Chapter 9
—J. Carter 1990: 441
The picture which emerges from our analysis of the distribution of the population, land, and wealth in the Classical Period, does not reveal the existence of an “aristocracy” and the gross social inequalities that such a term implies. The society which made maximum use of the land and brought it to peak production was one of small- or medium-sized farms and citizen-farmers—as close, perhaps, to the Jefferson ideal as the ancient world may have come. Its precipitous decline was probably not the result of the class struggle, nor may it have been entirely due to outside political forces beyond its control, but rather—as our detailed analysis of agricultural changes and the shifting settlement pattern suggest—in part at least to a failure to understand completely the potential and the limitations of the land itself.
The Paradoxes of Greek Agrarianism
The Greeks themselves during the period of the polis—Hesiod, Herodotus, Plato, and Thucydides here mostly agree—saw their own existence as a small part of the inevitable rise and fall of states. Nor was their cyclical view simply one of pessimism. It was more than the “golden-age” idea that past communities were “better” than present Greek societies. This notion of the creation/maturity/decline of states was akin to the natural process of birth, maturity, and death. “All Greek authors,” wrote the French historian Jacqueline de Romilly (1977: 19), “considered the rise and fall of a state just as they would consider the rise and fall of an individual person. The pattern of rise and fall has nothing to do with states as such, nor did the Greeks conceive any difference in nature between states and individuals.”
De Romilly’s correct observation does not mean that ancient historians and philosophers were completely ignorant of the influence of criteria such as finance, military expenditures, and demography. She suggests, I think, that all such data were seen by the Greeks merely as symptoms of this larger, this inevitable natural cycle of aging within a community, not as perceived catalysts, or causes in themselves, for social decay.
That cyclical notion is inherent in agriculture and so in an agrarian society at large. As a man’s back weakens, his muscles fail, his nerve and spirit break with age, the decline shows immediately in the farm. Things are not done as in the past. Weeds grow. Trees and vines lose their productive edge. House, barn, and fences become unkept. True, the next generation is eager to inherit and may remedy the decline. But one life of the farm (to the aging farmer its best life), an entire cycle in its history has ended, will not come again. For the mature agriculturalist who sees firsthand this natural process of erosion daily—in himself, his family, his neighbors—the entire world outside takes on a similar pattern. The community, the state, the country, like himself, will grow old, the ongoing and predictable deterioration clear for the keen eye, the inevitably agrarian eye, to see.
In our literary sources, fourth-century Greek authors can comment on excessive defense spending or the growth of noncitizen populations. But these observations are not presented as analysis of erosion. They are sometimes confirmation of the senility of the Greekpolis, a natural epilogue to the youthful exuberance of past times. It is unlikely that any ancient Greek thinker, in a systematic sense, discussed social, political, and economical phenomena that might account for the decline of the polis, although many Greeks—orators and philosophers mostly, especially during the fourth century—were quite aware that the three-centuries-old agrarian economy and social structure of the city-states were in a real state of crisis.
In a political sense, indigenous hoplite-farmers throughout the fifth century had been losing their exclusive importance to a growing minority in the Greek poleis, men who shared neither their agricultural background nor their agrarian vision of what a Hellenic city-state should be. Once the dominant class in the community by both their numbers and their status as the sole producers of food, the recalcitrant geôrgoi still in the late fifth and fourth centuries assumed that all Greek residents, landless and foreigners alike, would continue to accept their peculiar ideology that locally grown produce was the lifeblood of the polis, that wealth, social prestige, and political privilege were inseparably tied to something as pedestrian as a ten-acre farm, that naval power, mercenaries, foreign expeditions were not a necessary part of the city-state’s military and political agenda, that money divorced from land was no sign of success, and that all residents shared in their glory of the phalanx lumbering out to reclaim lost border ground.
With the break-up of the Persian hold over the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean world in the fifth century (i.e., 480-431 B.C.), and with the increasing disintegration of imperial control in Asia itself during the fourth (404-323 B.C.), things changed. As we have seen in the last chapter, many in the Greek city-states first learned of a wealth beyond their borders, and of the opportunities for Greek economic and military practice beyond the egalitarian sanction of the polis.
For these ambitious and aggressive non-landed, non-hoplites, there was a growing realization that food, like soldiers, could also be imported from abroad. Many Greeks knew that greater profit now lay in disreputable marketing and trading, rather than in the tedious growing of harvests. Seamanship and the navies that protected merchant vessels in the Aegean were now seen as important assets of commerce. Equal wealth was found from trading, mines, crafts, and in the region-wide exchange of natural resources such as clays, stone, metals, woods. A few years of hired killing in Asia could earn far more for a warrior than a plot of grain, vineyard, and orchards in Greece. Residence outside the Greek patchwork was not stifling, but lucrative, to those of the non-hoplite class (see, e.g., Rostovzeff 1941: 1.99ff; Garlan 1975: 103; Kinkel 66-68). In strictly financial terms, the end of Greek agrarianism, the diminution of the small hoplite farm as the key to social, military, and political privilege, resulted in much greater capital formation and wealthcirculating in Greece, the Aegean, Italy, Sicily, and Asia Minor at the end of the fourth century and on into the third (cf. Pritchett War 5.468-71).
All changes in the delicate equilibrium of the Mediterranean tugged from both above and below at the old middle group of Greek small farmers. M. I. Finley saw these ultimate—and fatal—contradictions of the agrarian polis once it was placed within the wider backdrop of the Mediterranean: “Profound structural changes followed, in the land regime as in other respects. Urbanization created new uses for land and wealth, introduced chattel slavery, made possible the existence of classes (and even of considerable wealth) not tied to land, and eventually fostered a considerable monetization of the economy…. It is no coincidence that the various examples given by Aristotle in the Politics, of communities which were still struggling (or had only recently abandoned the effort) to preserve more archaic property regimes, were without exception drawn from the more backward, non-urban Greek regions” (Finley 1975: 159).
The generations of the fifth and fourth century in the less “backward” Greek poleis, so castigated in conservative literature of the times (e.g., Andoc. Alcib. 22; Ar. Nub 987-99), naturally began to question the viability and honor of intensive agriculture itself. True, uneasiness on the part of some folk is always inherent in an agricultural society. I can attest to that from my grandfather’s lectures about the evils of the nearby town and his quiet disdain for those who would not live on or work their soil. Even if inappropriately labeling ancient Greece a “peasant society,” E. K. L. Francis was at least correct in identifying the blinkered and confining mentality of agrarianism. He saw the stifling impact it has on its own who choose not to accept its limitations: “This does not necessarily mean that individuals would not emerge in peasant societies whose mental pattern leads in a different direction and who cannot adjust themselves to tradition. However, for them there is no room or outlet within the closely knit community. We must presume that these will eventually be cast out, and compelled to seek a living in some way other than agriculture” (295).
What was different in the fifth and fourth centuries was that now greater opportunity arose for the traditionally rebellious and dissatisfied Greeks, for those ever-present agrarian misfits with a different “mental pattern.” At last they could achieve considerable nonfarming success, acquiring enough capital to make the old agrarian protocols appear nonsensical. Hesiod’s age-old advice to marry at thirty, to acquire a wife, ox, and slave, and then, through the avoidance of debt and the sea, to find at near senility security in the soil seemed increasingly impracticable, if not silly—given the realities of a Mediterranean-wide economy and a near limitless theater of wars, sieges, and plundering expeditions. Instead, many fifth- and fourth-century Greeks no longer minded at all being “cast out”—once they saw money and economic influence awarded to those outside “the archaic property regimes” without land, without heavy hoplite armor, indeed without even formal citizenship.
Just as the phalanx remained largely unchanged—and thus was bypassed—in a sea of complex, revolutionary military changes, so the fourth-century Greek polis itself seemed frozen, still operating on political premises that were becoming increasing irrelevant to a growing nonagrarian but capable and influential resident population. Hence the innovative, though inevitably futile, practice in the twilight of the free city-state of awarding grants of citizenship to some wealthy benefactors who were not native-born residents (cf. Pecírka 1963: 201). But the deep structural problems of the Greek polis could not be solved by the expansion of citizenship to only a few prominent foreign men, whose talents more often incurred private envy and suspicion. Much more was needed.
Even noncitizen foreigners and slaves who had joined in with Athenian patriots to rescue their democracy from the so-called Thirty Tyrants (i.e., 403 B.C.) were probably not guaranteed citizenship for their valiant efforts, as Athenians in the subsequent calm quickly tried to renege on promises of citizenship grants. No surprise that at Athens—and it was perhaps the most democratic of the Greek city-states—any attempt to expand the franchise was usually met with stern conservative opposition. Reactionary proposals (albeit usually from extremists rather than mesoi farmers) were made to bring back an even narrower agrarian republic of landowners (cf. Ostwald 500-509).
The Greek world of the late fifth century and fourth centuries, for all its vast military, social, and economic upheaval, was still extremely conservative politically. There was no chance that many metics, foreigners, freedmen, or exceptional slaves—whatever the warranting circumstances—would ever be formally included in the polis. Far more likely, even in troubled Greek democracies, nonlandowning citizens might themselves be threatened with a loss of their citizenship: the ideology of the obstinate polislookedbackward, not forward, to meet the changing cultural environment. Of that old and unsolved problem of most gifted resident-aliens lacking citizenship—and thus the chance for property ownership—A. R. Harrison notes of democratic Athens: “This incapacity, extending as it did to metics, had far-reaching effects on the economic structure of Athenian society, since it meant that the very men who were the backbone of the trading and banking community were precluded from owning, and therefore borrowing or lending on the security of, land” (237). A small farm was no longer a guarantee of financial success, no prerequisite for military service, but it was still mandatory for social status and political power.
The proper question is not why and how the agrarian polis eroded in the fourth century. Rather it is how was such a rigid entity inviolate so long, immune from the turbulent fifth- and fourth-century history of the eastern Mediterranean, a political brontosaurus born completely in answer to agrarian problems germane to a Greece of centuries past (cf. Starr 1977: 34)? Economics and fighting, both Mediterranean phenomena beyond the control of the polis, might change radically in the late fifth and fourth centuries. Yet the beleaguered Greek city-state wherever possible still stuck to its anachronistic social and political protocols born two and three hundred years earlier.
Hoplites were not pushed off their farms in the fourth century by grasping land barons. Nor were they displaced by the agricultural devastation (greatly exaggerated) incurred in the Peloponnesian War (as has sometimes been simplistically argued). Rather, increasingly in the late fifth century, agrarians became caught within their own confining rules. After more than two centuries of unquestioned prominence, the farmer/hoplite/landed citizen found himself more and more in a classic “no-win” situation. Small, intensive growers still owned and worked land in the fourth century out in the Greek countryside (cf. Snodgrass 1990: 128), but their absolute importance inside the polis was being lost.
By removing all others from the battlefield (and from a real voice in the polis), the Greek geôrgoi were simply captives of their own success at creating an exclusive egalitarianism. The landless (both the traditionally impoverished and the newly affluent “backbone of the trading and banking community”) became increasingly more numerous than the hoplite insiders, as their polis system took on the appearance of a benign but anachronistic apartheid. “The increasing size, and economic importance, of the community of Greeks living outside the cities,” Paul McKechnie writes, “created during the fourth century a mass of economically active people who had nothing to gain from the continuance of the system of making political decisions by a majority vote of citizens.” These private clubs, McKechnie rightly adds, became increasingly irrelevant: “Once there was a significant number of free people outside the system of democratic or oligarchic government, and some of them were educated, articulate men who could have been influential had they been allowed to become involved in government, objections could arise to the position which closed associations of citizens held as governing bodies in the Greek world” (McKechnie 10).
