Chapter 10

EPILOGUE: World Beneath Our Feet

—James Montmarquet 1989:248

If agrarianism is to survive, as I believe it can, it will serve as a different sort of a record: not of mass changes in the lives of the many, but of the persistent counterpressure of those few who choose to go in a direction of their own.

—Euripides Antiope (fr. 195 Nauck)

The earth bears everything and takes it back.

The Other Greeks

The Other Greeks has offered an alternative, nearly exclusively agrarian account of four centuries of Greek social, political, and military history (700-300 B.C.). Systematic emphasis on the countryside, as I argue in the Introduction is the most effective way to understand the ancient Greeks and the creation of the city-state. But it is an approach often neglected in this country, both because of the current directions of formal American academic research, and the more alarming and growing ignorance of agricultural life within our very culture.

Fundamental changes in the way the early Greeks grew food (Part One, The Rise of Small Farmers in Ancient Greece) were, I think, the causes of all subsequent cultural development in the West. There was a direct, not an incidental, relationship between the origins of our own intellectual heritage and the nearly forgotten yeomen of the Greek city-state. At the end of the Greek Dark Ages, population pressure and problems in food supply prompted a radically different approach to farming, a reordering of the Hellenic countryside characterized by decentralization, by local efforts at employing greater labor and infrastructure to produce a much wider and more productive variety of crops. The Mycenean palatial lord and the later Dark-Age baron, for all their respective degrees of political authoritarianism and oppressive economic exploitation, were not efficient food-producing organizers. For the next four centuries anything resembling those past societies was not to be resurrected as a permanent fixture in the Greek landscape.

Instead, now in relative (and unusual) isolation from the wider fabric of eighth to fifth century B.C. Mediterranean history, small, independent agriculturalists were free to coalesce as an entirely novel farming class in Greece. This so-called mesoi group of yeoman landowners grew food far more effectively than in the past. By the end of the sixth-century as many as a third to half of the free residents of the Greek polis considered themselves hoplite-landowners, not landless poor, not indentured serfs, not impoverished gardeners, not wage earners, not leisured rich horse raisers nor owners of large herds. The appearance of successful yet middling farmers marked the creation of European agrarianism as we have known it since. The ancient Greek agricultural community now believed that the land surrounding their growing communities, their chôra, should remain privately and perpetually in the hands of farm families, rural property to be divided more or less equitably and permanently among these citizens of the nascent polis.

Herein (see Part Two, The Preservation of Agrarianism) arose all subsequent Greek military and political development for the next two centuries (700-500 B.C.), institutions that are rarely—if at all—discussed in connection to agrarianism. So we should now reconceive the polis, constitutional government, the origins of individualism and Greek warfare itself as efforts to perpetuate independent landowners as exclusive citizens of the city-state, endeavors not so much to empower farmers as to create a larger and responsible community of equals. All were institutions utterly unimaginable without the supporting infrastructure of an agrarian middle. The continual erosion of hereditary aristocracy in the seventh and sixth centuries was thus, on a political level, followed by something entirely unprecedented in Greek history, the appearance of real constitutional government. But these broad-based “oligarchies” were not narrowly restricted to cabals of wealthy elites. Indeed, they were not, I think, “oligarchies” at all.

Typically, agrarian “polities” or “timocracies” incorporated a wide body of farmers, whose councils in turn sought to ensure the property-owning status of their successful agrarian constituents. The degree of democratization of these Greek agricultural governments of the seventh through fifth centuries—women, slaves, foreigners, and the landless were all marginalized—was normally regulated by size of the property qualification. Yet that requirement was quite often low. It might extend to owners of less than fifteen acres of farmland. In other words, Greek constitutional and representative governments did not appear ex nihilo at Athens. These breakthroughs were not the labor of political theorists, philosophical schools, or even of pragmatic politicians such as Solon, Cleisthenes, or Pericles. Popular government, as Aristotle saw in his Politics, was made possible only through preexisting egalitarian thinking, the pragmatic day-to-day experience of a cadre of independent and small farmers throughout the Greek city-states.

The simultaneous Greek military revolution of the early seventh century is explicable only by this rise of agrarianism, not merely by the technological dynamism of the hoplite phalanx, terrifying though it was. The new technology of hoplite weaponry in the late eighth and seventh centuries gave both power and order to the traditional “phalanx” of massed but loosely organized Dark-Age fighters. Just as new agrarian political and economic ideologies enhanced the agricultural evolution of the times, thereby ensuring a parquet of independent yeomen, the rules of military engagement (the third leg of the agrarian triad) now legitimized the grid of hoplites in the phalanx. Regulation born of agrarian thinking determined the place, time, object, sequence, and aftermath of Greek battles between the poleis.

