History of the Peloponnesian War

And it was always the best of the land that was most subject to these changes of inhabitants—the districts now called Thessaly and Boeotia, most of the Peloponnesus except Arcadia, and the most fertile regions in the rest of Hellas.

For the greater power that accrued to some communities on account of the fertility of their land occasioned internal quarrels whereby they were ruined, and at the same time these were more exposed to plots from outside tribes.

Attica, at any rate, was free from internal quarrels from the earliest times by reason of the thinness of its soil, and therefore was inhabited by the same people always.

And here is an excellent illustration of the truth of my statement that it was owing to these migrations that the other parts of Hellas did not increase in the same way as Attica; for the most influential men of the other parts of Hellas, when they were driven out of their own countries by war or sedition, resorted to Athens as being a firmly settled community, and, becoming citizens, from the very earliest times made the city still greater in the number of its inhabitants; so that Attica proved too small to hold them, and therefore the Athenians eventually sent out colonies even to Ionia.

The weakness of the olden times is further proved to me chiefly by this circumstance, that before the Trojan war, Hellas, as it appears, engaged in no enterprise in common.

Indeed, it seems to me that as a whole it did not yet have this name, either, but that before the time of Hellen, son of Deucalion, this title did not even exist, and that the several tribes, the Pelasgian most extensively, gave their own names to the several districts; but when Hellen and his sons became strong in Phthiotis and were called in to the aid of the other cities, the clans thenceforth came more and more, by reason of this intercourse, to be called Hellenes, though it was a long time before the name could prevail among them all. The best evidence of this is given by Homer;