If to these daily or frequently returning meteorological phenomena we add the terrors of occasional earthquakes, such as affect most mountainous countries and are known to have convulsed different parts of Greece within historic times, we perceive how favourable the conditions of environment must have been for exciting the imagination of an impressionable people. Whether, therefore, the early Hellenic myths arose in Hellas, or came from elsewhere, they could hardly fail in the end to betray the influence of the surroundings amid which they were handed down from generation to generation. The snowy summits of Olympus, rising serenely above the shifting clouds into the calm, clear, blue heaven, naturally came to be regarded as the fit abode of the gods who ruled the world. The association of that mountain-top with the dwelling-place of the immortals, first suggested to the imagination of the early settlers in Thessaly, passed outwards to the utmost bounds of the Hellenic world. Everywhere the word Olympus came to be synonymous with heaven itself. In the myth of the Gods and the Titans, as handed down in early Greek poetry, the influence of Thessalian topography is abundantly conspicuous. The two opposite mountain ranges of Olympus and Othrys became the respective strongholds of the opposing hosts. The convulsions of that ten years' struggle, whether suggested or not by the broken features of the ground and the conflicts of the elements, assuredly took their poetic colouring from them. The riven crags piled in confusion one above another, the rock-strewn slopes, the trees uprooted by landslips, the thunder-peals that resound from the misty mountain-chains, seem still to tell of that primeval belief, wherein the Titans were pictured as striving with frantic efforts to scale the heights of Olympus by piling Ossa on Pelion, hurling huge rocks and trees through the darkened air, and answering the thunderbolts of Zeus with fierce peals from the clouds of their lofty citadel. In the magnificent description of Hesiod, beneath all the supernatural turmoil we catch, as it were, the tumult of a wild storm among the Thessalian hills, with such added horrors as might be suggested to the imagination of the poet from the recollection or tradition of former earthquake or volcanic eruption.