In this manner, the ancient Greeks found a way to curb defense outlay without risking security. They discovered a means to distribute land equitably among a sizable group of citizenry without confiscations or the destruction of individual initiative. They established a political forum that regularly and peacefully resolved questions of social power and control, without authoritarianism or revolution. These three military, economic, and political challenges have undermined most societies since. Equality, responsibility, and cooperation explained a Greek farmer’s slot in the phalanx, his parcel of land, and his seat in the assembly.

But there were intrinsic ideological and practical limitations to the entire practice of Greek agrarian egalitarianism—and so to the whole notion of the Greek polis itself (see Part Three, To Lose a Culture), should the city-state ever find itself in an environment different from the insularity of its agricultural birth. The idea of rampant equality in politics, battle, and farming among a static population of landowning yeoman was clearly reactionary. Agrarianism reflected the peculiar, confining circumstances of the genesis of the Greek city-state in the eighth and seventh centuries. Therefore it was vulnerable to subsequent demographic changes and integration with the surrounding Mediterranean economy.

Once Greece, driven on by Athenian imperialism, reentered the main fabric of Mediterranean history after the Persian Wars, financial, military, and political challenge and opportunity tore at the very premise, the basic tenets, of the traditional agricultural life of thepolis. Fourth-century thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, so troubled by the growing diminution of agrarian conservatism in their own times, so disturbed by the increasing number of nonlanded residents and the amount of capital outside of farming, naturally put egalitarian landowning at the center of their reactionary philosophical utopias.

Hoplite warfare was not suited for distant campaigning. Its peculiar economy and its rules of engagement were largely absurd to foreigners, who fought on variegated terrain with completely different notions of war and warrior. Archers, rowers, slingers, cavalry, mercenaries, and light-armed troops, after all, were intrinsically valuable military assets, regardless of their relationship to the Greek landscape or the sociology of the polis. Similarly, self-interested Greeks of talent and vision, nonlanded men, who could create capital well enough off the farm, had no place in the agrarian matrix of the polis. It was an institution that once it had “evolved out of the confusion and depopulation which had followed the collapse of the Mycenean system was positively disadvantageous in the wider environment which they themselves had helped to create” (Runciman 1990: 350).

In a complex Mediterranean (and ironically increasingly Greek!) world, commerce, trade, and military adventurism—endeavors of “the wider environment”—all demanded status commensurate with new economic clout. As the number of the new practitioners grew, the yeoman class increasingly became unable to retain its own traditional agenda—an ideology that had been so beneficial to the past insular culture of Greece as a whole. The structures of the Greek agrarian polis could not live with fundamental change nor by the fourth century survive without it.

The Hellenistic world and Rome as well, we are now constantly reminded, was more multicultural, dynamic, and wealthy. States were far better adapted to capital formation, commerce, and the vast extension of military power, far more flexible in the granting of citizenship and the marshaling of large, diverse, and lethal armies. But was this not all at a price? After the fourth century, there was chaos in the Greek Aegean. Individualism had gone mad, a product of growing political turmoil, increasing inequality, the loss of social cohesion, and enormous military expenditure among the city-states—just the perennial problems which the blinkered world of Greek agrarianism for nearly four centuries had assiduously sought to address.

Outsiders might become citizens in such new states, but for what purpose? Citizenship in a polis was now to offer little guarantee of egalitarianism. There were to be few protections from the exploitation of wealthy and urban interests. After the demise of thepolisindividualism for a time might be enhanced, but the community as a whole lost. And in the end there was no individualism.

Greece in some sense may have also been a more exciting, more adventurous place after the fourth century. Then military service, citizenship, commerce, land ownership, farm production, and accomplished foreigners were all to be seen in pragmatic rather than in ethical terms. This change in values and outlook, however, surely was at an enormous social, political, and economic cost for Greek landed and landless alike. Agrarian protocol had both empowered and disenfranchised many Greeks. But the city-state had also created an undeniable equilibrium in some ways beneficial even to those without land. Manipulation by a large group of small farmers could never be as encompassing or as severe as the exploitation engineered by a tiny cabal of imperial elites. With the demise of the farmers’ polis, the concept of egalitarianism vanished for nearly everyone, citizen and mere resident alike.

Agriculture itself, the narrower practice of food production in Greece, continued for a brief time mostly unchanged. But farming in Greece, after the fourth century was now more and more conducted on entirely different ideological premises once the autonomouspolis was lost. Those shifts in Greek attitudes by the third and second centuries eventually did have enormous pragmatic ramifications for all involved: growing depopulation in the countryside, specialization of crops, decline in farm residence, enormous increase in farm size, growth of mercenaries, continual warring among professional armies, transference of local capital, an end to regional community autonomy, the impotence of representative assemblies, serfdom and peasantry replacing widespread ownership of chattel slaves, and growing rural impoverishment along with enrichment of an urban elite.

