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 on the 'key-industry'
of the whole industrial development; and when he cursed the invention of
shipping, he struck at the root-trouble of all, which had revealed to
autonomous Bread-cultured tribes in peninsular Europe lands otherwise
constituted and endowed by Nature, the exploitation of which seemed in