The mild climate relieved the Greeks of many cares which come to those who live in harsher lands, but the atmosphere was clear and bracing, which stimulated clear thinking. The Greeks were the first great thinkers in the world; they were possessed of a passion for knowing the truth about all things in heaven and earth, and few people have sought truth with greater courage and clearness of mind than the Greeks.
The poor soil of their land made it necessary for them to work hard and to form habits of thrift and economy. It was not a soil that made them rich and so they developed a spirit of self-control and moderation, and learned how to combine simple living with high thinking to a greater degree than any other nation has ever done. But if their soil was poor, they had all round them the exquisite beauty of the mountains, sea and sky, surroundings from which they learned to love beauty in a way that has never been excelled, if, indeed, it has ever been equalled.
The spirit of a nation expresses itself and its history is recorded in various ways: in the social relations of the people both with each other and with other nations, and this is called its political history; in its language which expresses itself in its literature; and in its building, which is its architecture. The Greek people were lovers of freedom, truth, self-control and beauty. It is in their political history, their literature and their architecture that we shall see some of the outward and visible signs of the spirit that inspired them, and the land of Greece is the setting in which they played their part in the history of civilization.
[[1]] Euripides: The Trojan Women, translated by Gilbert Murray.
CHAPTER II
GREEK RELIGION AND THE ORACLES
The city-dwellers in Greece lived in the plains separated from their neighbours by mountains, and this caused the development of a large number of separate communities, quite independent of each other, each having its own laws and government, but there were three things which all Greeks had in common wherever they lived: they spoke the same language, they believed in the same gods, and they celebrated together as Greeks their great national games.
The Greeks called themselves Hellenes and their land Hellas. Like the Hebrews and the Babylonians, they believed that there had been a time when men had grown so wicked that the gods determined to destroy the old race of man and to create a new one. A terrible flood overwhelmed the earth, until nothing of it was left visible but the top of Mount Parnassus, and here, the old legend tells us, a refuge was found by two people, Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, who alone had been saved on account of their righteous lives. Slowly the waters abated, until the earth was once more dry and habitable, but Deucalion and Pyrrha were alone and did not know what they should do. So they prayed to the gods and received as an answer to their prayer the strange command: "Depart, and cast behind you the bones of your mother." At first they could not understand what was meant, but at length Deucalion thought of an explanation. He said to Pyrrha: "The earth is the great mother of all; the stones are her bones, and perhaps it is these we must cast behind us." So they took up the stones that were lying about and cast them behind them, and as they did so a strange thing happened! The stones thrown by Deucalion became men, and those thrown by Pyrrha became women, and this race of men peopled the land of Greece anew. The son of Deucalion and Pyrrha was called Hellen, and as the Greeks looked upon him as the legendary founder of their race, they called themselves and their land by his name.
These earliest Greeks had very strange ideas as to the shape of the world. They thought it was flat and circular, and that Greece lay in the very middle of it, with Mount Olympus, or as some maintained, Delphi, as the central point of the whole world. This world was believed to be cut in two by the Sea and to be entirely surrounded by the River Ocean, from which the Sea and all the rivers and lakes on the earth received their waters.