abylonia, but the death-rate in these steaming alluvial plains has
always been very high.

When we turn to poor and mountainous countries like Greece, the
conditions are very different. It was an old belief among the Hellenes
that in the days before the Trojan War 'the world was too full of
people.' The increase was doubtless made possible by the trade which
developed in the Minoan period, but the sources of food-supply were
liable to be interfered with. Hence came the necessity for active
colonisation, which lasted from the eighth to the sixth century B.C.
This period of expansion came to an end when all the available sites
were occupied. In the sixth century the Greeks found themselves headed
off, in the west by Phoenicians and Etruscans, in the east by the
Persian Empire. The problem of over-population was again pressing upon
them. Incessant civil wars between Hellenes kept the numbers down to
some extent; but Greek battles were not as a rule very bloody, and every
healthy nation has a surprising capacity of making good the losses
caused by war. The first effect of the check to emigration was that the
old ideal of the 'self-sufficient life,' which meant the practice of
mixed farming, had to be partially abandoned. The most flourishing
States, and especially Athens, had to take to manufactures, which they
exchanged for the food-products of the Balkan States and South Russia.
The result was an increasing urbanisation, and a new population of free
'resident aliens.' Conservatives hated this change and wished to revive
the old ideal of a small self-supporting State, with a maximum of 20,000
or 30,000 citizens. Plato, in his latest work, the 'Laws,' wishes his
model city to be not too near the sea, the proximity of which 'fills the
streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begets dishonesty in the
souls of men.' On the other side Isocrates, the most far-seeing of
Athenian politicians, realised that the day of small city-states was
over, and that the limited, 'self-sufficient' community would not long
maintain its independence. He urged his countrymen to pursue a policy of
peaceful penetration in Western Asia, as the Greeks were soon to do
under the successors of Alexander. But the prejudice against
industrialism was very strong. Greece in the fifth century remained a
poor country; her exports were not more than enough to pay for the food
of her existing population; and that population had to be artificially
restricted.