The History of Greece Author:Thomas Keightley, Joshua Toulmin Smith Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: No granite peaks tower in Hellas : its mountains and hills are of lime- and sand-stone, forming spacious caverns, and affording sites in plains for strong castle... more »s. The quarries of Pentelicus, Carystus and Paros yielded marble in abundance to the sculptor and architect. The mines of Euboea gave copper, those of Boeotia and Laconia iron; silver came from Laurion in Attica, and from the isle of Siphnos, which last also yielded small quantities of gold. Such was Hellas, whose history we are about to relate,— a land yielding all the necessaries and most of the luxuries of life, of varied surface, of temperate climate, lying within a moderate distance of all the civilized states round the Mediterranean, and inhabited by one of the most highly endowed portions of the human race. CHAPTER II. ORIGINAL STATE OF GREECE. THE PELASGIANS. THE HEROIC AGE. Hellas, in common with the rest of Europe, was peopled by that portion of mankind named the Japhetian, Caucasian, or Indo-German race: but it is utterly beyond our power to say at what time this event occurred, or what was the condition of its first inhabitants. That they were not in the nomadic state, like the Turks and Arabs, is certain, for Greece affords no extensive plains for the herdsmen to range with their cattle; and the theory of the poets and philosophers of its later ages, that their forefathers had been only naked acorn-eating savages, should be received with great caution : it rests on no positive evidence, and is manifestly a consequence of the autochthonic theory, or that which supposes men to have sprung as it were from the ground like plants, rude, ignorant, and brutish,—a theory utterly at variance with experience. There are nations of which the original condition is tobe lea'.ned from the literature of some...« less