Précis 2001
It was not from want of perceiving the beauty of external nature but from the different way of perceiving it, that the early Greeks did not turn their genius to portray, either in colour or in poetry, the outlines, the hues, and contrasts of all fair valley, and hold cliffs, and golden moons, and rosy lawns which their beautiful country affords in lavish abundance.Primitive people never so far as I know, enjoy when is called the picturesque in nature, wild forests, beetling cliffs, reaches of Alpine snow are with them great hindrances to human intercourse, and difficulties in the way of agriculture. They are furthermore the homes of the enemies of mankind, of the eagle, the wolf, or the tiger, and are most dangerous in times of earthquake or tempest. Hence the grand and striking features of nature are at first looked upon with fear and dislike.I do not suppose that Greeks different in the respect from other people, except that the frequent occurrence of mountains and forests made agriculture peculiarly difficult and intercourse scanty, thus increasing their dislike for the apparently reckless waste in nature. We have even in Homer a similar feeling as regards the sea, --- the sea that proved the source of all their wealth and the condition of most of their greatness. Before they had learned all this, they called it “the unvintagable sea” and looked upon its shore as merely so much waste land. We can, therefore, easily understand, how in the first beginning of Greek art, the representation of wild landscape would find no place, whereas, fruitful fields did not suggest themselves as more than the ordinary background. Art in those days was struggling with material nature to which it felt a certain antagonism.

There was nothing in the social circumstances of the Greeks to produce any revolution in this attitude during their greatest days. The Greek republics were small towns where the pressure of the city life was not felt. But as soon as the days of the Greeks republics were over, the men began to congregate for imperial purposes into Antioch, or Alexandria, or lastly into Rome, than we seek the effect of noise and dust and smoke and turmoil breaking out into the natural longing for rural rest and retirement so that from Alexander’s day …… We find all kinds of authors --- epic poets, lyricist, novelists and preachers --- agreeing in the precise of nature, its rich colours, and its varied sounds. Mohaffy: Rambles in Greece




The Art of Greeks
The Greeks comprehended the beauty of nature in a different way and they neither described it in their art nor in their words. The Greeks considered the wild features of nature as the enemies of the individuals. It was not only the Greeks but also the artists of the same era that disliked these wild features because they were considered as a source of obstruction in the life of human beings. The wild landscape had no place in the art of the Greek whereas the fruitful fields were only represented in the background. The attitude of Greeks did not change even during their greatest days but their struggle proved fruitful when the Greeks republics were over. After Alexander's day one can find a variation in the work of different authors. (Words 146/419)