Native Greek farmers of the polis, “the closed associations” of “the system,” offered no mechanism for political integration once the flood-gates of military and economic opportunity burst open. Entertaining no unifying ideology other than the possession of equal plots of land and the rigid desire to possess, to protect, and to perpetuate that agrarian ideal, Greek hoplite landowners themselves had little taste for opportunities opening up in the Mediterranean. They had scant business sense, no desire or ability for political innovation, and were bereft of military visionaries: hoplite agrarians possessed no appeal to any other outside their own (shrinking) egalitarian sphere. There was little to offer “the mass of economically active people,” little hope either that poleis could grow into super city-states and still retain their characteristic informality, distrust of government, and immediate, almost hourly connection between voting, fighting, and farming. That self-contained autonomy in part explains Aristotle’s reactionary and largely sympathetic treatment of hoplite agrarianism, why he felt the ideal polis should not have a large population, why it should be self-sufficient, with most of its natural resources at hand (e.g., Pol. 2.1265a13; 3.1276a29; 7.13261-b). As M. I. Finley noted, (1975: 159), Aristotle’s favorite examples in his Politics are isolated, conservative Greek polities, which lay in the backwaters of Greece (and thus had been less exposed to upheavals of the contemporary conditions of the late fourth century). Similar favorites in thePolitics are ancient lawgivers who attempted to preserve a simple agrarian state (e.g., Pol. 2.1274a22-1274b26, 6.1319a14-16).
But land once parceled, even if equitably so, and doggedly retained, is a limited, a finite commodity. Membership in the Greek agrarian grid was not a currency well suited as the conditio sine qua non of citizenship to a growing and evolving populace, a populace increasingly eager for the roll of the dice offered by military adventures and foreign commerce (cf., e.g., Padgug 92-93; 100-104). Thomas Jefferson, in the romantic and often blinkered tradition of Western agrarianism, long ago lamented this intrinsic, unsolvable problem of landholding as the only key to citizenship: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America When they get piled up upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become as corrupt as in Europe” (cf. Griswold 31).
In sum, the Greek agrarian city-state had been able to fashion an unusually egalitarian social, political, and military system, but one (like many modern liberal states) closed to the larger, ever present (and growing) world of have-nots surrounding the polis, the other who desperately wanted the economic and social advantages of polis life. Herein lay the dilemma. To open up the discriminatory gates of polis citizenship was—as modern states have also often discovered—to corrupt the carefully constructed equilibrium and the unifying agricultural heritage that had evolved over two centuries of agrarianism. For the Greek geôrgoi to refashion the traditional polis for all residents might just as likely lose it for everyone. The economy of the city-state would remain agricultural but the ethos of the people would no longer be agrarian.
Nowhere can these paradoxes of ancient Greek agrarianism be seen more clearly than at Athens. It was the one Greek city-state that sought (ultimately unsuccessfully) to transform the agrarian ideology of the traditional polis to meet the new needs of the fifth- and fourth-century Mediterranean world. At Athens local hoplite farmers through a variety of mechanisms were won over to the idea of radical democracy—a government that in the fifth century relinquished its property qualification for most offices, built a navy, created an empire, and sought substantial outside sources of food and capital.
Rethinking the Greek Polis
i. The Athenian Reformation
To enfranchise as full citizens those who did not hold land, to mobilize serious military forces other than columns of landed infantry, to import food from outside the farms of their own Attic citizenry, all that could call into question the old agricultural protocols of the Athenian polis. But such a modification of polis ideology was needed in the fifth and fourth centuries, if the city-state were to survive as an autonomous entity within the growing complexity of Mediterranean empires and nations.
Athens altered the economic, political, and military triad upon which the city-state was based in the fifth century (e.g., [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.2, 1.7-9, 2.1-6, 2.14-16; Plut. Them. 19). By moving to the left she avoided some of the inherent, unresolved inconsistencies of the normative agrarian Greek polis. At the same time, that shift helped to accelerate the city-state’s (inevitable) decay. As we have seen, the wars with, and eventual victory over, Persia (490, 480/479 B.C.), and the subsequent creation of a maritime empire presented economic and political possibilities unimaginable in the sixth century, offering Athens resources beyond the capabilities of most other poleis (Thuc. 1.89-96).
Athenian imperialism hastened the democratization process begun by Cleisthenes (507 B.C.). It enhanced social groups who held no land. Twenty thousand citizens now worked outside of agriculture (e.g., Arist. Ath. Pol. 24.3; Ar. Vesp. 709). Beside conferring prestige on landless thêtes who had served so well against Persian ships (c.f. Meier 555-60; 579-98; Momigliano 1-7), the formal creation of a vast navy from the tribute of allied states turned Athenian attention permanently seaward (Thuc. 1.99.1; Plut. Cim. 11), away from purely landed aspirations. The erection of the long walls and the fortification of the Athenian port at Piraeus only cemented this new reliance on naval, rather than infantry power alone (Thuc. 1.107.1-108.1, 2.13.7). Citizens of Athens in a psychological sense walled themselves off from their own farmland to connect with the sea.
Grain as early as the mid-fifth century was now imported in sizable quantities into Piraeus. Despite the controversy over the exact date and degree of dependence on overseas foodstuffs, Athens’ well-known concern for foreign supplies represented an ostensible interest in food pricing, availability, and commerce at odds with the old idea of absolute landed self-sufficiency.1
Finally, the exploitation of the silver mines at Laurion in southern Attica, the growth of some small factories in Athens, and the manning of a huge Aegean fleet drew nonagricultural slaves into Athens proper in enormous numbers. With them came the metics. They were an unblinkered and gifted group of resident alien businessmen, bankers, and traders, a shadow city of outsiders who had no part in the functioning of democracy, no formal political rights in the polis. Surely that demographic reality made the traditional notion of a city-state of agrarian peers problematic.
By the fifth century, there were somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 metics (adults and children), and between 80,000 and 150,000 slaves.2 As if the official attempts at diversifying the economic, political, and military resources of Athens were not enough, this more insidious, less organized migration of foreigners and slaves into the polis further diminished the classic exclusivity of the hoplite landowner at Athens (e.g., Plut. Per. 12; [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.10-12). By the middle of the fifth century, we are not sure how many residents were not middling agriculturalists of Attica. It is a safe guess that at least half the citizens might no longer possess a hoplite-sized farm—that is, land that would have met the traditional yeoman census. Of the total resident population of adults in Attica (citizen men and women, metics, and slaves), hoplites liable for military service probably constituted no more than a tenth (i.e., about 20,000 hoplites out of a total adult population in Attica of perhaps more than 250,000). Yet the entire ideology of the Greek polishad once derived from just that increasingly small minority.
A ten-acre farm and its native proprietor were finite commodities. Cash and the foreign-born in the late fifth and fourth centuries were not. Every person, every drachma brought into Athens in some sense eroded the exclusive hoplite/citizen/landowner trinity. That centuries-old entity could cope with the slow economic growth and static military conditions of the seventh and sixth centuries far more successfully than the expansion and monetization of the fifth-century economy. The traditional economic structures of the polishad been in some part ethical. They were predicated on the innate moral superiority of yeoman agriculture over all forms of commerce and nonlanded capital.
The result of what we may legitimately now call the “Athenian experiment,” this catalyst of polis deviancy among the Greek city-states, should have been, I think, constant friction between old guard hoplites and newer landless residents and citizens—with occasional outright fighting between the two groups as landed broad-based oligarchy and timocracy sought to suppress landless democracy, as farmer fought wage earner for the soul of the community. Radical democracy of the Athenian kind, after all, was inimical to much of the concept of broad-based agrarian timocracy we have seen in this book. No matter how low the property qualification for full citizenship under egalitarian agrarian governments might extend, did not Athenian-style democracy go even further? Ostensibly (though not always in practice), Athens put a man with little or no land on roughly equal political and military footing with a farmer-hoplite (e.g., Arist. Pol. 4.1292a10-12, 4.1293a1-13; [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.2.)—a citizen whose plot had provided the fountainhead of family privilege for generations. Cash, a far more fluid and volatile standard of privilege than land (e.g., Arist. Pol. 5.1308a35-1308b8), could quickly widen the gulf between wealthy and poor, and destroy the agrarian middle.
But between 507 and 338 B.C.—the establishment of Athenian democracy and the end of Athenian autonomy—often convolution, not revolution, marked Athens. As democratic institutions took hold after Cleisthenes (507 B.C.), the agrarian exclusivity of Attic farmers was transformed or at least partially reinvented. Although there was always growing tension between Athenian landed and nonlanded, no overt fighting broke out between hoplites and the poorer during this long process of democratization. What occurred at Athens throughout the fifth and into the fourth century was actually a gradual diminution of hostility between the two groups, yeomen (zeugitai) and landless (thêtes). Farmer-hoplites increasingly accepted the tenets of Athenian democracy, as the Athenian polisapparently tried to bend that it might not break, reinventing the nature of the traditional whole that it might at least save some of its parts.
How and why could so-called radical democracy at Athens ever become palatable to hoplite-farmers? Democratic government was a revolutionary institution. Did it not threaten the old economic, political, social, and military domain of small landowners?
The answer lies in the unique inclusiveness of Athenian democratic ideology. The Athenian polis took special care not to marginalize but rather to incorporate geôrgoi—s till a real power in most Greek citystates—into the cultural life of a reformed polis, even when novel democratic institutions were at odds with the traditional farming agenda of Attic hoplites. Just as important, however, hoplite-farmers came to learn that their own social, economic, and political status could (for a time) be enhanced under Athenian democracy, not inevitably diminished as the orthodox view sometimes maintains. If Athenian farmers could give up their belief in traditional agrarian exclusivity, some growers might find even greater profit—at least in the immediate short term.
The challenges to hoplites at Athens were not unique. They were reflective of larger military and economic processes ongoing in the fifth-century Mediterranean itself, fundamental changes that questioned the entire Panhellenic notion of past centuries that apoliswas an egalitarian institution confined to small landowners.3 By the late fifth century cash was frequently acquired through innovative agricultural practices such as leasing and specialization for local markets. Worse for the small Athenian farmer, capital could often be found outside agriculture altogether from mining, trade, and banking. Aristophanes’ Blepyros, in the Ecclesiazusae, points out the odd phenomenon that some wealthy now “have silver and gold, but own no land” (Eccl. 601-2). This “new social reality,” Edward Cohen remarks, saw “the rise of a new ‘mixed’ Athenian establishment, which was infusing the traditional Athenian upper classes with wealthy resident foreigners, former slaves, naturalized citizens” (88).
The novel divergence between property owners and the creators of commercial capital soon raised the specter of cash-wealthy—but landpoor—men of talent and vision. Quite naturally, under the static existing system of agrarian values, these upstarts were either looked at with mistrust and envy by yeomanry, or, in the case of resident aliens, denied proportionate social and political opportunity altogether. In most Greek poleis this discrimination was expressed by the absence of something as basic as a ten-acre farm. Cash brought a man economic might. But land was still the key to political and social status inside the polis.
