(5) The special growth of civic and peaceful population in Attica by the free incorporation of the smaller towns in the franchise of Athens. Athens had thus the largest number of free citizens of all the Greek cities to start with,[323] and the maximum of domestic peace. (6) The maintenance of an ideal of cultured life as the outcome of these conditions, which were not speedily overridden either by (_a_) systematic militarism, or (_b_) industrialism, or (_c_) by great accumulation of wealth. (7) The special public expenditure of the State, particularly in the age of Pericles, on art, architecture, and the drama, and in stipends to the poorer of the free citizens. Thus the culture history of Greece, like the political, connects vitally from the first with the physical conditions. The disrupted character of the mainland; the diffusion of the people through the Ægean Isles; the spreading of colonies on east and west, set up a multitude of separate City-States, no one of which could decisively or long dominate the rest. These democratic and equal communities reacted on each other, especially those so placed as to be seafaring. Their separateness developed a multitudinous mythology; even the Gods generally recognised being worshipped with endless local particularities, while most districts had their special deities. For each and all of these were required temples, altars, statues, sacred vessels, which would be paid for by the public[324] or the temple revenues, or by rich devotees; and the countless myths, multiplied on all hands because of the absence of anything like a general priestly organisation, were an endless appeal to the imitative arts. Nature, too, had freely supplied the ideal medium for sculpture and for the finest architecture--pure marble. And as the political dividedness of Hellenedom prevented even an approach to organisation among the scattered and independent priests, so the priesthood had no power and no thought of imposing artistic limitations on the shapers of the art objects given to their temples. In addition to all this, the local patriotism of the countless communities was constantly expressed in statues to their own heroes, statesmen, and athletes. And in such a world of sculpture, formative art must needs flourish wherever it could ornament life.