That full account of Hellenistic farming and fighting has not been adequately chronicled. No books have been devoted to Hellenistic warfare or agriculture. But a comprehensive study of both would explain much of the Greek-speaking world after the polis—and it would dim considerably much of the luster that the Hellenistic age now enjoys.

The Populist Legacy

We should not assume, however, that Hellenic agrarianism was ever entirely uniform. It did not encompass all of Greek life in every locale from the end of the Dark Ages to the rise of the Hellenistic monarchies. Large territories—Sparta, Thessaly, Crete—never, or at least only piecemeal, adopted the inclusive agenda of intensive, privately owned agriculture, broad-based oligarchy by property qualification, and hoplite warfare.

At the other extreme, some poleis to the left of the agricultural exemplar, such as Athens, often at the forefront of Mediterranean history in the fifth century, gradually sought to evolve and to transform the agrarian ethic among their landed and nonlanded citizens alike. Athenian democracy resulted in innovative, but at times clearly anti-agrarian, political practice and military strategy. The Athenians and their imperial democracy, in short, helped bring the wider Mediterranean world to the very doorstep of the Greekpolis.Through extension of citizenship to the landless, urbanization, fortification, diminution of agrarian warfare, creation of a fleet, and reconstitution of the ideological basis of its middling landowners, Athens attempted both to save the idea of the city-state as a viable political institution, and yet to end the hegemony of the old agrarian polis. True, that contradictory effort led to a cultural explosion, to a vibrant, very brief artistic and intellectual renaissance at Athens unimaginable among her more pedestrian agrarian neighbors. But her piecemeal attempts at city-state transformation ultimately failed. Athenian imperialism only made the survival of the Greek city-states’ ideology even more problematic.

One third to one half of the adult male native population within most Greek city-states never owned adequately sized land in the first place. They never voted in the assembly, never fought in the hoplite phalanx, never entered into the small farmers’ matrix, and so benefited only indirectly from the trickle-down fruits of hoplite agrarianism. At best, these Greeks on the edge might possess insubstantial plots. They enjoyed only partial political privileges, and were drafted as prestigious infantrymen only in dire circumstances. A comprehensive history of those marginalized Greek peoples also has yet to be written.

But Greek yeomanry, even if these farmers were not preponderant in absolute numbers, was clearly the dominant culture of ancient Greece. Hoplite cultivators did establish the social, political, economic, and military foundations of most Greek city-states—and hence the general fabric of the life and thought of the polis itself. Nonagrarians in the polis adopted the farmers’ values and laws, not vice versa. If we now wish at last to trace the origins of the so-called Greek legacy, the genesis of our own contemporary Western culture, we must look to the unique circumstances in the early Greek countryside, not simply to Athenian democracy.

There are, as I see it, at least twelve fundamentals of Western civilization that originated exclusively in the agricultural practice of the polis. They have rarely, if ever, been acknowledged in their proper agrarian pedigree as the discovery of farmers, not urban intellectuals:

1.     Private ownership of land

2.     Free choice and independence in economic activity

3.     An economic mentality that sought to improve productivity

4.     Liberation from oppressive and capricious taxes and rents

5.     Constitutional government based on local representation

6.     Chauvinism of a cohesive middle stratum, neither wealthy nor poor

7.     Notions of egalitarianism and equality of property holding

8.     Private ownership of arms

9.     Citizen composition of amateur militias

10. Absolute subservience of military organization to civilian political control

11. Desire to limit and control defense outlay

12. Preference in warfare for decisive engagement and frontal assault

These Western ideals, so cherished and taken for granted so long in America, all grew out of a purely practical, utilitarian—and inevitably agrarian—environment. The autonomous and agrarian Greek polis itself vanished in the Hellenistic era. But that disappearance was due to complex phenomena that finally exposed the city-state’s fragile cargo of agrarian exclusivity and structural rigidity. Most of the city-state’s ethical and moral values, however, transcended the confining nature of its late eighth-century birth. They could be applied perfectly well to any subsequent culture with the prerequisite courage and necessary imagination. For a civilization in crisis such as our own, there is value in discovering the ideological foundry from which first emerged much of what we take for granted, much of what we have always assumed to be a non-agrarian heritage.

Is there not merit now for Americans to discover from the Greeks why, in the words of Max Weber, “the prevailing life-style was marked by great simplicity, and this was true of the creative figures of Hellenic culture in the period of its greatest achievements”? “Greek art in particular,” Weber adds, “was not stimulated in any way by a demand for material luxuries” (Weber 1976: 200). And should not our generation seek to know why private lavish dwellings were “a clear violation of a building ordinance intended to enforce a social principle, that of the equality of property among members of the landowning class” (Métraux 96)?