The poleis throughout Greece—and Athens most of all—after the Persian Wars were subject to a variety of challenges and opportunities, for which their traditional and inflexible infrastructure of the past two centuries was ill-equipped. These growing tensions in many city-states became manifest in the fourth century when we hear of a number of serious civil outbreaks.4 Social tensions among the Greek poleis can be traced to a fundamental and growing inequality between propertied and propertyless, as the rigidly egalitarian institutions of the past broke under new economic realities and were no longer able to maintain for the resident population a flexible and moderate alternative.
ii. The New Athenian Military
As the hoplite phalanx was becoming more and more irrelevant in late fifth and fourth century Greece, Athens successfully sought to refashion the entire role of the heavy-armed hoplite. Of course duty outside formal phalanx battle ended the hoplite’s role as exclusive protector of the polis. But fighting away from the mass also gave Athenian agrarians new responsibilities, albeit in much different roles. During fifth-century Athenian democracy, hoplite infantry were used more frequently than during the period before the Persian Wars under either agrarian oligarchy/timocracy or Peisistratian tyranny (i.e., 700-480 B.C.)—although in guises entirely antithetical (and so in the long term disastrous) to the entire notion of traditional one-day, agrarian wars.
Despite the emphasis on naval operations in the Athenian Empire, there were plenty of occasions throughout the fifth century when autonomous hoplite forces played a less dramatic, but nevertheless vital military role in the defense of the polis as amphibious troops and besiegers.5 The ever-conservative Aristotle may have had these hoplite operations in mind when he complained that constant infantry service abroad had incurred high casualties among the landed, and in his opinion strengthened the aspirations of the poor at home (e.g., Ath. Pol. 26.1; Pol. 5.1303a7-10). Although these battles outside the agrarian arena were part of the process (discussed in the previous chapter) that precisely destroyed hoplite warfare in Greece, at Athens her heavy infantrymen were nevertheless not left idle. They were used outside pitched battles and integrated into the city’s multifarious defense forces. The dismantling of polis agrarianism at Athens was an insidious process. It incorporated farmers themselves as agents of their own eventual demise.
There are, as we have seen, numbers of anecdotal passages in Greek literature attesting to the growing friction between landed conservatives and the naval mob. Under closer scrutiny these concerns are usually the disenchantment on the part of the more wealthy at Athens. There was probably not much complaint from the Athenian hoplite farmer himself, who, after the Persian Wars, increasingly was seeing his traditional military interests oddly protected by democratic change.6
A much more accurate representation of grass-roots Athenian hoplite ideology is found in Aeschylus, and even in the conservative comedy of Aristophanes and the often bitter drama of Euripides (cf. Spahn 8-9; Eur. Suppl. 238-45). These playwrights had no real sympathy for aristocratic (or Spartan) oligarchs, but rather praise for the egalitarian nature of Athenian democracy. They acknowledge the great contribution of the rowing-class of Athenian poor. But they see in it no obstacle to their innate pride in the achievements of their own class of hoplite farmers in both a military and agricultural sense.7 The integration of moderates such as these into democracy, and those whom they represented, is in stark contrast to the single-minded, reactionary shrillness of the Athenian fourth-century philosophers. Those elite dissidents idealized the Athenian hoplite class of which they were not a part in either sympathy or practice (de Ste. Croix 1972: 183-85, 355-76; L. B. Carter 97-98).
During the late fifth century, as I suggested in the last Chapter 8, only a few hoplite armies collided head-on in the thousands. At Athens, however, hoplites were still busy for a while yet. There were numerous occasions when hoplites marched out on infantry expeditions and attempted to engage the enemy (not always successfully) in decisive encounters. Here one thinks of the twice-yearly invasions of the Megarid, when the Athenian hoplites mustered in full force during the Archidamian War (Thuc. 2.31, 4.66.1; Plut.Per. 30.3). Two thousand hoplites also marched north against Spartalos in 429 B.C., forcing the Chalcidian infantry into the city proper, and then falling back before enemy missile troops and cavalry sorties. Deployed traditionally on flat ground against an enemy who had no intention of deciding the issue with similar heavy infantry, over 430 hoplites perished (Thuc. 2.79.7).
Athenian hoplites also played a vital role in more complex, combined operations during the Peloponnesian War. These were situations where they were transported by sea and then expected to occupy ground alone or seek out enemy light and heavy infantry. Although ostensibly marines in the sense that they arrived in enemy territory on ships (cf. Jordan 193-95), rather than by land, it is better to describe these hoplites as “expeditionary forces.” Often their activity was far from the coast, independent, and not always supported by combined naval strategy.
A good example is Demosthenes’ ill-fated Aetolian campaign (426 B.C.). After landing near Oeneon in Locris, he set out into the rugged terrain of Aetolia with a combined force that included three hundred Athenian hoplites, “all,” Thucydides says in a rare note of poignancy, “in the prime of life.” One hundred twenty perished, “the best troops of the Athenians that fell in the war” (Thuc. 3.98.4). At Solygia (426 B.C.) Nicias fought a traditional hoplite battle against the Corinthians before withdrawing his army to his ships off the coast (Thuc. 4.44.6; Diod. 12.65.6). Later, Cleon’s attack on Amphipolis was spearheaded by twelve hundred hoplites and a fleet of thirty ships (Thuc. 5.2.1). The most infamous example of a hoplite army transported in mass is, of course, the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily, when “few returned home.” There the combined allied force may have numbered between 40,000 and 50,000, including at least 2,700 Athenian heavy infantry, and many more thousands in allied hoplite companies. They fought an initial decisive and successful action against the Syracusan heavy infantry and for most of the later campaign stayed primarily on land (Thuc. 6.43; 7.20, 87.6; Diod. 13.2.5, 8.7, 9). These were all examples of Athenian infantry deployed beyond the arena of the set pitched battle.
Hoplites in the fifth century were used by the democracy in even smaller numbers as amphibious marines in the classic sense, or as more daring seaborne raiders (e.g., Pl. Leg. 4.706B-C). During the Archidamian War, they skirted the coast of the Peloponnese, disembarked, ravaged, and plundered (e.g., Thuc. 2.17.4; 2.23.2; 2.25.30; 2.26; 2.32; 2.56; 2.58.1). In the wake of enemy reprisals, they unheroically fled to the safety of the ships (and the safety provided by landless rowers). Although these troops rarely formed up in the phalanx for decisive, single battles, rarely sought out their enemy counterpart or engaged in drawnout sieges, there is little doubt they were employed as hoplites proper. Agrarians equipped for head-to-head collisions (although perhaps now in lighter composite armor) now preferred the cowardly but effective skirmishing of their social inferiors.
More controversial still is the actual status of the trireme’s standard seaborne contingent of ten epibatai, the naval “marines” permanently attached to Athenian vessels independent of any hoplite forces being transported from theater to theater. Given their exalted status in the literary and epigraphical sources, the nature of their training and armament, and their apparent recruitment from the hoplite muster roll, it is logical—if these strict census differentiations still always applied in the late fifth and fourth centuries—that most epibatai should not have been landless thêtes. Marines were often those who were eligible and liable to see service as hoplites proper (cf. Jordan 184-202; Gomme Comm. 2.42, 80, 271, 367). From the record of their employment during many naval engagements, Athenian marines were not mere adornments. Often they became the decisive element in battle as both naval boarders and defensive troops who kept the enemy from gaining access to the decks of their own ships. Even more striking, on some occasions in the Peloponnesian War, farmers may have not fought as hoplites at all, but rather served as rowers in the fleet alongside the landless.8
What we see at Athens during the entire course of the fifth century is not quite—as so often is argued by the Old Oligarch, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Plutarch, and others—an abridgment of the hoplite presence. It was more complex than that. There was actually increased opportunity and need for infantry service, albeit in new and untraditional ways. Although these novel military roles in the long run were dooming agrarian warfare in Greece, in the short term, they were not immediately injurious to Athenian yeomanry itself. This integration and complementary nature of Athenian hoplites and rowers was exactly what Pericles was referring to in his funeral oration when he bragged that the Athenians were usually successful at war because of “simultaneous attention to the navy and the expedition by land of its citizens to many lands” (Thuc. 2.39.3), a practice that “made every sea and land the highway of our daring” (Thuc. 2.41.3; and cf. especially 1.142.5). Agrarians were now in service to an empire, not simply devoted to the sanctity of their ancestral borders.
Elsewhere, among other Greek democratic and maritime powers, there was nothing approaching the Athenian balance in naval and land defense. Hermocrates of democratic Syracuse blamed the Sicilians’ initial loss to the Athenian phalanx on his own citizens’ utter lack of familiarity with hoplite warfare (Thuc. 6.72.3-5)—a testament to how far some democratic seafaring city-states by the end of the fifth century had strayed from the old hoplite protocols. The number of conventional single-day encounters that were purely hoplite in character may have decreased under Athenian democracy, but the occasions where fighters saw some type of hoplite service surely multiplied. This ubiquity of heavy infantry was due both to a greater frequency of war making during the fifth and fourth centuries (as opposed to seventh and sixth), and the expansion of the Athenian hoplite horizon to include these new responsibilities as marines and as seaborne hybridized troops.
Even the notorious (from a farming point of view) Athenian policy of avoidance of pitched battle in Attica during the Peloponnesian War (e.g., Thuc. 2.14.1; 2.21-22; Plut. Per. 33.7) did not ensure the destruction of native farms by enemy ravagers. While forced evacuation of landowners inside the walls of Athens should be seen as democracy’s rebuke of traditional Greek agrarian ideology, it was still not necessarily fatal to Athens’ own indigenous hoplite farmers. The issue is surely more complicated: Athens sought to protect her agriculturalists in novel ways that were compatible with her new democratic, rather than past agrarian, thinking.
The five enemy invasions between 431 and 425 B.C.—and even the Spartan occupation of Decelea outside the walls of Athens (413-404 B.C.)—did not irrevocably harm Athenian farms. Planting continued throughout the Archidamian War, and perhaps sporadically even during the occupation of Decelea. Serious damage to capital crops such as trees and vines did not occur. Many farmers never evacuated their families to Athens at all (Hanson 1983: 111-43). Other Athenian land forces were not idle in Attica; they did not allow ravagers to attack with impunity the property of fellow hoplites. The democracy took pains to ensure that cavalry patrols, light-armed sorties, and overseas actions were designed to relieve pressure from local farmers’ property (e.g., Thuc. 2.19.2; 2.22.2; 7.27.5; cf. Xen. Hipp. 7.4; Vect. 4.47; cf. Bugh 81-119).
Most rural folk surrounding Athens were completely opposed to the evacuation, an affront, they felt, both to their hoplite pride and to the integrity of their property (e.g., Thuc. 2.20.1-2; 2.21.3; 2.59.1-2). But the real suffering of Attica’s agrarians was the great plague of 430 B.C. inside Athens, not enemy ravagers (e.g., Thuc. 3.87.2; cf. Hanson 1983: 126-27). Understandably, we hear of no organized, sustained hoplite resistance to Pericles’ strategy of forced evacuation. There was little, if any, civil insurrection over his policy—a plan that the historian Thucydides (no radical democrat) felt made for good strategy (e.g., 2.61.2; 2.65.7, 13).
Periclean defense was, in fact, palatable enough to its citizens (even if strategically unsound) partly because of the belief of Attic hoplites in their leaders’ promise to protect their farms by means other than pitched hoplite battle—a promise for the most part kept. In an ironic sense, if any profited from the radical, anti-agrarian strategy of deliberate avoidance of hoplite battle in Attica—the old Persian War ideology of Themistocles promulgated by Pericles and his followers—it was the Athenian farmer-hoplite (even if not always the wealthy cavalry elite)!
