evy-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 his finger