In time, a people and their culture come to resemble the land they live on and the climate around them more than anything else. I state that as a truism that seems to hold very well through history. Athens was a stable democracy as long as the wheat production went well, but descended into anarchy when the crops went badly. Sparta was comparatively rocky and always had poor yields, so the culture became one that stole from outsiders but valued order internally. Athens and Sparta were close together, but had very different pieces of land they inhabited.

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