Surely, in a strictly cost-to-benefit sense (excluding psychological considerations of the martial credo of the hoplite), pitched battle in 431 B.C. on the Athenian Plain between Athenians and the Peloponnesian invaders would surely have led to at least one or two thousand dead Attic farmers (out of a ten- to twenty-thousand-man infantry force in the field)—and a greater loss of military prestige among local landowners. The Peloponnesian and Theban invaders may have marched into Attica in 431 B.C. with perhaps forty thousand men (cf. Plutarch’s improbable figure of sixty thousand; Hanson 1983: 123 n. 38)—the largest assembled hoplite force since the combined Greek army at the battle of Plataea in 479 B.C.
Under imperial democracy Athenian hoplites for a time enjoyed bizarre trade-offs: highly visible military service, but an actual avoidance of all-out (and lethal) battle between national armies in Attica; evacuated farms but little long-term destruction of the Attic countryside. Pitched battle in Attica and constant protection of isolated homesteads ostensibly were the hallmarks of hoplite agrarianism. But by the late fifth century, they were also the very military situations where high hoplite casualties were certain, and probable the defeat and accompanying loss of agrarian repute before formidable Peloponnesian and Theban infantry.
At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the nonlanded and poorer Athenian thêtes were about equal in number to the other citizens who fought in the phalanx (about twenty thousand men each). By 404/3 B.C. at war’s end it was a completely different story. During the twenty-seven years of fighting, landless thêtes, the supposed beneficiaries of Athenian liberalism, died more than twice as frequently as hoplites, the purported losers under radical democracy (e.g., B. Strauss 5, 58, 71, 75-76, 80-81, 179-82). If the Peloponnesian War was a tragedy for all Athenian citizens, it became an abject slaughter of its landless population.
The multifarious use of Athenian hoplites as amphibious troops was a dramatic marriage of traditional infantry and growing naval power. Aside from the acknowledged advantages that mobile infantry brought to the defense requirements of the Athenian empire, there were also less apparent social and political benefits to democracy as well. Landowners were transported by, and could fight alongside with, their social inferiors. This blurred traditional census rubrics. It cemented the notion—as the shared experience of danger offered by military service so often does—of political equality (e.g., Arist. Pol. 6.1321a17-19).
The role of heavy infantry at Athens was not quite rejected altogether in the fifth century, but rather transformed. This revolutionary development tended to strengthen the social foundations of Athenian democracy, just as it undermined agrarian protocol. It went forward apparently without much objection from farmers themselves—despite the knowledge that the precious equation between small landowner and heavy soldier was now gone.
iii. The Expansion of the Athenian Economy
All produce, home-grown and imported alike, in the fifth and fourth centuries was now in even greater demand at Athens; foreign supplies only helped assuage the increased appetite for a variety of foods among the growing Attic population. The notion that Athenian democracy paid little heed to the hoplite agriculturalist, or did not require his local foodstuffs, is simplistic. This need for foreign supplementation might just as well argue for increased local demand. Importation was not designed to replace domestically grown food. “Those of you involved in mining,” the speaker of a Demosthenic speech against Phainippos (about 320 B.C.) reminds his audience, “have experienced setbacks, but you farmers are profiting beyond what is fitting” (42.21; cf. Diod. 18.18.6). Xenophon’s Ischomachos says: “No business gives greater returns than farming” (Oec. 20.22; cf. Pritchett War 5.471-73).
The dynamism and growth of Athenian democracy surely enhanced the economic position of the local Attic farmer in a strictly financial sense. Ironically, at just the same time it was ending his traditional and privileged role as single food guarantor of thepolis:short-term monetary enhancement for individual growers, long-term destruction of the old agrarians as a class. If Athens was ultimately destroying Greek agrarian ideology, that upheaval was part of a more immediate effort to protect her farmers as citizens at large, by extending Athenian custom and practice beyond agriculture and the original confining ethos of the polis. Attic cultivators seeing monetary gain in the fifth and fourth centuries, forsook long-term (and parochial) interests. Greek farmers, much like their modern counterparts, always seemed to have a special fascination with sudden, unexpected riches, even when they eventually destroyed their agrarian tranquillity (e.g., the story at Hdt. 7.190.1).
We have argued that the farms of Attica were not really sacrificed during the Peloponnesian War, and that, despite the rhetoric of Attic comedy, local agriculture was not destroyed. In the ensuing fourth century, Attica spent vast sums on interior fortification, to keep secure the countryside of Athens (cf. Ober 1985: 51-101). This military conservatism was not so much a reaction to the agrarian damage of the Peloponnesian War (which we have suggested was in fact minimal), as much as an acknowledgment of three new realities: (1) the need to curb the overall defense expenditure and avoid costly offensive campaigns (e.g., Lys. 34.10; Lycurg. Leocr. 1.42-43); (2) the realization that the Athenian hoplite phalanx, in its changing composition and spirit, was no longer eager to face down enemies in the old style of pitched battle (e.g., Ar. Eq. 1369-71; Xen. Mem. 3.5.19; cf. [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 2.1)—fights that in themselves were becoming increasingly rare in Greece; and (3) the presence of an enormous (and expensive) variety of military contingents on the evolving Greek battlefield.
The increasing appearance of mercenary bands and organized groups of light-armed raiders demonstrated that peril lay not in organized columns of heavy infantry, but in war waged by any means at an enemy’s disposal. In this context, expensive rural construction made some sense. It at least showed the democracy’s intention not to neglect the Athenian landowner. The new pragmatic and self-interested Athenian hoplite wanted the psychological security of keeping foreign armies off his farm—without the need to march out to meet the aggressor in a pitched battle. To a large extent the democracy—through roads, forts, rural patrols, and garrisons—eagerly granted him his wish.9
More than thwarting agricultural loss, radically democratic government, ostensibly hostile to broad-based, agrarian timocracy, brought clear profit to the farmers of Attica. This paradox manifested itself in a number of ways. At its most basic it was simply a question of greater opportunity for theft. After describing the Theban plundering of rural Attic estates, the fourth-century anonymous Oxyrhynchus Historian explains that this was possible because the Athenian (democratic) countryside was “the most lavishly furnished” in Greece (12.4-5; cf. Thuc. 2.14-16). His commentary on the wealth of the Attic countryside ends in fragments. But a partially restored phrase concludes: “whatever they took [when fighting] from the Greeks they brought into their [own] fields.” The subject of that incomplete sentence is unexpressed. It almost surely must be the Athenians: apparently Attic farmers in the fifth century often took rural property from conquered subjects and then reemployed it on their own farms. This pilfered cargo resulted in an agrarian infrastructure that was the most “lavish” among all the Greek city-states. The Thebans at the end of the Peloponnesian War then replundered what the Athenian farmers themselves had plundered. Here we should imagine stock, slaves, tools, woods, and metals, items the Athenians had probably looted from years of overseas campaigns and local intrusions into nearby agrarian Megara.10
When the right-wing thinker of the fifth century, the so-called Old Oligarch, believed that Athens’ wealth in part derived from the sea, he perhaps was thinking of both plundered and legitimate riches of every type that came into the Piraeus—and then were dispersed throughout Attica (2.7, 11). The impression is that beneficiaries of Athenian maritime power were the farmers of Attica.
Less overt than simple theft and plunder must have been more insidious private dealing by Athenian officials. These were opportunists who found ample opportunity to acquire cheaper products across the Aegean, even after the formal end of the empire. In a fourth-century oration of Demosthenes, Meidias is accused of diverting ships while on official Athenian business to pick up stock and slaves for his farm back in Attica (Dem. 21.167-68; Plut. Mor. 785C). That charge of seizing property and using it for one’s own needs in Attica must have been a frequent complaint (Dem. 51.13; cf. Dem. 4.24, 45, 47; 8.24).
Equally important to Attic farmers was the introduction of pay for hoplite military service, probably sometime around the mid-fifth century—a phenomenon, as we have seen, entirely inimical to agrarian warfare. Military compensation was no doubt welcomed, not rejected, by Athenian farmers themselves. In the agrarian twilight of the fifth and fourth centuries yeomen were quickly learning of the immediate cash benefits this new democracy had to offer. Monetary incentive lies behind the purported (and, in the traditional agrarian sense, blasphemous) advice of Aristides after the Persian Wars that the Athenians “should strive for hegemony, and after coming in from their farms, live in the city. For that way there would be compensation for everybody: for those who were serving in the army, for others who were posted as frontier guards, and in general for those attending to public affairs” (Arist. Ath. Pol. 24.1-2; cf. Plut. Arist. 22, 25). Thucydides believed at any rate that one reason the army supported the daring expedition to Sicily was the steady wage in the short term, and the chance to obtain enough capital to fund their pay in the future (Thuc. 6.24).
Under the traditional agrarian regime of the past two centuries, the Athenian farmer had left his plot, formed up in the phalanx and advanced the polis’s claim to a strip of disputed borderland—inferior farmland ironically involving more a question of community prestige than a source of agricultural bounty. Most losses during afternoon wars in both time and lives were the agrarian community’s alone. Now the burden was shifted to the entire polis. Should Athenian farmer-hoplites fight, they were to be paid. The money was to come not from taxes on their property or harvests, but from overseas tribute and commercial excise revenues.
Under Athenian democracy the burden of polis defense not only was shared with the landless, but also could prove (for a time) much more lucrative to the landed. Was this not a small price for the short-sighted (or realistic?) agrarian to pay for the loss of his agricultural exclusivity? Given the mobility of ships and government support, many Attic farmers now would be salaried to range over the Aegean and even into the Mediterranean as far as Egypt or Sicily, and in the process be given greater opportunity to carry valuables back to their own ground. The tradition that Attic agrarians had enjoyed state pay from both military and public service under the Athenian democracy led Plutarch to say they had been “corrupted” by Pericles’ offers of cleruchies (settlements abroad), theater subsidies, and jury pay (Plut. Per. 9.1). Plutarch may have been correct. All were activities that took a man away from his farm and curtailed the city’s reliance on his ability to grow food. That surely constituted “corruption” in the old agrarian sense.
Even if Plutarch exaggerated and, in fact, many rural Athenian hoplites rarely found opportunities for state cash, generous polis entitlements to others (Aristides’ “everybody”) could only expand the economy. “Trickle up” economics, as it were, enhanced the assets of those who were not poor to begin with. Athenian expansionism was not a zero-sum format where someone’s gain was another’s loss. It was an inflationary process that actually benefited most involved. Throughout the fifth century at Athens, the number of those citizens meeting the hoplite census (now probably a cash rather than a farm production requirement) increased, as urbanization and the monetization of the economy accelerated (e.g., Patterson 67-68).
Incidentally, in my own experience, market growth and an expanding economy have always enriched grumpy agrarian mossbacks. Neighboring farmers in our own locale continued to groan all through the inflationary 1970s that “everyone was getting big in farming,” that “you could now leverage your way into riches without knowing anything about agriculture,” that “foreigners and outsiders were buying up land,” that “you can buy anything on credit,” that “costs were going sky-high.” Despite their genuine agrarian revulsion at the increasing speculation and investment in agriculture and their realization of the growing dangers of outsiders to family farming, this was precisely the period when conservative growers eagerly made their most profits, enjoyed their greatest advances in net worth, and enjoyed their most sustained prosperity.
In the case of Athens, imperialism and an expansionary market economy brought profits to local Attic farmers. These developments were welcomed—even though they soon would spell the destruction of the old agrarian Greek city-state. Of that late fourth-century crisis of the polis, Jan Pecírka correctly saw its genesis in the transformation of the fifth-century Athenian economy: “In no case, however, can we say that the origins of this “crisis” of the “community of the citizens” should be sought in the fourth century. Its roots go back to the Athenian Empire of the fifth century” (1976:29).
iv. Political Conciliation
The creation and evolution of democracy through the fifth and fourth centuries have traditionally been interpreted as a political affront to the power and privileges of the old hoplite regime in Athens. Any extension in political participation was antithetical to the traditional guarded influence of the farming class, and a challenge to the foundations of the traditional agrarian polis.