The pragmatic, egalitarian, and common-sense values of the Greeks, I repeat, were not the harvests of nostalgic philosophical utopias. Hellenic culture did not originate from the work of ancient theorists or rhetoricians. It was not the result of intellectual discussions over power and gender in dialogues, plays, and orations. E. M. Wood, despite wrongly calling Athenian hoplite-farmers “peasant-citizens” nevertheless makes a perceptive—but nearly neglected—observation: “Many of the cherished ideals of Athenian culture, and even some of its most exalted notions of Greek philosophy may owe their origins to the experience and aspirations of the Attic peasantry” (Wood 126). The “ideals” and “exalted notions of Greek philosophy” were the direct result of the birth of European agrarianism.

The learned practitioners of nuance and criticism, the urban cultural fora, now and in the past, are mostly unconcerned with and incapable of creating a just and viable society of equals. They usually do not believe in, do not live among, do not work beside, do not marry among the great middle group of ancient and modern citizenry, the people who day by day, nearly unconsciously craft the culture and create the values in which they live. Most theorists and intellectuals are also at a distance from nature and the harsh pragmatism that she instills in all those who attempt to grow food in a hostile environment, unforgiving of either error or misfortune, unconcerned with excuse or special pleading. As stated in the Introduction, I see a disheartening—and continuing—tendency on the part of current American classicists to think and write too exclusively about this intellectual few of the Greek polis, thinkers who rested on the shoulders of the unknown giants in the forgotten countryside.

Is that late twentieth-century academic fascination with the political theory and literary criticism of a small cadre of ancient writers not explicable, when we consider that the modern American scholar of this era—himself dependent on the bounty of a vibrant middle-class—often has no appreciation, no affinity, no affection for the very culture that has produced and now protects him? To understand the other Greeks, American classicists, however imaginative and erudite they may be, must change more than their approach to classical scholarship. They must end more than their preoccupation with texts, theories, and rhetoric. They must radically shift their focus from the confining world of graduate seminars and panel discussions to the popular arena of poorly educated undergraduates and the ignored majority of middling readers. Only thus can the concerns and aspirations of the forgotten present illuminate a neglected past.

Clear proof of the dominant role of yeomanry in Greek cultural history is, as we have also seen, the negative argument, the fact that most of their values—despite the continued (and growing!) presence of the Greek philosophical schools, libraries, and organized intellectual research—vanished from common practice, both chronologically and regionally, once the agrarian middle of the Hellenic city-state disappeared. That (very provocative) book which chronicles the peculiar affinity of ancient Greek academic (as opposed to original) thinking for monarchy, tyranny, and authoritarianism also has not yet been written.

To the modern literary, philosophical, and theoretical historian of the 1980s, the despotic Hellenistic world was an intellectual feast of increasing diversity in philosophical approaches, of growing organization and sophistication of academic enterprise and inquiry. It was a thinking-man’s gala, a multicultural pandemonium much in vogue now in the university. But the post-polis was a world—like ours—roughly contemporaneous with the period in which rural life and the majority of citizenry was rapidly vanishing as independent and powerful forces for political, social, and military autonomy and egalitarianism. It was, after all, farmers, not urban savants, who had kept the culture of the Greek city-state alive.

Gloriously informed investigation, brilliantly reasoned contemplation among introspective literati, and far-seeing theories of the Greek polis were not the creators, not the catalysts for the extension of pragmatic Greek values. They were the logical fruit of the groundwork of agrarians, Greek farmers who are now all but lost to the European historical record. The efforts of these geôrgoi provided the capital, the security, the freedom, the entire backdrop for a curious few to enhance, to question, to nuance, and to transform their own fundamentally sound agrarian political, social, and military thinking—this urban intellectual renaissance reaching a crescendo in the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C., just as the old supporting framework and safety of egalitarian agriculture was collapsing. No wonder once the cohesive middle was lost, constitutional government and local autonomy never really returned to Greece.

So I argue that you must change your accustomed impression of the ancient Greeks. Do not envision them as distant geniuses or robed intelligentsia. They are not “the famous ‘creative minority,’ an aristocracy of intellect and morals, an upper class, not mere individuals, of a higher level of intellectual and moral education” who alone “create true and eternal things” (Ehrenberg 1951: 373). The Greeks are not a few bearded stone heads. Their culture instead is the inevitable consequence of a strong middle group of independent farmers, who alone had the talent, courage, and vision to construct a society in their own image, confident that from that creation would inevitably flow the best of human talent and aspiration.

Appreciate that agrarian genesis of Western values. Seek to preserve a remnant of it in your own experience, and with it find some protection for, some anchor to, your own precious but now precarious political, economic, social, and military heritage, some understanding that the free individual does have responsibility to his community.

