We are now hard upon the borderland of history, and we take leave of a
peninsular Europe--for the grassland stands still outside, as a distinct
geographic entity--in which the diverse races, and languages, and
religious schemes, and material cultures, are almost wholly propagated
under the forms of societies of one homogeneous type, autonomous,
indeed, like the states in the loosest of federations, and involved
annually, somewhere or other, in intertribal feuds and war; but
sufficiently acquainted with each other's customs to know that they were
based 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. Lévy-Bruhl: for the Cyclops had
the 'will to power'.[13]

Here, then, was a social structure and a political world, an _oikoumené_
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