There is much truth to this notion. Cleisthenes purportedly brought in non-Athenians and freed slaves to be enrolled in the citizen rosters of the newly constituted demes (Arist. Pol. 2.1275b34-40; cf. Ath. Pol. 21.4). The introduction of ostracism (e.g., Plut.Arist.7.3-8; Philochorus FGrH 328 fr. 30; Arist. Ath. Pol. 22) forced any prominent figure to weigh very carefully the jealousy and hostility of his social inferiors.
In the 460s B.C., in the wake of increased naval prominence and growing imperialism, the popular leader Ephialtes also reduced the power of the aristocratic Areopagus to not more than a homicide court for murdered Athenians. The transference of its formidable political influence to the Athenian landless assembly, the council, and the law courts was traditionally felt (perhaps wrongly) to have been practicable only when Cimon, accompanied by four thousand conservative hoplites, was away from the city, engaged with the Spartans in suppression of her helot revolt. Pericles’ subsequent inauguration of pay for citizens’ public service, his building program, and his reliance on an Athenian naval presence of at least 330 ships were seen as efforts to increase the power and visibility of the landless thêtes at the expense of the rich and the middling hoplite classes—developments whose continuance by the reconstituted democracy of the fourth century only made things more difficult for local farmers.11
Confirmation of agrarian hoplite resistance on the political level to the expansion of Athenian democracy should be apparent in the only real revolutionary movements in the history of Athenian democracy: the oligarchical insurrections of the Four Hundred in 411 and “The Thirty Tyrants” in 403 B.C. During the turbulence of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, the populace was exhausted and suspicious of the democratic government which had lost their empire. The extreme rule of the so-called Four Hundred, ostensibly a revolutionary body of Athenian elites, gave way after only four months to one Theramenes and his more moderate followers. They proposed that Athenian citizenship be based on the ability to afford the hoplite panoply (rather than on possession of land alone). That change resulted in a group called “The Five Thousand,” but which more likely included nine thousand or more (Thuc. 8.97.1-2; Arist. Ath. Pol. 33.1-2; Lys. 20.13; cf. Busolt and Swoboda 69-70) who would succeed the failed rightist cabal.
In 411 B.C., then, the environment at Athens seemed ideal for a return to broad-based agrarian timocracy of the old style (cf. Thuc. 8.97.2; Arist. Ath. Pol. 33.2) discussed in Chapter 5. Permanent overthrow of radical democracy and a return to “hoplite democracy” along the lines of Aristotle’s ideal “polity” or—better yet—a regression to Solon’s reforms of nearly two centuries prior, could recreate a sixth-, rather than a fifth-century, Athenian polis. Moderate leaders and a middle constitution of largely agrarian holders of heavy weaponry could once again hold sway (see Whibley 192-207; de Ste. Croix 1981: 605-6; 30, 31; Ostwald 384-95; cf. Bisinger 44-45).
Yet the fortunes of the so-called Five Thousand transitional reformers in 411 B.C. were no more successful or lasting than those of the more reactionary Four Hundred revolutionaries earlier in the year. Why was this so? Neither insurrectionary group could count on the support of Attic hoplite agrarians. Just as the “hoplites” (or whoever the men of the Five Thousand actually were) had been instrumental in dethroning the ultra right-wing Four Hundred (e.g., Thuc. 8.92.4; 8.98.1), so many of these hoplite landowners in power now actually acted as custodians for, not usurpers of, democracy. When the danger of aristocratic revolution was over, in a matter of months power returned from hoplites of the Five Thousand to the original radically democratic government.
While the exact sequence of political events of the year 411 B.C. has been continuously debated, in both stages of the revolution Athenian agrarians openly opposed the wealthy aristocratic Four Hundred. They also had little enthusiasm for the idea of a permanent hoplite government of Five Thousand—even though that latter body probably would have been composed of men identical to themselves. Clearly, the gradual erosion of the old tenets of Greek agrarianism was proving lucrative to Athenian mesoi. By 411B.C.farmers knew well that radically democratic government and Aegean imperialism both could pay dividends (at least for a while) to landowners in Attica.
Little need be said of the more radical and murderous aristocratic coup that ensued in 403 B.C. at Athens. Then Attic hoplites were even less sympathetic to the wealthy ideological zealots on their right.* Democratic resistance to the rightists—with recent losses in the Peloponnesian War of landless rowers at sea, and the navy demoralized over their defeats—once more counted on moderate hoplites, now led by the hero Thrasyboulos. His efforts culminated in a dramatic hoplite battle at the port of Piraeus, where the radical oligarchs led by the aristocratic Thirty Tyrants were routed, and democracy for a second time in a decade restored.
Nor in the aftermath of the Thirty’s downfall did the Athenian citizenry have any sympathy with aftershocks of anti-democratic fervor, like the so-called farmer proposal of one conservative Phormosios. He wished to confine citizen rights only to those who owned land (rather than Theramenes’ earlier idea of restriction on the basis of arms). That reintroduction of a property qualification (politeian mê pasin alla tois tên gên exousi paradounai)—the backbone of the old agrarian polis—would have disenfranchised some five thousand Athenian citizens immediately (Dion. Hal. hypoth. on Lys 34). Yet it failed to become legislation. Apparently, the Athenian hoplite constituency had no desire to balkanize a society in which they had done quite well, and which they had just defended with their own lives (Markle 158-59; de Ste. Croix 1981: 292).
By the mid-fourth century even the Reaganesque reactionary Isocrates could bristle at the thought of a property requirement to restrict participation in Athenian democracy (Isoc. 4-105). A return to Greek broad-based and timocratic agrarian oligarchy, “hoplite” or “farmer” democracy—roughly akin to Aristotle’s “polity”—seems to have been often considered, but found to be without much grass-roots support among Athenian hoplites themselves. What explains, then, this remarkable political loyalty of hoplite landowners to Athenian democracy, a government that had done so much to transform—and in a long-term sense to destroy—the Greek agrarian polis?
After a century of gradual dilution of their old agrarian privileges, at the end of the fifth century, Athenian hoplites fought unwaveringly on behalf of democratic institutions. In the fourth century they continued their staunch support. The military and economic explanations for the attractiveness of Athenian democracy to the agrarian hoplites of Attica have already been offered. Keep in mind (as we saw in Chapter 8, “Hoplites as Dinosaurs”) that military service itself in Greece was changing so much that, at least by the middle of the fourth century, a man’s equipment and manner of fighting were no longer always an accurate representation of his social status: many hoplites may not have been farmers and some may not even have owned their own arms.
The landless at Athens had suffered an inordinate number of casualties during the Peloponnesian War, diminishing in the years right after the war the revolutionary fervor from a growing underclass. Aside from military and economic self-interest—and the gradual irrelevance of the hoplite census itself—there were also political reasons that show precisely how Athenian agrarians had been transformed through the fifth and fourth centuries. As defenders of Athenian democracy, Attic farmers no longer adhered strictly to the agrarian ideal of phalanx battles, property qualifications, and self-sufficiency in food production.
First, old-style agrarian timocracy, as I have argued in Chapter 5, “Before Democracy,” was in itself the forerunner to Athenian democratic government. The original hoplite reaction against the wealthy landowning clans in the seventh and sixth centuries—whether dramatic or insidious—had instilled in Greek farmers no love of aristocrats. Instead they had a natural affinity for representative constitutions. The innovative decision to expand the franchise to an additional class of native-born residents was in some sense a far less radical move for hoplites than their own destruction of hereditary aristocracy and monarchy centuries earlier. The heritage of Athenian democracy can be traced directly back to agrarian timocracy of the seventh and sixth centuries. Farmers themselves were the original architects of all Greek constitutional governments.
No wonder that those earlier agrarian oligarchies (wrongly, Aristotle felt) had dubbed themselves “democracies,” a logical enough notion when political participation was considerably broadened to include a sizable group of like-minded farmers (e.g.,Pol.4.1297b24-26). Similarly, Herodotus argued that once the democratic regime of Cleisthenes was established, the Athenian land army had fought far better than under Peisistratian tyranny (Hdt. 5.78)—another suggestion that even at the beginning agrarians had felt more at home with democratic government than with narrow authoritarianism.
When cornered, the reactionary Four Hundred of the revolution of 411 B.C. sought vainly the protection of a “Five Thousand” hoplite constituency. The former believed that a broader-based agrarian constitution might garner considerable support among the farming citizenry, and thus stave off popular reprisals from the landless dêmos. Most revealingly, the aristocrats of the Four Hundred, like their ancestors centuries earlier, cynically had little real empathy for the idea of a genuine “hoplite” polity. They thought “that so many sharers in power would be essentially the rule of the people (antikrus dêmon)” (Thuc. 8.92.11).
The rightist Four Hundred were absolutely correct in their belief that the succeeding Five Thousand hoplite representatives would be more palatable to the Athenian democrats as “essentially the rule of the people.” But they were entirely wrong on the more critical issue: the political traditions of agrarian, broad-based oligarchy had now at Athens become distant echoes of a century past. They were no longer viable. They were completely extinguished, never to be permanently resurrected. If Attic hoplites did not wish agricultural government, no wonder they had even less desire to protect aristocratic autocracy in its attack on landless democracy.
For agrarian militiamen of Athens, too much popular government was not nearly as evil as none at all. During the life of the autonomous Athenian democracy no property qualification along the old Solonian lines, flattering though the proposal might be to farmers, was reestablished to disenfranchise the landless. “Many of the hoplites,” G. E. M. de Ste. Croix has remarked of these two Athenian right-wing revolutions at the end of the fifth century, were “inclined to waver—as one would expect of mesoi—but eventually [came] down firmly on both occasions in favour of the democracy” (1981: 291-92).
Second, for all the complaints of later elites, the public symbolism and popular ideology of Athenian democracy during much of the fifth century was all hoplitic, not, as we usually assume from the complaints of rightists such as the Old Oligarch and Plato, exclusively dominated by themes of the landless. The conservative Plutarch thought that Cleisthenic democracy, far from marking the beginning of radical democracy, had actually been “an aristocratic regime” (Cim. 15). The fifth- and fourth-century military muster lists (katalogoi) that listed Athenian citizens in their demes for military service—even if more and more symbolic than regulatory (cf. Boeckh 652-53)—were essentially hoplite registers. They omitted poor thêtes altogether, men who, incidentally, no doubt aspired to become yeomen zeugitai (i.e., to possess some capital and own land) whenever they could (Thuc. 6.43.1; Ar. fr. 232 Kock; Andrewes 1-3).
Class differences remained under Athenian democracy, but as is usually the case where cash, rather than birth and property, reigns, they were more along emulative American, rather than resentful European, lines. The Athenian poor often envied the geôrgoi and thus sought to reconstitute hoplite ideals, not destroy them entirely.
Officially, the magistracies and major public offices at Athens were rarely until the fourth century opened to the landless. They remained the domain of the upper three classes, of which the yeomen zeugitai were by far the numerically superior.12 For what it’s worth, the Athenian orator Lycurgus during the late fourth century thought it important to mention an old precedent where the proposer of legislation had to prove land ownership (Leocrc. 22). There is a reference in another fourth-century orator, Deinarchus, that Athenian generals purportedly had to have landed property inside Attica (in Dem. 1.71). These are echoes that—even under democracy—property still continued to lend symbolic prestige and social status. The transformation of the agrarian polis to a landless institution was spiritually and psychologically incomplete.