This effort at populism, academic “vulgarization” if you will, is, I think, urgent now to the preservation of Classics as an academic discipline in this country. Despite strong class enrollments, despite integration within the general education framework of the university, the study of classical antiquity is under assault throughout the United States. If we professors do little to convince the public of its value, its usefulness, it will surely vanish altogether as a formal academic discipline.

To take but one example, at my home teaching institution, California State University, Fresno, in the summer of 1992 (six months after the Classics program received national recognition), the university of nearly twenty thousand students in the face of budgetary reductions advocated first of all eliminating every class in the language and culture of Greece and Rome, and all courses in humanities from Homer to the Renaissance. This decision (only partially rescinded when funding was restored) was agreed to by the chairman of the Literature Department, reluctantly sanctioned by the dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, but originally made by the vice-president and president of the university. Why would the humanities, and Classics in particular, be the firstdisciplines to be stripped from a university curriculum?

We academics, I think, are in large part culpable. In the United States—out of timidity, self-interest, or both, it must be admitted forthrightly—we write ever more about ever less for ever fewer. The enormous industry—there is no other word for it—of our American university is now at a critical juncture, faced with a dilemma it seeks to avoid, but cannot. The 1980s saw in this country a growing number of people simply uninterested in reading history and literature. Many are openly hostile to learning and intellectual life in general The next stage in the erosion of American learning is even more frightening. If the literacy, if the inquisitiveness of the general populace continues to diminish at present rates (and is there reason to believe that it will not?), most Americans by the end of the 1990s will not merely be uninterested in, but actually incapable of, absorbing a challenging book. In times of economic stagnation taxpayers will no longer contribute to what they neither understand nor wish to understand. How many university-based journals, how many academic press books pile up on the table of the nurse, cook, or plumber, much less of the doctor, stockbroker, and lawyer? How ironic it is that hours released from the university classroom during the 1980s subsidized so much of this specialized, often counterproductive research; how ironic it is that we academics ignored what might have saved us, in order to indulge in what now surely is destroying us.

Our problem in Classics in this country is not really how many women or people of Asian, African, or Hispanic heritage choose to learn or not to learn Greek and Latin. It is the nearly unsolvable dilemma of class and status that affects us all, not the simpler and solvable issues of race, gender, or ethnicity. For too long our pool of prospective classics students and scholars of both sexes and all ethnicities, has been stocked by those with traditional and narrow academic interests, those with little knowledge of, much less experience in, the beleaguered social and economic life of the society in which they now live: men and women who exclusively read and write books of theory and criticism largely about those of the past who wrote books, men and women who have either no ability to or no interest in communicating their expertise to the public at large.

In a larger sense, the hour of reckoning is ominously near for all the disciplines lumped under the rubric “humanities.” The growth of computer networks, electronic mail, and extensive data banks—ironically all projects welcomed by scholars—are double-edged swords. Can such technology also not make the whole notion of esoteric, university-press publications obsolete undertakings, and even more the ubiquitous academic journal? Both species of university endeavor, after all, are unnecessarily expensive. They are often inaccessible—in style, spirit, and interest—even to the few on campuses who read them. Will not some clever student in frustration (with no interest in seeing the emperor clothed) soon ask the dreaded question: is there a need for such scholarship at all to be presented in printed or book form, much less any reason for the accompanying old lie that many can, or will wish to, read it? Surely, if academics are to continue to write for and squabble only among themselves in obtuse language, on topics unintelligible to the public, why not turn the entire enterprise over to the machines—compiling, concording, communicating silently over optic cables between proud university towers? As priestly sects of bibliographers and tabulators cloistered at terminals, we will type on keyboards in esoteric tongues. Unknown by and unimportant to the mob below, we will very quickly be left adrift, less important to society than the Linear B scribes or hieroglyphic masters of the past.

Financial support is required by the entire enterprise of recent academic publication—primarily the effect of the tenure policies of most American universities that value minuscule teaching responsibilities and sheer quantity of output over quality, independence, and originality of research. But the public already has passed judgment. They no longer read any of what we write. They are convinced that we are neither willing nor able to teach undergraduate students the fundamental elements of Western culture. Soon they will no longer subsidize what they see as an increasingly expensive and irrelevant fraud.

I no longer entirely believe in the traditional scope and presentation of much of academic research in the humanities, at least as it is practiced now in this country. Nor do I have much confidence in the methods accompanying that inquiry, nor even in the present environment in which such work takes place. In their present evolved forms, these scholarly practices at times deliberately limit, rather than encourage, access to literature and history. Both traditional and revisionist disciplines, right and left, in my view, have become ever more elitist. They are not, as they must now be, populist.

