cultivating no more of their territory than the exigen-
cies of life required, destitute of capital, never planting
their land (for they could not tell when an invader
might not come and take it all away, and when he did
come they had no walls to stop him), thinking that the
necessities of daily sustenance could be supplied at one
place as well as another, they cared little for shifting
their habitation, and consequently neither built large
cities nor attained to any other form of greatness. The
richest soils were always most subject to this change of
masters; such as the district now called Thessaly, Boeo-
tia, most of the Peloponnese, Arcadia excepted, and the
most fertile parts of the rest of Hellas. The goodness
of the land favoured the aggrandizement of particular
individuals, and thus created faction which proved a
fertile source of ruin. It also invited invasion. Accord-
ingly Attica, from the poverty of his soil enjoying from
a very remote period freedom from faction, never
changed its inhabitants. And here is no inconsiderable
exemplification of my assertion, that the migrations were
the cause of there being no correspondent growth in
other parts. The most powerful victims of war or faction
from the rest of Hellas took refuge with the Athenians
as a safe retreat; and at an early period, becoming nat-
uralized, swelled the already large population of the
city to such a height that Attica became at last too
small to hold them, and they had to send out colonies
to Ionia.

There is also another circumstance that contributes
not a little to my conviction of the weakness of ancient
times. Before the Trojan war there is no indication of
any common action in Hellas, nor indeed of the uni-
versal prevalence of the name; on the contrary, before
the time of Hellen, son of Deucalion, such appellation
existed, but the country went by the names of the differ-
ent tribes, in particular of the Pelasgian. It was not till

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