The occasional call to “make the thêtes into hoplites” (e.g., Antiphon fr. B6; cf. 6.12, 21, 35), in the strictly political (rather than military) sense of granting all citizens in democracy equal access to office holding, was also a phenomenon of the late fifth and fourth-centuries, a time when class distinction and the census rubrics themselves were becoming ever more incidental. We never hear of a wish “to make the hoplites into thêtes.” Ideologically, hoplites were made to feel that the landless thêtes were becoming more like themselves, rather than vice versa. This “big-tent” notion that others were brought up, rather than insiders pulled down, was critical to the Athenian polis transformation.
Infantrymen, not (the militarily more important) rowers, were frequently portrayed on Attic vases. Dramatists and historians lauded infantry service. Public sculpture and painting emphasized hoplite bravery (e.g., Paus. 1.15.1-3; 10.10.4; Nep. Milt. 6.3-4; Aeschin.In. Ctes. 3.186). Popular myth magnified infantry prowess. Hoplites were commemorated in public decrees, casualty lists, and in public orations (see. Loraux 161-64; 170-71; cf. 151). When the Athenians wished to punish and humiliate their captured adversaries they voted to cut off the prisoners’ right thumbs, making them incapable of using the hoplite spear, but not the oar—even though the greater military threat to Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War was from enemy triremes, not landed hoplites (Plut. Lys. 9).
Just as the growth of Athenian democracy had reconstituted the need for infantry and enhanced the private prospects of many farmers, so too it deliberately cultivated hoplite tradition and pride. Athens gave its landed infantry a sense of magnified (if not always lasting) political preference as well—even as the whole exclusionary and parochial ethos of the agrarian hoplite was itself slowly eroding (cf. Fornara 51-54; Wardman 59-60). This ideological deference to hoplites in the fifth century can also explain why their continued incorporation and loss of independence at Athens went on unheeded during the fourth century. Hoplitic symbolism was adopted by the democracy for all occasions. This was not a device to divide, but rather one to unify the various elements of the multifaceted democracy.
Third, the large number of slaves and resident alien metics at Athens, and the careful restrictions between citizen and noncitizen, also helped to draw hoplites into line with democratic thinking. The inclusion of landless into the Athenian citizenry hardly exhausted the group of social and political inferiors. Hoplite landowners still realized that democracy provided sharp demarcations between free and slave, citizen and noncitizen, male and female, and even at times propertied and propertyless. Adult Athenian males who enjoyed voting privilege and full access to political office were still a distinct minority of the adult resident population of Attica. Inclusion of the landless at Athens in the citizenry may have resulted in a no more egalitarian society than existed during more conservative agrarian regimes. Those rural city-states of Greece, as we have seen in Chapter 5, may have insisted on the tradition of a property qualification for their native-born, but they were also simply without large numbers of disenfranchised aliens and slaves engaged in trade, commerce, and mining.
At Athens there were also instances—military service, colonization schemes, cleruchies—where yeomen and propertyless shared common enterprises and aspirations. Athenian farmers were not routinely ostracized. They were not as a group singled out and hauled into court, or subjected to land confiscations and redistributions. Emulation and admiration, not class warfare, was the rule. Athenian hoplites’ political loss was completely relative, never absolute. If it was to be a question of political diminution, it occurred through the sharing, not the curtailment, of rights and privileges.
What are we to make of the baffling relationship between Athenian farmers and democratic government? How did such a marriage affect the evolution of the Greek city-state as a whole? We have seen that during the fifth and fourth centuries the old rigid structures of the agrarian polis were gradually transformed on a variety of fronts, without much opposition from farmers themselves. Hoplite service was no longer always a peculiarly agrarian experience. Nor in itself did it now comprise the totality of Greek warfare. When the national interest in the early fifth century (490-479 B.C.) called for a new theory of defense, replete with social ramifications, hoplites at Athens were presented with the dilemma of the old warrior Ajax, to change or die—and quite readily attempted the former.
The expansion of the Athenian economy, the growth of the fifth-century population, and the increasing bureaucracy of government in the fourth—all fatal to the centuries-old idea of polis agrarianism—actually for a time enhanced local Attic agriculturalists. Through frequent paid military service and overseas plunder, cash and capital accrued to farmers in an increasingly complex and market economy. The veneer of hoplite ideology in turn was preserved in the hearts of all Athenians, and politically its yeomen representatives may often have continued to receive preferred treatment over those without property—the supposed beneficiaries of the new radical democracy. No surprise it is that hoplite farmers always supported, never attacked, democracy in time of crisis.
This metamorphosis of hoplites into democrats, this abandonment of the entire concept of the exclusivity of hoplite-landowners—timocratic oligarchy, phalanx warfare, agricultural autarkeia—was made possible not through coercion or revolution. It was accomplished by seduction and ratified through the manipulation of symbols. That should remind us all that in a sea of economic and social change, agrarianism cannot be saved simply through the undying spirit of its farmers.
The end of traditional agrarian privilege at Athens for a time provided farmers greater agricultural income, continued prestige, and less exposure to peril. In place of the monopoly of agriculture arose a somewhat more flexible and stable polis for the new conditions of a rapidly changing Mediterranean—as the relative immunity of Athens to the Greek revolutionary fervor of the fourth century demonstrates. Nowhere else among the Greek city-states was the endangered hoplite class so supportive of, and protected by, the aspirations of the landless citizenry. Athenian aristocrats may have lamented the loss of the hoplite ideal, but many hoplites themselves must have actually welcomed their change into loyal democrats. Athens extended the egalitarian idea of agrarianism to all its native-born residents, and sought to refashion hoplites not as exclusive protectors of agrarianism, but rather as defenders of the new democratic order in the late fifth and fourth centuries. All that brought her a century of calm, but it also accelerated the destruction of the traditional Greek polis.
v. Athenian Aftermath
Athens went farther than any other community in transforming the old agrarian polis. But the Greek city-state was not saved by Athens—as the decades after the battle of Chaironeia show (338 B.C.). This “failure” of Athenian democracy—if we can dare label the inability of a state to obtain perpetual autonomy a “failure”—was due to two reasons. First, as we saw in Chapter 5: “Before Democracy,” Athens still found no way to incorporate the resident aliens, wealthy foreigners (metics) or any other not born to native Athenian parents. Those were often just the people so vital to the economy of the fourth-century Greek world. The marginalized were every bit as important—in fact, they were more vital—to the city as the enfranchised native thêtes. Even when the poorer landless were brought into the Athenian polis, the total number of adult residents outside the city- state’s citizen rolls may have been as great at Athens as at other more conservative agrarian communities—rural communities who were far less engaged in trade and overseas contacts. In this political sense, if continued survival, autonomy, and independence within the dangerous world of the fourth century were the simple goals of the Greek polis, Athenian democracy did not go far enough in redefining the relationship of citizen and noncitizen. It did not end the importance of land in the new environment where far greater capital could be made away from the farm; it did not jettison the cumbersome baggage of agrarian prestige and landed egalitarianism. Was it not suicidal to transform the economic and cultural foundations of the Greek polis, without a simultaneous and complete overhaul of the political framework of the city-state itself?*
As is the case with most would-be revolutionaries—Russian communist reformers of the late 1980s are good examples—who enact only half-measures, Athens’ attempts to rework her farmers into the city-state, for all the resulting (temporary) social stability of the late fifth and fourth centuries, actually may have done more in the long run to destroy the tenets of traditional Greek agrarianism than any other force of the time. The move away from land-based agricultural governments, the turn away from wars of a day by phalanxes, the reinvention of agrarian timocrats into farmers as democrats, the reliance on trade, overseas imports, and a navy, all intensified the complexity of the fourth-century Greek world. Athens helped to make the old agrarian polis more and more anachronistic. Her democracy offered in recompense only a partially reconstituted city-state: she had helped to destroy the old agriculturally exclusive world, but she had not completely prepared the polis for the new cosmology of the Mediterranean.
Athens, as the most powerful of the Greek city-states, essentially had two choices in the widening horizons of the fifth century. She could have retained her agrarian traditions, by foregoing active participation in the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of the Persian defeat. She might have played a prominent role in Greek unification around agrarian principles, creating some federated fortress Greece, a defensive alliance of autonomous agricultural city-states, a democratic and Ionian mirror image of the Peloponnesian League under Sparta.
Alternatively, after taking up an activist and internationalist stance, Athens, like Rome later, could have moved beyond all resemblance to her agrarian genesis, a landed tradition that was so inimical, so disadvantageous to her new cosmopolitan position. Instead, Gorbachev-like, she did neither. She wished to have it both ways: to be a polis and simultaneously a commercial and military force in the affairs of the Mediterranean, to give land prestige and yet host thousands of landless.
That was impossible. The two were inherently contradictory. The status of locally owned property still lingered at democratic Athens; the restrictions on citizenship to the native-born were normally in force; the veneer of agrarian egalitarianism and envy of the more successful were only enhanced under democracy. All that was the cargo of the old agricultural Greek polis. It should have had no logical place in a new, greedier world, where foreign trade and capital acquisition were necessary elements of state policy, not targets of moral censure.
Athens in the fifth century had forcibly exposed the fragile and parochial agrarian ideals of Greece to the storm of the Mediterranean at large. Through her complex financial and commercial interests, Athens simultaneously sought to extend, to transform, to improve on, and so to preserve the egalitarian heritage of agrarian ideology. Is it not tragic that in that very process she also hastened on the destruction of the entire economic, military, and political premises of the traditional Greek city-state?
Elsewhere and After
—Glotz 1967: 348
Agrarian pauperism was the cancer of Greece in Hellenistic times.
—Finley 1973: 102
I think one may conclude, from the accumulation of individual instances, that the trend in antiquity was for a steady increase in the size of landholdings; not a simple straight line upward, as much an accumulation of scattered, sometimes very widely scattered, estates as a process of consolidation; but a continuing trend nevertheless.
If Athens could not reinvent the city-state to meet new social and economic challenges and opportunities, no other Greek community could. But we should not dwell on this end of the autonomous agrarian polis in the fourth century. No state, no political entity exists in perpetuity. Consider the great duration of the Greek city-state over four hundred years, its success, and the lasting power of its ideas.
To illustrate the contribution of Greek agrarianism from the eighth to end of the fourth centuries, examine alternative, non-polis Greek communities by locale. Throughout the four centuries of normative polis culture, there were always other areas in the Greek speaking world—Thessaly, Crete, and Sparta come quickly to mind—where the city-state never quite evolved from the Dark-Age clan to a community of agrarian equals. In those places, instead of agrarianism, we see indentured servants, large estates, an absence of broader political representation, and distortions of the idea of infantry militias (cf. Busolt and Swoboda 284-88). The sociologist E. M. Wood saw this clearly. Her “peasant citizen” at Athens is, in fact, essentially the same as our yeoman farmer:
One way of defining the significance of the peasant citizen (and increasingly also the artisan citizen) might be to consider this phenomenon against the background of other peasant societies, beginning with the communities of early Greece before the advent of the polis, and those Greek states which never saw the full development of either the peasant-citizen or large-scale chattel slavery, notably Sparta, Thessaly, and the city-states of Crete. In all these cases, agriculture and production in general were dominated by people who were politically subject to or juridically dependent upon privileged classes or a central authority to whom they were obliged to render tribute and/or labour services in one form or another (Wood 83).
