It was in this light that the Greeks saw their mountains. In their eyes they compared very unfavourably with their great natural rival, the sea. It is true that the sea was mildly reproved by the epithet ἀτρυγετός for producing no crops, but it made amends, being the good-natured Mediterranean, by helping to transport the produce of other lands, while the mountains were a positive obstacle to commerce.
We may note that in Il. i. 156:—
ἦ μάλα πολλὰ μεταξὺ,
οὔρεά τε σκιόεντα θάλασσά τε ἠχήεσσα,[17]
the mountains and the sea are both alike mentioned as barriers between people and people, although it may be questioned whether the idea is more definite than that of distance, to which the epithet σκιόεντα is more appropriate. In this case the mountains are introduced merely to give a concrete horizon to the idea of remoteness conveyed by μάλα πολλά and σκιόεντα.
The sea was commonly regarded by the Greeks as a tie between land and land, the mountains as a barrier. So they damned the mountains with faint praise of their timber, their hunting grounds, and, most unkindest cut, the wider view of the sea from their cliffs. There was no one to tell the primitive Greeks that from the hated mountains, by streams and melting snows, came the very meadows in which they delighted, that the richness of their ideal pasture-lands of Thessaly was produced, not in spite of, but actually by the mountains round. So they continued to regard them as heaps of waste, and it was this view which was primarily responsible for the reticence about the mountains with which we meet in Greek literature. In all the Odyssey there are hardly twenty lines descriptive of the mountains. In one of the most beautiful lines of Homer:—
εἴσατο δ’ ὡς ὅτε ῥινὸν ἐν ἠεροειδέϊ πόντῳ.[18]
Od. v. 281.
the picture is of the island, not of its mountains; they are mentioned, but merely because a low-lying island is not visible in ‘misty’ distance.
The first use of the mountains in simile is to represent big, ugly people: of the Cyclops,
καὶ γὰρ θαῦμ’ ἐτέτυκτο πελώριον, οὐδὲ ἐῴκει
ἀνδρί γε σιτοφάγῳ, ἀλλὰ ῥίῳ ὑλήεντι
ὑψηλῶν ὀρέων, ὅ τε φαίνεται οἶον ἀπ’ ἄλλων.[19]
Od. ix. 190.
and of the queen of the Læstrygones,