hertzberg, Geschichte von Hellas und Rom, 1879 (in Oncken's series), i, 9; Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 1872, p. 65 sq.; Bury, History of Greece, ed. 1906, pp. 2–4; Fyffe (very explicitly), Primer of Greek History, p. 8—but it is strangely overlooked by writers to whom one turns for a careful study of causes. Even Grote, after having clearly set forth (ii, 150) the predetermining influence of land-form, attributes Greek divisions to the "character of the race," which even in this connection, however, he describes as "splitting by natural fracture into a multitude of self-administering, indivisible cities" (pt. ii, ch. 28, beginning); and Sir George Cox, after specifying the geographical factor, speaks of it as merely "fostering" a love of isolation resulting from "political creed." Freeman (History of Federal Government) does not seem to apply the geographical fact to the explanation of any phase of Greek history, though he sees in Greece (ed. 1893, pp. 92, 554) "each valley and peninsula and island marked out by the hand of nature for an independent being," and quotes (p. 559) Cantù as to the effect of land-form on history in Italy. In so many words he pronounces (p. 101) that the love of town-autonomy was "inherent in the Greek mind." Mr. Warde Fowler (City-State of the Greeks and Romans) does not once give heed to the geographical conditions of causation, always speaking of the Greeks as lacking the "faculty" of union as compared with the Latins, though the Eastern Empire finally showed greater cohesive power than the Western. Even Mr. Fyffe (Primer cited, p. 127), despite his preliminary recognition of the facts, finally speaks of the Greeks as relatively lacking in the "gift for government."
The same assumption is made in Lord Morley's Compromise (ed. 1888, p. 108) in the allusion to "peoples so devoid of the sovereign faculty of political coherency as were the Greeks and the Jews." Lord Morley's proposition is that such peoples may still evolve great civilising ideas; but though that is true, the implied thesis as to "faculty" weakens even the truth. The case of the Jews is to be explained in exactly the same way as that of the Greeks, the face of Palestine being disjunct and segregate in a peculiar degree. Other "Semites," living in great plains, were united in great monarchies. The sound view of the case as to Rome is put by Hertzberg: "Soll man im Gegensatze zu der hellenischen Geschichte es in kürzester Fassung bezeichnen, so kann man etwa sagen, die italische Landesnatur stellte der Ausbildung eines grossen einheitlich geordneten Staates durchaus nicht die gewaltigen Hindernisse entgegen, wie das in Griechenland der Fall war" (Gesch. von Hellas und Rom, ii, 7). Cp. Shuckburgh, History of Rome, 1894, p. 9, as to "the vast heights which effectually separate tribes." Dr. Cunningham puts it (Western Civilisation, i, 152, 160) that Roman expansion in Italy came of the need to reach a true frontier of defence, in the lack of physical barriers to the early States. (So Lord Cromer, Anc. and Mod. Imperialism, 1910, p. 19.) It seems more plausible to say that all of the States concerned were positively disposed to conquest, and that the physical conditions of Italy made possible an overrunning which in early Greece was impossible.
The theory of "faculty," consistently applied on Mr. Fowler's and Lord Morley's lines, would credit the French with an innate gift of union much superior to that of the Germans—at least in the modern period—and the Chinese with the greatest "faculty" of all. But the long maintenance of one rule over all China is clearly due in large part to the "great facility of internal intercourse" (Davis, The Chinese, Introd.) so long established. The Roman roads were half the secret of the cohesion of the Empire. Dr. Draper suggests, ingeniously but inaccurately, that Rome had strength and permanence because of lying east and west, and thus possessing greater racial homogeneity than it would have had if it lay north and south (Intel. Devel. of Europe, i, 11). On the other hand, mountainous Switzerland remains still cantonally separate, though the pressure of surrounding States, beginning with that of Austria, forced a political union. Compare the case of the clans of the Scottish Highlands down to the road-making period after the last Jacobite rising. See the principle discussed in Mr. Spencer's Principles of Sociology, i, § 17.
It may be well, before leaving the subject, to meet the important criticism of the geographical principle by Fustel de Coulanges (La Cité antique, liv. iii, ch. xiv, p. 238, édit. 1880). Noting that the incurable division of the Greeks has been attributed to the nature of their land, and that it has been said that the intersecting mountains established lines of natural demarcation among men, he goes on to argue: "But there are no mountains between Thebes and Platæa, between Argos and Sparta, between Sybaris and Crotona. There were none between the towns of Latium, or between the twelve cities of Etruria. Physical nature has doubtless some influence on the history of peoples,