Finally, a word is needed for beleaguered American graduate students of Greek culture who now contemplate an academic career in the twilight decades of our profession in this country. If we are to study a culture that evolved from middling agrarians, the writing of ancient history, your work and life’s vocation, at this penultimate but exciting hour must satisfy more than ever at least four criteria.

1. Should not Greek and Roman history be accessible—in language, style, and spirit—to all those who labor outside the university? That is a difficult task. Disdained by your professors, it is now unwelcomed even by your peers.

Academic populism requires creative talent. It is more than mere erudition. But it is an approach which until recently has had a long and glorious tradition. Adopt it. Seek to recapture your independence and your audience, and discover an affinity with your ancient subjects of inquiry. You can rescue your profession from the theorists and specialists. They can be formidable critics in talk, bitter in brief repartees, but their teaching and writing have not stopped the decline of their own discipline. It will be tragic if you alone are to inherit the bitter harvest of what they have sown.

2. The study of antiquity must, if people are to read it, also raise broad, important issues of the past, big questions that are invariably cultural, social, and economic, and thus help to make sense of traditional political and military concerns. This demands that the historian must generalize. He must risk exposure to the myriad corps of specialist critics, the “millions of ants” whose censure can be disheartening, vehement, and ceaseless.

3. Ancient history’s intellectual framework must also be rooted firmly in classical scholarship, supported by direct citation of ancient texts, inscriptions, artifacts, coins, vase paintings, and the like. Nearly always this requires the historian to free himself from rigid dogma and purely ideological concerns. He must confess unfashionably that there is an agreed-upon, indisputable body of knowledge, a corpus of information largely immune to personal distortion and prejudice. In other words, there are facts, facta anddicta, things that were actually done and said.

The incorporation of models and analogy, the judicious use of theory is on occasion valuable for the historical reconstruction of antiquity, given the paucity of primary sources. The work of M. I. Finley has often been a testament to successful use of these methods when applied to the ancient world. But their employment must succeed, not precede, must enhance, not replace, must clarify, not obfuscate a mastery of original data. Theory is the capstone to years of philological and historical study. It is not the foundation. Nothing is so embarrassing, nothing so transparent, nothing so silly, as to witness the young “theorist” of the ancient world bereft of a pragmatic foundation in classical scholarship.

4. Equally important, historians of Greece and Rome must now also draw on their imagination and—if they possess it—their emotion. They must make the effort to recapture, or better to recreate, the spirit and the ordeal of the past. Scholars must try with any and all means at their disposal to provide a glimpse of what life was like, what it meant to the people of antiquity—and why we should now care. The historian who ferrets out good and evil, who spots timidity and gallantry, may be opinionated—even biased. But he is not necessarily therein inexact or inaccurate—if his evidence is presented openly for scholarly examination. The infusion of passion and fervor, as classicists as ideologically and methodologically diverse as Peter Green, Robin Lane-Fox, G. E. M. de Ste.Croix, and Bernard Knox have shown, stirs controversy. It repels tedium and can parry the monotony inherent in the assemblage of literary, archaeological, and epigraphical data. It can also save a near terminal discipline for another generation.

World Beneath Our Feet

A final word of caution is also needed about the current position of American agrarianism. The time is late. The obstacles are many, the stakes high. The future is bleak—if it is from farmers, a particular type of farmer, that much of our cherished heritage was once sprung, and is preserved. The story of Greek agrarianism and thus of Greek history itself is of utmost importance to any who seek to arrest the decline in American culture.

To take one small, but not unrepresentative, example: at a slow but unending pace, concrete, asphalt, rye grass bury the farms of the Santa Clara and San Joaquin Valley, in megalopoleis such as San Jose and Fresno, currently the third and fourth largest metropolitan areas in California—if we dare use the word poleis for unchecked urban sprawl. To walk over this ground, to shop, or to eat, is to walk among detached and unknown souls, themselves residents of no more than a decade or so. Like urban outsiders in the Hellenistic city, they have no intention of remaining or dying where they live, much less perishing where they were born. The arrival and departure of so many of these continually transient, disconnected people, citizen and noncitizen alike, are predicated simply on the endless pursuit of cash and status. The culture that they create is one for the most part of irresponsible individualism and unchecked materialism, ostentation for the more successful, envy for those below, of self-interested and obedient response to authority, the wellspring of, the lifeline for, all their financial advancement.

