Attica was not an island; but it could be invaded only by sea, or
by forcing the resistance which could be offered at the steep mountain
passes towards Boeotia or Megara. Attica was thus distinctly separated
from the rest of Greece. Legends told how, when the half-savage
Dorians had forced themselves southward over the mainland, they
had never penetrated into Attica; and the Athenians later prided
themselves upon being no colonists from afar, but upon being
"earth-sprung,"--natives of the soil which they and their twenty-times
grandfathers had held before them.

This triangle of Attica had its peculiar shortcomings and virtues.
It was for the most part stony and unfertile. Only a shallow layer
of good soil covered a part of its hard foundation rock, which
often in turn lay bare on the surface. The Athenian farmer had a
sturdy struggle to win a scanty crop, and about the only products
he could ever raise in abundance for export were olives (which seemed
to thrive on scanty soil and scanty rainfall) and honey, the work
of the mountain bees.


4. The Physical Beauty of Attica.--Yet Attica had advantages which
more than counterbalanced this grudging of fertility. All Greece,
to be sure, was favored by the natural beauty of its atmosphere,
seas, and mountains, but Attica was perhaps the most favored portion
of all, Around her coasts, rocky often and broken by pebbly beaches
and little craggy peninsulas, surged the deep blue Aegean, the most
glorious expanse of ocean in the world. Far away spread the azure
water[*],--often foam-crested and sometimes alive with the dolphins
leaping at their play,--reaching towards a shimmering sky line
where rose "the isles of Greece," masses of green foliage, or else