Geography / Sea Life

The soil is not very good for growing things, there are a lot of mountains that make it hard to walk from one place to another, and there is never enough fresh water. Because of this, people did not settle in Greece as early as they moved to Egypt and the Fertile Crescent.

On the other hand, what Greece does have is a lot of coastline (beaches). No part of Greece is more than about forty miles from the sea: a couple of days walking. Plus there are a lot of small islands as well. So when people did come to live in

Greece

, they were sailors, and the Greeks have always spent a lot of time sailing on the ocean.

The combination of good sailing and lousy farming tends to make Greeks try to get a living from the sea. This can take several forms. First, Greeks fish a good deal. Second, they sail trade routes from one city to another, both Greek cities and elsewhere, all over the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, and make a living buying and selling things. Third, Greeks hire themselves out as soldiers to fight for other people around the Mediterranean, especially in Western Asia and Egypt (where there is money to pay them). And, less attractively, Greeks also often turn to piracy or raiding to make a living, as in the Trojan War.

Even as far back as the Stone Age, many Greeks were sailors, and sailed all over the Eastern Mediterranean. Like many other sailors in other places and times (like the Vikings for example), the Greek sailors seem to have found a lot of different ways to make their living from sailing. Some of them were fishermen, and ate some fish and sold some in markets. Other Greeks were traders, who bought things at one port and sold them at another port, and made some profit for themselves along the way. Other Greeks were soldiers for their city-state, who conquered other cities and forced them to pay tribute. Many Greek sailors worked as mercenaries, hiring out themselves and their ships to fight for other countries like Egypt.

Finally, other Greeks were pirates, who simply raided wherever they could and took whatever they could get. In real life, people probably didn't fit so neatly into any of these categories. Pirates sometimes traded, and sometimes fished, and sometimes hired themselves out as mercenaries. Traders were not above doing a little raiding if they got the chance. For soldiers, the difference between fighting and raiding is not always very clear.

Another important aspect of the Greek environment is that it is very unstable. Greece is smack-dab in the middle of a very active volcanic zone, where the Europe tectonic plate meets the Africa tectonic plate. There are several active volcanoes, and earthquakes are also very common. There is a nervous feeling that there could be a natural disaster at any time. This got the Greeks interested in a particular kind of religion which we call oracles. Oracles are the gods speaking to people, often in the form of minor earthquakes, and the gods tell the people what is going to happen in the future.

One final observation: the Greek landscape does not look the same today as it did in the Bronze Age. There used to be quite a lot of trees on the hillsides of Greece, but people cut most of them down, and now the hills of Greece are mostly bare, or have little bushes on them. We are not quite sure when exactly the trees were cut down, but very likely it has to do with the beginning of using iron in Greece, around 800 BC. You have to heat iron very hot (1537 degrees Centigrade) in order to melt it, and that takes a lot of wood fires.

Trade

Conquering some of the new lands showed to the Greeks that they could sell more things to people and buy from them what they needed more easily. The trading system was very good for Greece. The Greeks sold wine, pottery, and olive oil to their trade countries, and that gave them all the money to buy the grains that they needed from Egypt.

Land and Resources

The first towns were often built on the hills. The farmers grew food for the city. They mostly grew their crops in the valley and they kept animals on the hills such as sheep and goats.

Sometimes, farmers couldn't grow enough food to feed their own people and the cities sent out some new explorers to look for some new lands across the sea.

The climate of Greece is similar to other Mediterranean countries. In the lowlands, the summers are hot and dry with clear, cloudless skies, and the winters are rainy. In the mountains, it's much cooler, with considerable rain in the summer. Fog and snow are rare in the lowlands, the mountains are snowy in winter. The rainfall varies greatly from area to area. In Thessaly, less than 38 mm of rainfalls in some years, while parts of the western coast receive about 1270 mm. The mean annual temperature in Athens in about 17 degrees C. The extremes range from a low of -0.6 degrees C in January to a normal high of 37.2 degrees C in July.

The coastline of mainland Greece was so jagged that almost all its communities were within forty miles of the sea. Most Greeks, regardless of where they lived, never traveled very far from their home; what few long-distance travelers there were customarily went by sea. Overland transport was slow and expensive because rudimentary dirt paths served as the only roads in the predominantly mountainous terrain where most Greeks lived. Their proximity to the Mediterranean Sea allowed Greek entrepreneurs to use it as a highway for contact with one another and for potentially lucrative international trade with, in particular, Egypt and the Near East. But going to sea meant dangers from pirates and storms, and prevailing winds and fierce gales almost ruled out sailing in winter. Even in calm conditions sailors hugged the coast as much as possible and preferred to put in to shore at night for safety. As the eighth-century poet Hesiod commented, merchants needing to make a living took to the sea “because an income means life to poor mortals, but it is a terrible fate to die among the waves.”