It will be seen from these circumstances, that Greece, considering its limited total extent, offers but little motive, and still less of convenient means, for internal communication among its various inhabitants.[336] Each village, or township, occupying its plain with the inclosing mountains,[337] supplied its own main wants whilst the transport of commodities by land was sufficiently difficult to discourage greatly any regular commerce with neighbors. In so far as the face of the interior country was concerned, it seemed as if nature had been disposed, from the beginning, to keep the population of Greece socially and politically disunited,—by providing so many hedges of separation, and so many boundaries, generally hard, sometimes impossible, to overleap. One special motive to intercourse, however, arose out of this very geographical constitution of the country, and its endless alternation of mountain and valley. The difference of climate and temperature between the high and low grounds is very great; the harvest is secured in one place before it is ripe in another, and the cattle find during the heat of summer shelter and pasture on the hills, at a time when the plains are burnt up.[338] The practice of transferring them from the mountains to the plain according to the change of season, which subsists still as it did in ancient times, is intimately connected with the structure of the country, and must from the earliest period have brought about communication among the otherwise disunited villages.[339] [336] “Upon the arrival of the king and regency in 1833 (observes Mr. Strong), no carriage-roads existed in Greece; nor were they, indeed, much wanted previously, as down to that period not a carriage, waggon, or cart, or any other description of vehicles, was to be found in the whole country. The traffic in general was carried on by means of boats, to which the long indented line of the Grecian coast and its numerous islands afforded every facility. Between the seaports and the interior of the kingdom, the communication was effected by means of beasts of burden, such as mules, horses, and camels.” (Statistics of Greece, p. 33.) This exhibits a retrograde march to a point lower than the description of the Odyssey, where Telemachus and Peisistratus drive their chariot from Pylus to Sparta. The remains of the ancient roads are still seen in many parts of Greece (Strong, p. 34).