For these nonagrarian areas in Greece, the failure to emerge along polis lines was a product of choices made in the eighth and seventh centuries. Problems of food supply and land use at the end of the Dark Ages were not, as in the case of the normative Greekpolis,resolved through a movement of sizable numbers of the population to intensive agriculture and the incorporation of marginal lands at home and subsequently colonies abroad. In the case of Sparta, the brutal conquest of neighboring territory and the imposition of serfdom on populations indigenous to both Laconia and Messenia occurred (cf. Busolt and Swoboda 663-70).
True, there was a tradition that the Spartiates themselves held equal shares of land, and in their name allotted similar-sized farms to helot families. But this was not quite an affirmation of broad-based agrarianism. Instead it was a peculiar distortion of the ethos of small farming. Although early Sparta was not completely indifferent to the development of intensive agriculture, hoplite warfare, and nonaristocratic government in Greece of the eighth and seventh centuries, her helot “problem” led to bizarre mutations in the agrarian ethic.
A small body of hoplite equals (“Similars”) did emerge at Sparta. They did fashion among themselves representative government of sorts, and did hold about equal-sized plots. But given the need for constant surveillance of thousands of subjugated peoples, Spartiates turned to an oppressive militarism. Males did not farm. They trained constantly for battle. In Thessaly also, the old Dark-Age regime of aristocratic horse owners and dependent serfs was never quite dethroned. No wonder it boasted that its indentured peasants could be drafted onto triremes in mass (Xen. Hell. 6.1.11). Set against this class of serfs was a tiny group of rich landowners. The Thessalian Menon from the area around Pharsalus supposedly helped to equip an entire Athenian army and three hundred horsemen from the wealth of his own private estates.13
Outside the Greek polis, ubiquitous expansive estates, serfdom, and manorial agriculture had been commonplace for centuries. In these areas where small-scale privately owned plots were rare, the whole notion of agrarianism never quite caught on. Its accompanying appendage, the Greek polis, also was never fully developed.* In other words, many oriental states and village communities had not shared the Greek experience—its “liberation of agriculture” and concomitant rise of the polis. It is not unfair to say that they had not progressed too far beyond the palace mentality of centuries past. Scholars who advocate an Eastern heritage for Greek culture should confine their arguments to the pre-polis era. They can legitimately claim an Asian or African pedigree for Mycenean bureaucracy and perhaps even the Dark-Age lord, but not for the etiology of the unique Greek city-state.
Examine eras in Greek history which did not see small farmers and hoplite warfare, those times both before and after our polis period between 700 and 300 B.C. The manorial nature of the Greek Dark Ages gradually reasserted itself in Hellenistic and Roman times—in the exact areas where the old agrarian polis had once held sway. Specifically, in Hellenistic and Roman times, either cultivated lands coalesce into larger blocks or enormous numbers of scattered farms come under the ownership of one man. Crop raising falls into patterns of monoculture. Formerly good agricultural land is abandoned altogether. Rural settlement and population decline—in some aspects the Dark-Age situation before the advent of the polis.
It was not confined to a single locale.14 Conflict between rich and poor within the poleis is understandable when the old agrarian protocols against accumulated wealth withered away. Although in fifth and fourth-century literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence there appears no Greek farm larger than one hundred acres, that is no longer the case in the third and second centuries (Finley 1981b: 65; cf. Guiraud 391-99). Then the sources attest both to much larger estates and to excessive tribute imposed on diminishing numbers of smaller farmers, an age where the infusion of nonfarm capital into the community must have severely disrupted the old agrarian regime.
Gallant (1991: 188-193) has compared two Greek poleis’ respective financial obligations during the fifth century and later during Hellenistic times. Under the regime of the Hellenistic despot Lysimachos (306-281 B.C.) the Aegean island of Amorgos and the Ionian city of Miletus needed between forty-five and thirty-six percent of their cultivable area to pay for tribute, more than double the amount required by the earlier “oppressive” Athenian empire. Obviously, the degree of rural exploitation increased in these communities once the structures of the old agrarianism—and Athens was herself far more imperialistic than most of her contemporary city-states—withered away. Hellenistic dynasties required far more capital for military expenditures and urban interests than was true of past Greek city-states. When they looked for revenue for their palace, their garish siege engines, and their hordes of mercenaries, they looked to an increasingly vulnerable countryside. In the third and second centuries exploitation of farmers was far easier without the presence of agrarian legislation, the popular representation of landed councils, strong infantry defense forces, and the ethos of past agrarian chauvinism.*
Archaeological field surveys of modern Greece have also suggested that many regions were undergoing fundamental structural changes at the end of the fourth century, accelerating their evolution away from the culture of yeomanry by the third century.15 That is when continual non-hoplite warring and the resulting taxes on both land and produce by nonrepresentative and nonconstitutional governments eventually caused a depopulation of the countryside. It was an environment increasingly devoid of farmhouses and the traces of intensive agriculture. After the fourth century, the growing absence of rural infrastructure in Greece implies an ongoing erosion of the traditional city-state, a waning of the old underlying agrarianism.
Farm residence was on the decline in many regions. In the transition to large estates, overseers and bailiffs more frequently occupied the traditional family farmhouse.** A little to the north of Attica in Boeotia “by late Hellenistic times, there is an initial fall-off in the number of occupied sites, and second a tendency for occupation to be concentrated in the larger centers” (Bintliff and Snodgrass 145). The southern Argolid and Messenia area in Greece generally reveal about the same striking pattern (van Andel and Runnels 1987a: 110-17, 162; MacDonald and Rapp 146). In the Greek settlements of southern Italy after the fourth century, “the numerous country roads … fell out of use and were grown over as the countryside reverted to pasture land” (Carter et al. 309; Carter 1990: 409-10; 412).
Besides the accumulation of properties into larger estates, there was also, paradoxically, a rise in brigandage among the scarcer isolated farms once the ethos of the small landowner was cracked and the ever vigilant agrarian vanished. Paul Guiraud, who a century ago noted this phenomenon, thought that the continual warring, increased class strife between rich and poor, and the subsequent assumption of power by Hellenistic authoritarian regimes lay behind the general agrarian decline (e.g., 1893: 398-406). This destruction of small farming and agrarian ideology is also expressed in a variety of Greek literary sources in Hellenistic and early Roman times. Lament over the decline in the countryside is much more than mere formulaic topoi in Greek literature (e.g., Alcock 47-48; cf. Day 231-38).
The evidence in Greek literature for these later changes is anecdotal and found in a variety of sources. A few examples will suffice. They generally confirm the record of archaeological survey mentioned earlier. In the Roman period the topographer Pausanias remarked that Aetolia, never a shining example of intensive agriculture, was now abandoned and uncultivated altogether (Paus. 8.24.11). Strabo said that by the first century B.C. Arcadia, a little farther to the south—once the home of solid hoplite infantry—was in large part relegated to pasturage (8.8.1; cf. 9.2.25; 9.5.12; cf. Polyb. 4.73-74). Polybius remarked of early second-century Greece in general: “In our own times some cities have become deserted and agricultural production has declined, although neither wars nor epidemics were taking place continuously” (36.17.5).
Plutarch (Mor. 413F-414A) only slightly exaggerated the vast difference between the Greek countryside during his own time (the late first and early second century A.D). and the earlier agrarianism of the polis era, when he remarked that “the whole country of Greece could hardly field 3,000 soldiers, which is the amount that the Megarians alone sent forth to Plataea” (i.e., 479 B.C.). In the Greek mind, wise use of the land increased rural population and produced stout infantry; concentration in farm owning and extensive agricultural practices resulted in the very opposite, in a near absence of agrarian pike-men. In a famous passage in Dio Chrysostom, who lived about the same time as Plutarch, there is a reference that Thessaly was desolate and Arcadia depopulated (33.25). Of a city in Euboea, Dio also says in a discussion of the hazards of large estate farming that two-thirds of its surrounding countryside were unused and unfarmed (7.33-34; 38). Lucian, writing of Attica in the second century A.D., could be amused at men who claimed to own the entire countryside surrounding small villages (Lucian Ic. 18).16
Under the agrarian patchwork of the old Greek polis period there was nothing approaching the estates of the third-century B.C. farm of an Apollonius at Memphis (6,500 acres) or an Heroides Atticus (worth in cash about 2.5 million drachmas [enough wealth to qualify 1,250 farmers under the old 2,000 drachmas hoplite census of past centuries]). By the second century A.D. Heroides owned a great part of the deme of Marathon—the fifth- and fourth-century B.C. haunt of hundreds of hoplite farmers.*
Under a corporate agricultural regime, close attention to farming detail and any notion of independence by the farmworkers themselves were impossible. In Ptolemaic Egypt, for example, peasants in some type of share cropping arrangement farmed the enormous estate of one Apollonius. They complained to their absentee owner of the problems in working such a vast property: “There are lots of mistakes in this business of the ten thousand arurae [about 6,800 acres?], because there is no intelligent person to manage the agricultural work. Call some of us up and listen to what we have to tell you” (Rostovtzeff 1922: 75). At Hermopolis in late Roman Egypt a list of farm owners shows that the wealthiest 3.5 percent owned 53 percent of the surrounding countryside; the poorest 47.5 percent had only 2.8 percent of the land (cf. Duncan-Jones 138-39).
Unlike the agrarian regime of the polis, Hellenistic agriculture under the Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Attalids was often “subject to most detailed bureaucratic planning, at every level: what seed was sown where, what dues were paid by the lessees, and when—every step in the procedure, from the renting of royal storehouse equipment to the assessment of harvest returns, was subject to scrutiny by a swarm of local or governmental officials” (Green 368; cf. Kreibig 6-26). We should imagine there were “lots of mistakes” in farming when “detailed bureaucratic planning” intervened “at every level.”
In the aftermath of the polis period, the paradoxical situation arose that as the number of Greek farms shrunk and the surrounding countryside became less cultivated and less inhabited, the actual size of remaining farms increased enormously. With general decline in overall population, with more and more land vacated, it would seem a logical step for the absentee wealthy to curtail labor and capital investment in agriculture. They preferred instead to seek profit in large, extensively farmed estates managed by overseers and manned by servile gangs or serfs.
Incidentally, despite popular supposition, the concentration of American farmland into vast corporate tracts has not led to greater agricultural productivity per acre (cf. Strange 78-103). As in the case of the ancient world, less efficient farms arose and a decrease in rural population continued. In the experience of one modern rural sociologist: “The most important concomitant of large-scale operations is the composition of the population it produces. With a given amount of available land, the larger the farming units are, the fewer will be the number of farm operators” (Goldschmidt 218).
