Book meme going around

I've seen this book meme going around, so I decided to preempt it after reading CL's post about it (and the handy dandy bible quote she managed to get out of it: It really is "the good book." Who cares about the meaning of life or morality? The real important stuff is how to make the carrying harness for an ark.)

Anyway, here are the rules. Yet again, screw #5. I don't know that many people.

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123
3. Find the first 5 sentences
4. Post the next 3 sentences
5. Tag 5 people

I'm kind of cheating; the nearest book to me is my Handbook of Steel Construction, which would not work very well. The steel book does not have a page 123 per se. Its format is 1-12, 3-121, etc, which is very good for a design manual but not very good for memes. Most pages don't have sentences either, but instead have of tables, figures, and clauses.

So I choose the second nearest book, which is Early Greece, 2nd Ed., by Oswyn Murray. Turns out this is a university text and it's extremely dry and detailed, yet amazingly contains little actual useful detail. Here's my three sentence excerpt:

For the homeland, prosperity again, and not only among the colonizing cities: Aegina never colonized, but the basis of her wealth was the resulting trade. The religion behind the colonists also benefited: the Delphi of Apollo the Leader became the richest and most important international sanctuary, and repository of the tithes of booty from victories colonial and home. Politically the influence was most perhaps from colony to mother city.

Ugh, I should have shuffled my books around a bit before doing this. That was horrible.