Of the uncanny similarity between modern American culture and life in Hellenistic post-polis times, Peter Green alone observes:

I could not help being struck, again and again, by an overwhelming déjà vu, far more than for any other period in ancient history known to me: the “distant mirror” that Barbara Tuchman held up from the fourteenth century A.D. for our own troubled age is remote and pale compared to the ornate, indeed rococo, glass in which Alexandria, Antioch, and Pergamon reflect contemporary fads, failings, and aspirations, from the urban malaise to religious fundamentalism, from Veblenism to haute cuisine, from funded scholarship and mandarin literature to a flourishing dropout counter-culture, from science perverted for military ends to illusionism for the masses, from spiritual solipsism on a private income to systematic extortion in pursuit of a plutocratic dream (Green xxi).

Buried beneath the concrete and asphalt of our present suburbs is the ghost of another somnolent and shadowy world. It is a discarded universe of past farms and lost agrarian communities, whose shared memory and silent values are now nearly gone from American culture. For the most part this sudden, but catastrophic conversion of thousands of acres into shopping centers, highways, and housing tracts in California—and the rest of the nation—is a phenomenon of the last twenty years, a transformation whose consequence very few have fully grasped. We know in California (where so much of our national policy and social future originates, where less than one-half of one percent in the state are farmers, a dwindling population itself three times smaller than the crescent number of state residents on food stamps [Scheuring 383]) that agrarianism in purely social terms is preferable to corporate agriculture. Communities of small farmers have a stability and a human infrastructure superior to that of the agribusiness town. We realize that the certain destruction of half of the state’s original agrarian landscape will finally turn out to be environmentally unfortunate.

Studies decades ago proved that the towns of the western side of the San Joaquin Valley of California (the Hellenistic model) that had grown up as a result of corporate agriculture, lacked the stabilizing “culture” of east side valley communities (the polis model)—hospitals, PTAs, Little Leagues, community bands, service organizations, home ownership, newspapers, churches, small businesses. The latter were places where farmers had staked out parcels of twenty, forty, and eighty acres, not vast absentee tracts in the thousands (Goldschmidt 279-343). Two case studies in Walter Goldschmidt’s classic 1947 study were the corporate-farming town of Arvin (“practically no paving, street lights, or sidewalks … slow in getting adequate water and sewage facilities” [Goldschmidt 216]) on the corporate southwestern side, and Dinuba (on the same avenue eight miles to the east from our own farm) on the family-farming east side of the San Joaquin Valley. “Dinuba residents,” writes a recent sociologist reviewing Goldschmidt’s work of nearly a half century ago, “also had a higher standard of living than did residents of Arvin, and in addition had more control over community decisions: those decisions were more commonly made by local popular election in Dinuba and by county officials in Arvin. Greater social stratification was found in the community of large farms, and greater economic and social homogeneity of the entire population existed in the town of the small farms” (cf. Davidson 67).

Nor have things changed under the absentee and estate agriculture of central California. Often I drive over to visit the towns of Five Points, Mendota, and Huron in the corporate-farming western side, the Hellenistic world of the San Joaquin Valley. The contrast with the eastern side, the small-farming communities of Reedley, Dinuba, Selma, and Kingsburg, which are themselves quickly disappearing as farm communities in their evolution to suburban commuting hubs of Fresno, is still striking. An article by Richard Street in the March 17, 1990 issue of the conservative California Farmer (its logo: “The Business Magazine for Commercial Agriculture”), entitled “Agriculture’s Wild West Town,” notes of the west-side town of Huron: “That Huron is not a particularly good advertisement for the community-building qualities of Westlands [the federal water district that supplies the corporations] becomes apparent to anyone walking the town’s streets. Huron has no Catholic Church, no fast food franchises, no chamber of commerce, no Little League, no Boy Scouts, no high school, no newspaper, no PTA, no Lion’s Club, Kiwanis Club, Rotary Club, or any other kind of club. It does, however, have 13 bars.”

In sum, in strictly scientific terms, California corporate agriculture had led to rural depopulation and a less intensive, less productive use of land similar to Greece in the post-polis period: “The data demonstrate that where the towns are surrounded by large farms, the population per acre declines. … It is of particular importance to remember that, though the number of people supported is greater, nonetheless, the average income in the small farm town of Dinuba is appreciably greater than in the large farm community of Arvin, and they have a higher standard of living” (Goldschmidt xli).

Anyone with any sense, of any political persuasion, can sense the difference in values between family farming and agribusiness, between a rural sociology of three, rather than two, classes (cf. Goldschmidt 58-63), between a settled and a sparse countryside, between a polis and a palace or fiefdom. The philosophy of farmhouses, diversified and permanent crops, trees and vines, generation-upon-generation in the same house, for all its parochialism, its blinkered limitations, its inflexibility, its frequent boredom, still clearly lends stability to a society at large. The notion continues to provide value, a middle ground to a community, in a way that open, vast acreages managed from afar cannot.

