on the same large needs, not merely of ‘living’ somehow but of ‘living well’, and to respect this common heritage of intertribal customs, so far that in their uttermost dealings with admitted aliens they were wont to ‘make war like gentlemen’.  To Homer’s audience it was sure proof that Odysseus was really ‘at the back of nowhere’, when the Cyclops was unable to behave when a stranger came to his cave:  he was ’a monster, of knowledge not according to the rules’.[12] It was a criticism of despair, like that of M. Levy-Bruhl:  for the Cyclops had the ’will to power’.[13]

Here, then, was a social structure and a political world, an oikoumene where men could live, tolerant of fairly wide variations in detail, within a general uniformity:  for tribal society in Middle Italy or even in Western Greece, as we first catch sight of it, was by no means homogeneous with tribal society beyond the Alps in the times of Caesar and Tacitus.  But apart from these variations, tribal Europe was a coherent whole; and it was so because, and as long as, no new problems of adjustment between Man and Nature arose to upset the balance struck by that Bread-culture with which we were concerned just now.  For the patriarchal tribal societies, as we watch them still in Albania for example, are neither more nor less than the political aspect of that culture, and their varieties and deviations stand in close correlation with the varieties which we have seen the Bread-culture assume.

In the same way, the break-down of this social structure proceeds, step by step, in relation with the two great changes to which normal Bread-culture is exposed.  On the one hand, primitive self-sufficiency (the retrospective ideal of Greek political thought) was infringed irrevocably as soon as contact was made with a region, like ancient Scythia, where, as Herodotus puts it, ’there are no earthquakes and they grow wheat to sell’; for in the Mountain Zone you are never secure against shocks, and almost never have any surplus of grain.  Once in oversea contact with lands like these, it became more economical to buy grain thence, and to pay for it by increasing the production of oil and wine, than to grow everything at home; and a new and ‘limitless’ source of wealth emerged in the process of exchange.

On the other hand, oil and wine needing far less labour than grain-crops and offering longer leisure (which for Greeks meant the chance to start doing something else), the contemporary revelation of mineral wealth, and of many forms of craftsmanship, again largely (though not wholly) introduced from oversea, created another source of wealth, no less ‘limitless’ and dangerously unmanageable, in a world where wealth of any kind was literally ‘so little good’.  And this industrial wealth, like its commercial counterpart, was personal wealth, owed wholly to skill and push, and in no way due to your clansmen or your clan.  When the poet cursed the discovery of metals, he put