Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/244

 228 HISTORY OF GREECE. times, is alone enough to inculcate reserve in such speculations Nevertheless, we may venture to note certain improving influ- ences, connected with their geographical position, at a time when they had no books to study, and no more advanced predecessors to imitate. We may remark, first, that their position made them at once mountaineers and mariners, thus supplying them with great variety of objects, sensations, and adventures ; next, that each petty community, nestled apart amidst its own rocks, 1 was sufficiently severed from the rest to possess an individual life and attributes of its own, yet not so far as to subtract it from the sym- pathies of the remainder; so that an observant Greek, com- mercing with a great diversity of half countrymen, whose language he understood, and whose idiosyncrasies he could appreciate, had access to a larger mass of social and political experience than any other man in so unadvanced an age could personally obtain. The Phoenician, superior to the Greek on ship-board, traversed wider distances, and saw a greater number of strangers, but had not the same means of intimate communion with a multiplicity of fellows in blood and language. His relations, confined to purchase and sale, did not comprise that mutuality of action and reaction which pervaded the crowd at a Grecian festival. The scene which here presented itself, was a mixture of uniformity and variety highly stimulating to the observant faculties of a man of genius, who at the same time, if he sought to communicate his own impres- sions, or to act upon this mingled and diverse audience, was forced to shake off what was peculiar to his own town or commu- nity, and to put forth matter in harmony with the feelings of all. It is thus that we may explain, in part, that penetrating appre- hension of human life and character, and that power of touching sympathies common to all ages and nations, which surprises us so much in the unlettered authors of the old epic. Such periodical intercommunion of brethren habitually isolated from each other, was the only means then open of procuring for the bard a diver- sified range of experience and a many-colored audience ; and it was to a great degree the result of geographical causes. Perhaps among other nations such facilitating causes might have been 1 Cicero, dc Orator, i. 44. 4< Ithacam illam in asperrimis saxulis, sicut nMii lam, affixaai."