Thus an early exploitation of Elis and Messenia would be checked by piracy. The question as to the originality of Greek culture, it is interesting to note, was already discussed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, Misc. iii, ch. i. (_b_) The Greek land as a whole, especially the Attic, was only moderately fertile, and therefore not so cheaply and redundantly populated as Egypt. The bracing effect of their relative poverty was fully recognised by the Greeks themselves. Cp. Herodotus, vii, 102, and Thucydides, i, 123. See on the same point Heeren, _Political History of Ancient Greece_, Eng. tr. pp. 24-33; Thirlwall, _History of Greece_, small ed. i, 12; Duncker, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, iii, ch. i, § 1; Wachsmuth, _Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks_, § 8; Duruy, _Hist. Grecque_, 1851, p. 7; Grote, part ii, ch. i (ed. 1888, ii, 160); Boeckh, _Public Economy of Athens_, B. i, c. 8; Niebuhr, _Lectures_, li (Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 265); Mahaffy, _Rambles and Studies in Greece_, 4th ed. pp. 137, 164-67. Dr. Grundy (_Thucydides and the History of his Age_, 1911, p. 58 _sq._) lays stress on the fertility of the valleys, but recognises the smallness of the fertile areas. (_c_) Hellas was further so decisively cut up into separate cantons by its mountain ranges, and again in respect of the multitude of the islands, that the Greek districts were largely foreign to each other,[152] and their cultures had thus the advantage of reacting and interacting, as against the disadvantage of their incurable political separateness--that disadvantage in turn being correlative with the advantage of insusceptibility to a despotism. The effect of geographical conditions on Greek history is discussed at length in Conrad Bursian's essay, _Ueber den Einfluss des griechischen Landes auf den Charakter seiner Bewohner_, which I have been unable to procure or see; but I gather from his _Geographie von Griechenlands_ that he takes the view here set forth. Cp. Senior's _Journal kept in Turkey and Greece_, 1859, p. 255, for a modern Greek's view of the state of his nation, "divided into small districts by mountain ranges intersecting each other in all directions without a road or canal"; the deduction from the same perception made by the young Arthur Stanley (Prothero's _Life of Dean Stanley_, 1-vol. ed. p. 143); and the impression retained from his travels by M. Bertrand, _Études de mythologie et d'archéologie grecques_, 1858, p. 199.