This people began as a nation of sturdy farmers, close to the earth, abstemious, hard-working, strong-muscled delvers and hewers, becoming through their very capacity for enduring hardship and taking blows the strongest people in antiquity. But their very strength and their unflagging industry turned them into a nation of grabbers and cadgers, living off their neighbors, converting their mother city into a gigantic mouth and stomach, sucking in foods, booty, works of art, slaves, religions, gods, and scraps of knowledge, turning every refinement of culture, every decency of daily life, into something at once lurid and brutal, sensational and disgusting, pretentious and meaningless.