as Asia, where vast deserts and high mountain chains separate the
populations, is the seat of immobility.[18] Commerce is limited to the
bare necessities of life, and there are no inducements to movement, to
travel, and to enterprise. There are no conditions prompting man to
attempt the conquest of nature. Society is therefore stationary as in
China and India. Enfolded and imprisoned within the overpowering
vastness and illimitable sweep of nature, man is almost unconscious of
his freedom and his personality. He surrenders himself to the disposal
of a mysterious "_fate_" and yields readily to the despotic sway of
superhuman powers. The State is consequently the reign of a single
despotic will. The laws of the Medes and Persians are unalterable. But
in Greece we have extended border-lands on the coast of navigable seas;
peninsulas elaborately articulated, and easy of access. We have
mountains sufficiently elevated to shade the land and diversify the
scenery, and yet of such a form as not to impede communication. They are
usually placed neither in parallel chains nor in massive groups, but are
so disposed as to inclose extensive tracts of land admirably adapted to
become the seats of small and independent communities, separated by
natural boundaries, sometimes impossible to overleap. The face of the
interior country,--its forms of relief, seemed as though Providence
designed, from the beginning, to keep its populations socially and
politically disunited. These difficulties of internal transit by land
were, however, counteracted by the large proportion of coast, and the
accessibility of the country by sea. The promontories and indentations
in the line of the Grecian coast are hardly less remarkable than the
peculiar elevations and depressions of the surface. "The shape of
Peloponnesus, with its three southern gulfs, the Argolic, Laconian, and
Messenian, was compared by the ancient geographers to the leaf of a
plane-tree: the Pagasaean gulf on the eastern side of Greece, and the
Ambrakian gulf on the western, with their narrow entrances and
considerable area, are equivalent to internal lakes: Xenophon boasts of
the double sea which embraces so large a portion of Attica; Ephorus, of
the triple sea by which Boeotia was accessible from west, north, and
south--the Euboean strait, opening a long line of country on both sides
to coasting navigation. But the most important of all Grecian gulfs are
the Corinthian and Saronic, washin