he cattle
find during the heat of summer shelter and pasture on the hills, at a
time when the plains are burnt up. The practice of transferring them
from the mountains to the plain according to the change of season, which
subsists still as it did in ancient times, is intimately connected with
the structure of the country, and must from the earliest period have
brought about communication among the otherwise disunited villages.

Such difficulties, however, in the internal transit by land were to a
great extent counteracted by the large proportion of coast and the
accessibility of the country by sea. The prominences and indentations in
the line of Grecian coast are hardly less remarkable than the
multiplicity of elevations and depressions which everywhere mark the
surface. There was no part of Greece proper which could be considered as
out of reach of the sea, while most parts of it were convenient and easy
of access. As the only communication between them was maritime, so the
sea, important even if we look to Greece proper exclusively, was the
sole channel for transmitting ideas and improvements, as well as for
maintaining sympathies--social, political, religious, and
literary--throughout these outlying members of the Hellenic aggregate.

The ancient philosophers and legislators were deeply impressed with the
contrast between an inland and a maritime city: in the former,
simplicity and uniformity of life, tenacity of ancient habits and
dislike of what is new or foreign, great force of exclusive sympathy and
narrow range both of objects and ideas; in the latter, variety and
novelty of sensations, expansive imagination, toleration, and occasional
preference for extraneous customs, greater activity of the individual
and corresponding mutability of the state. This distinction stands
prominent in the many comparisons instituted between the Athens of
Pericles and the Athens of the earlier times down to Solon. Both Plato
and Aristotle dwell upon it emphatically--and the former especially,
whose genius conceived the comprehensive scheme of prescribing
beforehand and insuring in practice the whole course of individual
thought and feeling in his imaginary community, treats maritime
communication, if pushed beyond the narrowest limits, as fatal to the
success and permanence of any wise scheme of education. Certain it is
that a great difference of character existed between those Greeks who
mingled much in maritime affairs and those