The Life of Greece, p21:
We do not know which of the many roads to decay Crete chose; perhaps she took them all. Her once famous forests of cypress and cedar vanished; today two thirds of the island are a stony waste, incapable of holding the winter rains. Perhaps there too, as in most declining cultures, population control went too far, and reproduction was left to the failures. Perhaps, as wealth and luxury increased, the pursuit of physical pleasure sapped the vitality of the race, and weakened its will to live or defend itself; a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean.
The book is copyright 1939; one wonders if parts of it were written in the roaring 20s or if the author was in the depths of the Great Depression and thought that was the beginning of the end of the United States of America. Maybe it was.