Drawing on comparative data of similar complex societies, Joseph Tainter located in the countryside the eventual collapse of the entire oppressive Roman bureaucracy. Farmers increasingly in the second through fourth centuries A.D. had lost control of their production, and thus were squeezed by exorbitant taxes. These monies were not recirculated, and hence brought little productivity in return to rural parts. Tainter’s general economic analysis of rural depopulation in the later Empire conforms to the ancient literary and archaeological evidence discussed earlier about Hellenistic Greece:
Three explanations are commonly offered for the abandonment: soil exhaustion, labor deficiencies, and barbarian raids. None of these is really satisfactory …. Contemporaries attributed it to overtaxation, and there is much to recommend this interpretation. The expensive government and military of the Dominate are clearly implicated…. Under these conditions the cultivation of marginal land became unprofitable, as too frequently it would not yield enough for taxes and a surplus. Hence, lands came to be progressively deserted. Faced with taxes a small holder might abandon his land and go to work for a neighbor, who in turn would be glad of the extra agricultural labor. A patronage system developed where powerful local land-holders extended protection over peasants against the government’s demands.17
Even if all this has the air of the abstract, of the grand theory of rise and fall, the general lessons we must draw from ancient Greek agrarianism are unmistakable. Privately held small and equal-sized plots, homestead residence, intensive production strategies, wide-scale private ownership of individual slaves, farmer control of food storage and processing, freedom from excessive taxation, and strict agrarian control of war making and politics all led to social stability in the ancient Greek world. They resulted in a countryside and rural community—the polis—immune from exploitation by outside powers, in a laboratory for intellectual and artistic renaissance well before even the rise of Athenian democracy. Behind them all lies the agrarian creed of egalitarianism for the landed and the dispersion of wealth and capital throughout a broad middle group of citizens. These are the only conditions out of which successful broad-based constitutional government can arise. For citizens to care about the future of their own community and believe in their own abilities at directing it, a large body of them must have acquired the prerequisite confidence and expertise through their own private economic and military success. In a preindustrial society, that can best occur among a like group of yeoman militiamen, who develop shared values and a common culture through their private, though nearly identical struggle. Ten thousand men each farming ten acres, alike pruning vines and picking fruit, each proud of his private slot in the checkerboard of the phalanx, bring to government that priceless balance of individual responsibility and group concern. None can survive without another, yet none look to another for survival. Disturbing as it might be to modern intellectuals in the university, it is not an exaggeration to say that our entire Western literary and philosophical tradition arose on the backs of a very peculiar and previously unseen sort of farmer.
The problem (tragic to my mind) is that such systems, like the Greek polis, often unfortunately grow up in isolation, and then tend to be closed, overly conservative and reactionary societies. They cannot respond to sudden infusions of wealth and population, forces disruptive of the traditional one to one equation that was between land and social/ political/military status. To reinvent itself, as Athens more than any other city-state attempted to do, required a complete, not a haphazard move beyond agrarianism. That was something too much to ask even from radical Athenian democracy. The Greek polis was, in short, “hostile to the concentration of power into the hands of any single person, family, or group except for limited periods and for limited purposes as endorsed by the citizen body as a whole” (Runciman 1990: 366). The agrarian egalitarianism that had for centuries prevented exploitation against its own also frowned upon the infusion of noncitizen talent—a resource that could prepare the Greek city-state for new challenges ahead.
The central thesis of this book has been the rise of a remarkable agrarian culture in Greece. Its political, economic, and social system for nearly four centuries gave rise to a steady prosperity. In turn, farming success provided the leisure, capital, and ideology of what we now know as polis culture, the fountainhead of Western civilization. More specifically, it seems to me the Greeks discovered that the inherent basis of economic development and social stability revolved around three general concepts.
First, a private system of land ownership encouraged productivity and rewarded innovation among its native-born citizens. Farm ownership introduced the idea that human excellence is fostered by individual, not corporate, not state initiative. This original move toward privately held, intensive agriculture provided in most areas a surplus of food production. It freed a sizable minority for commerce, small crafts, and government bureaucracies. The last point is especially important. The freedom of the Greek geôrgoi from property and income taxes should never be forgotten. During the late Hellenistic and Roman periods in Greece, the countryside was continually vulnerable to blanket taxation, funds that were often raised by local authorities and then transferred to distant dynasts, further weakening the rural economy. Of the assumption of Roman control in Greece, Susan Alcock also points out that the result was an acceleration of trends begun earlier during Hellenistic times, a “higher level of systematic, regular and direct taxation. These could be augmented by other extraordinary levies. Most taxes were required in cash, and the province as a whole suffered a net loss of revenue to the central authorities.”18 The more subsequent generations of Greek farmers were taxed, the more they disappeared—and the less money was raised as inefficient estates took their place.
Authoritarianism in Hellenistic and Roman Greece surely did not result in increased agrarian efficiency to meet outside demands. It did not evoke an efficiency spawned by necessity and the trickle-down effect of enrichment for the few. In post-polis Greece outside dynasties only increased the ongoing decline in rural population, and they ended most equitable distribution of farm property.19
Second, and even more important than private farm ownership and freedom from government interference in any appreciation of contributions of the agrarian Greek polis, were the real efforts to deal with the inevitable inequality that arose out of an entrepreneurial system of agriculture. Men and women are not born of equal talent or opportunity. Hence, accumulated wealth, and the power of that wealth, for much of the life of the agrarian polis were carefully scrutinized. Originally popular government grew up as a precise response to the needs of small farmers, as a mechanism to protect their agricultural achievement and cohesive middle identity. Soon a whole set of sometimes creative, sometimes bizarre, ultimately confining institutions—liturgies, land inalienability, restriction against nonagricultural activity, scrutiny of public officials, laws of inheritance—followed. While land was seldom on any wide scale confiscated or redistributed—to do that would shake the confidence of those who were devoting labor to improving their own small parts—a social ethos nevertheless arose that frowned upon the accumulation of farm property and wealth (cf. Isager and Skydsgaard 128-29). Amid the agrarian ordeal of the seventh through fifth centuries, the truly successful landowner was not encouraged to gobble up his neighbor. To act so brought stricture rather than admiration. Instead, his public donations and services that recycled his expertise and his capital through the community brought him praise, rewards, and adulation.
The leisure and wealth that derived from agricultural productivity of the polis of the seventh through fourth centuries were in a social sense not predatory. Agrarian capital was channeled back through the foundations of the city-state, reappearing to support what we now would call Greek culture—civic buildings in stone, public architecture, painted pottery, literary and philosophical pursuits. In the present century-long debate between capitalism and collectivism it is striking how often we have forgotten this contribution of the agrarian Greeks.20 The agrarian Greeks’ major accomplishment, after all, was the unique balance and harmony between individual excellence and corporate well-being, an equilibrium between private enterprise and social stability.
Besides the wider economic development spawned by intensive agriculture, and the accompanying political mechanisms to protect middling farmers, the third and final component of the Greeks’ success was the limitation of warfare. The construction of rules and regulations sharply curtailed the amount of capital and labor devoted to war making and, most important, diminished the degree of human and material suffering caused by battles, which could be frequent but not costly.
Do not underestimate the importance of hoplite frugality. There does seem to be a sharp break in the military practice of the Greek city-states before and after the period of the free polis. Expenditures for both aggression and defense historically can devour the accumulated wealth and leisure of most societies. But in Greece from the early seventh to the late fifth century a mechanism was found to relegate costs to an insignificant portion of the agrarian community’s outlay: the same local control of land tenure that preserved the agrarian grid also governed the composition and conduct of the phalanx.
As this book has argued, all these polis structures were the work of an ideology of agrarianism, of farmers who emerged out of the Greek Dark Ages with a new egalitarian ethos at odds with the traditional notions of both the rich and the poor. Just as the appearance of new intensive agriculture, ideas of egalitarianism, and hoplite warfare explain the rise of the city-state, so the deterioration of those institutions and the demise of their creators reflects the erosion of the polis. Specialization in agriculture, the elevation of cash and commerce over small farming, increases in the size of individual estates, growing disparity between rich and poor, the appearance of mercenaries, and cavalry and specialized troops involved in extensive and constant campaigning, are all interrelated. They are characteristic of the Hellenistic Greek world and beyond. They are emblematic of the end of the city-state of middling farmers—and all that went with it.
An aerial photograph of a Greek “city-state” circa 250 B.C. would not necessarily appear dissimilar to one taken a century and a half earlier (i.e., 400 B.C.). Walls, temples, and houses after all would be about the same. On closer examination, municipal institutions would seem roughly identical: young ephebes, cults of the Olympian gods, philosophical schools, public records on stone, civic boards and regulatory bureaucracies. Linguistically as well, the populace of the later Greek community spoke more or less identical Greek to that of its ancestors. Organized learning and intellectual investigation went on; academics thrived. Examine standard modern surveys of the disintegration of past empires and cultures: the Greeks are conspicuously absent. In neither Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies nor Yoffee and Cowgill’s The Colapse of Ancient States and Civilizations is the Greek polis even discussed.
So the notion of an “end” of the city-state, of Greek culture of the polis, should not conjure up images of a holocaust or Armageddon, the specter of shaggy barbarians and livestock in the agora of an abandoned community. The Greek polis never achieved a level of uniformity or complexity comparable to other imperial or palatial systems. It never experienced a cataclysmic social and cultural demise. Much different and far more complex societies (such as in the Near East and in the New World) often are decapitated and collapse in isolation (without, as in the case of the waning Greek polis, a Rome or Macedon nearby), no competing power primed to take advantage of the exhaustion (cf. Tainter 201-4). Utter confusion reigns for centuries in their wake. Depopulation and widespread impoverishment are the predictable reactions to prior overspecialization and bureaucratization. Cataclysms of this magnitude are far removed from the erosion of the Greek city-state.
Nevertheless, by the third and the second centuries the Greek polis was clearly lost—if by “lost” we mean the old equation of small landowner/hoplite infantryman/citizen. Lost was the idea of a free man within an autonomous city-state, a recipient of the cultural dividends that arose from that matrix. “The poleis which survived and indeed flourished in the Hellenistic and even Roman periods,” wrote W. G. Runciman (1990: 348), “were, therefore, poleis in name only: they were urban communities with a life of their own, but not ‘citizen-states’ in the sociological sense.” The curious Greek experience with agrarian egalitarianism was over by the third century B.C. “The ‘political’ life of the Hellenistic city was essentially determined by two contrasting facts: the lack of real power and the insistence on autonomy. As there was so little power, the autonomy more often than not was only nominal, and at any rate remained a purely parochial affair. There were no true heirs to the political citizens of the classical age” (Ehrenberg 1951: 372).
With the demise of the inward-looking, stodgy yeomen, enormous wealth and poverty ensued. The Greek-speaking Hellenistic world could now use the Hellenic genius without ethical constraint. It could leave the West with affirmation of the now popular “diversity,” not unity, with urban cosmopolitanism, not patchworks of homestead farms, with bizarre siege engines, elephants, and packs of hired killers, not ephemeral boxes of bronze-clad farmers. Theirs was a realm of potentates and their tiny cabal of “friends,” not agrarian councils of dour husbandmen, “their facial expressions like sour vinegar” (Ar. Eccl. 289-292).
*They were largely cutthroat dreamers who had expelled hoplites from their farms (e.g., Xen. Hell. 2.4.2, 4-7, 24, 26-27, 31-32; cf. 3.1.4; Arist. Ath. Pol. 38.2).
*As Jan Pecírka correctly formulated the dilemma: “The economic and political evolution of Athenian society outgrew the framework fixed by the polis … the framework of its economic and political principles, the framework of its social structure and inherited moral values and political behaviour” (1976: 19).
*“While in ancient Greek society the city (polis) was the center of an agriculturally cultivated or pastured territory and the seat of individual landowners with at least formally equal rights and duties (koinonia tôn politôn), the basis of production in the old Oriental societies was the village community, which had above it … the despot or a temple or some other governmental owner of their means of production, especially of the land” (Kreibig 6).
*“Because the local elite no longer needed to look solely to the community for legitimation of its power, the community lost the leverage it used to have over them. Instead power devolved downward from the king to his “friends” and others, and thus communal accountability dissipated” (Gallant 1991: 195).
**Xen Oec. 12.3; Langdon and Watrous 170. Of the deme Atene in southern Attica, Hans Lohmann has remarked: “At the end of the 4th century B.C. there was a sudden collapse, the valleys became depopulated and barren and none of the numerous farmsteads was to survive considerably into Hellenistic times” (1992: 56).
*Cf. Finley 1973: 100-101; Day 231-38; Jardé 119; the dedications of Heroides at the Panhellenic sanctuaries rival the aggregate contributions of entire city-states of the sixth through fourth centuries.