GRECIAN MYTHOLOGY.

49

Hercules; and the establishment of his worship in Arcadia was thus produced by the subterranean passage of the Stymphalian lake into the passage of the Erasinus. We may refer to the influence of similar causes on the social and moral character,

on the pursuits and tastes, of the inhabitants of the same country. The soil of this division of the Peloponnesus was such as to afford little encouragement to the agriculturist. Its mountain tops are covered with snow for the greater part of the year, and its plains themselves, such as those of Tegea, Mantinea, and Megalopolis, are rather flat surfaces on the elevations of hills, than warm and fruitful lowlands, where a rich alluvial soil is deposited by the contributions of fertilising streams, or which are sheltered by the protection of umbrageous forests, or refreshed by the mild breezes of the sea.

The temperature and soil of such provinces as Boeotia and Thessaly, in the continent of Greece, were almost without a parallel in the Peloponnesus; much less could they be rivalled within the limits of Arcadia. From the circumstances which have been detailed, it arose that the life of the inhabitants of that country was necessarily pastoral. The same leisure and freedom, and familiarity with grand and beautiful scenes, which such an existence in a fine country supplies in abundance, and which has produced the mountain

H

melodies of Switzerland and the Tyrol, made, in earlier times, the land of Arcadia the cradle of the pastoral Music of Hellas. On the summit of Cyllene, Mercury found the lyre; and it was Pan, the deity of Arcadia, who invented the favourite instrument of the swains of Greece.

The social character of the Arcadians was beneficially affected by these influences. They were beguiled, by their means, of the rudeness which they would otherwise have derived from the ruggedness of their soil, and from the inclemency of their climate; and thus, by a happy compensation, the very same causes which gave them impulses towards a rigid and savage mode of existence, supplied the most efficient means for reclaiming them from those same tendencies, to habits of a more refined nature.

It is said, by an authority which cannot be questioned on such a matter, namely, by the native historian Polybius, that the inhabitants of the village CYNETHA, who alone, of the people of Arcadia, resisted the influences which were supplied by the national music, owed to that circumstance the sternness and inhospitality of character by which they were distinguished from their compatriots.

Such, then, were some of the results produced by the soil and climate of this country.

It is not unworthy of remark, as a demonstration of the fact, that all which was connected with the occupations and enjoyments of a country life, was produced and cherished in Arcadia, that even the pastoral Poet of Italy, when he is commencing his didactic poem upon the affairs of rural life, is carried away from his own country into Greece, and led to derive his inspiration, not from the rivers and mountains, from the meadows and the vineyards, of his own beautiful land,-not even from those which adorned the fairest part of it, in which he was then writing, but from the rude hills and barren

sheep-walks of Arcadia. Not the majestic steeps of the Apennines, nor the vine-clad slopes of Vesuvius, but the Arcadian mountains of Mænalus and Lycæus, were the pastoral Helicon and Parnassus of Virgil.

There is another result, derived from a source similar to that of which we have just spoken, and which is not to be neglected in an attempt to form an estimate of the social character of the inhabitants of this country, and of the natural causes which led to its development.

The life of shepherds is necessarily of a migratory kind. The selection of new pastures, and the temporary abandonment of the old, are the familiar and constant duties of their existence: but the habitual performance of them has a strong tendency to weaken their attachment to any particular spot, and to produce a restlessness of character and an impatience of the same objects, which renders a change from one scene to another, not merely agreeable to them, but necessary.

Hence was produced a feature in the character of the Arcadians, which

obtained for them less respect than they derived from their probity and hospitality, and from the exercise of those other virtues which are generally associated with the idea of a pastoral life.

The Arcadians were not reluctant to serve as mercenary troops, in whatever country, and under whatever commander, there seemed to be the prospect of the greatest personal advantage to themselves; and instances are not wanting of contests, in which some of them were ranged on a different side from others of their fellow-countrymen. Thus, as Arcadia was the Switzerland of Greece, so were the Arcadians the Switzers of antiquity.

To pass from Arcadia to the province which bounded it on the south. It was a part of the policy of the legislator of LACONIA, to dissuade his compatriots from surrounding their capital with walls. He did this, no doubt, from the conviction, that as men, and not walls, make a city, so the best way to secure for a city the best walls, namely, the bravest men, was to leave it unfortified.

Thus it happened in fact. SPARTA was most secure, when she had no walls; and she then began to be unsafe, when she erected them.

But the physical characteristics of his country alone might well have suggested to Lycurgus the same thing. Nature herself had, in truth, already surrounded, not, indeed, the capital city, but the whole country of Laconia, with impregnable bulwarks. The real walls of Sparta were her mountains. From them she gained the appropriate title of unassailable. On the west, she was fenced in by the lofty and continuous range of Mount Taygetus: all entrance within her limits was blocked up on the north by the huge hills of the Arcadian frontier; on the east, her territory was protected by the sea,