Europe; a history by Norman Davies

Peninsula, Environment and Prehistory

It is environment; climate, geography, topography, seasons, etc. that underlies the success of empires. 'The empire of climate', wrote Montesquieu in 1748, 'is the first of all empires'; and he proceeded to show that the European climate had no rival. It favoured requirements of primitive agriculture, psychology (opportunity and challenge), trade and travel, terrain (The Great European Plain, the Mountains, the Mediterranean, the mainland trunk).
It's absence of extremes is attributed to the success of human evolution in Europa.

Sculpture of Atlas, Praza do Toural, Santiago del Compostela. In Greek mythology, Atlas was the poor burdened Titan who supported the heavens. Archimedes remarked; "Give me a place to stand on and I will move the Earth."

Hellas, Ancient Greece

Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the thing of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about... Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs, but in the affairs of the state as well... We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. Others are brave out of ignorance, and, when they begin to think, they begin to fear. But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.

- Pericles (c.495-429), his funeral oration for the dead of the first year of the Peloponnesian War; pulsing with pride at the freedom and high culture of his native city Athens - the zenith of Greek civilisation in which political, intellectual, and cultural energies peaked.