But the sad history of complex societies, ancient and modern, argues that bureaucracies grow, never shrink. Unproductive citizens multiply, rarely wane. Taxation, urbanization, and specialization are the harvests of elite legitimizing, nuancing classes—government, insurance, advertising, law, finance—who feed and clone from ritual, regulation, and regimentation. Family enterprises give way to corporate and governmental entities; in their wake mercenary enlistment, personal service, and public subsidy are offered to the landless and jobless detritus. Rural becomes urban, farmers suburbanites, as popular culture overwhelms agrarianism, never vice-versa. Even language is refashioned to convince that work is drudgery, simplicity boredom, charity entitlement, words themselves reinvented so that capital accumulation might become “success,” chaos “diversity,” selfishness “freedom,” and failure “victimization.”

Could not, one asks, America at this late hour reverse that Hellenistic trend and relearn harder rural values that were with us at the beginning? The task is not, as in the case of the early Greeks, the physical challenge of scarce treasure, scant resources, poor soil, insufficient labor, or foreign invasion. We have the capital, the land, the people, and the intelligence. But a rendezvous with simplicity and self-reliance entails starker psychological and ethical burdens where physical work would be respected, public service rewarded, and military duty required.

There is no hope that the family farm will return in the next century. Subsidy for corporate farming will only increase as technology, not agrarianism, is seen as the solution for the food crisis to come. The thug and the financial pirate alike will not be reinvented as the local peach farmer or hardware store owner. But again could not we, one demands, at least adopt the spirit of the early Greeks and the contemporary farmer, at least transfer the values of the departed to post polis America? We could. But we will not, for we have not the courage. That renaissance involves an entire rejection of what we now hold so dear, a return to what we clearly despise: a common culture of peers, life away from the vortex of pelf and publicity, a firmness with the poor as well as the wealthy. Could we really imagine a United States where public assistance for being unproductive is eliminated, for the welfare mother and corporate irrigator alike, for the dank tenement and the tasteful vacation home, for the corner loiterer and futures speculator? Could we envision Los Angeles and New York as failures of the human spirit, worthy of no dole, no handout, instead to clone Fowler, Exeter, Kingsburg, and other small east side agrarian towns as the closer ideals of the Greek polis? Do we want through incentive and fine a state where all citizens must be reeled in to vote on their local and national affairs, a community where the cargo of bankruptcy, divorce, and illegitimacy draws stern rebuke, not state sanction? Do we really desire an “intrusive government” that would tax annuity, interest, and dividend only to subsidize family-based construction, manufacturing, and agriculture, a government that does not call stasis “stability” or rising employment “inflationary”? And can the eighteen year old forego his semester of sociology at the local JC, the more eager Ivy League tyke his first cog on the cursus honorum for a year of shared military service, where all in the American phalanx learn that they are, for all their strange hue, residents of the same land, speakers of an identical tongue, fierce protectors by birth or choice of a long and distinguished cultural heritage?

In that American polis one could not complain of big government but pocket as relish his social security; could not desire to stand tall without sending his only son into harm’s way; could not talk of values only to strip the assets of his demented paterfamilias, parking him in a subsidized convalescent bed. He could not lecture on responsibility behind his gadgeted estate; could not call work his day’s hedge, wager, and gamble, and could not equate living long with living well nor confuse uncreased skin and firmer flesh with probity and character. And so we would come to learn, as the Greek geôrgos and the American farmer have, the bitter lesson that total freedom is chaos, that what is legal is not always moral, that we are by birth, training, or character neither equal nor inherently good, that to vote, to work with one’s hands, to defend the state, to raise a family, to pass on something better, that to repair not scavenge and cannibalize the wreckage of neighbor and friend, that to do all that and break no statute, undermine no covenant, is, after all, life’s work, nothing more, nothing less.

TABLE 1 Differences Between Arvin and Dinuba

	Arvin	Dinuba
1. Environmental Factors
1. Land:
(a) Area served	64,000 acres	43,000 acres
(b) Land in farms	46,000 acres	34,000 acres
(c) Intensive uses	22,000 acres	24,000 acres
(d) Land of soil classes 1 to 3	59,000 acres	31,000 acres
2. Water
(a) Source	Pumped	Surface supplemented with pumps
(b) Cost	$6.92 per acre	$4 per acre
3. Other resources:
(a) Minerals	Oil leases, general	None
(b) Recreation	little or none	Little or none
II. Cultural and demographic factors:
1. Popultion of community	6,000	7,400
2. Cultural Origins:
(a) American Origin	88 percent	81 percent
(b) Native Californian	4 percent	19 percent
(c) Dust Bowl migrants	63 percent	22 percent
(d) Median length of residence	less than 5 yrs.	15 to 20 yrs.
3. Educational attainment (average for family heads)
	7.6 yrs.	8.4 yrs.
4. Economic status:
(a) Median income bracket	$1,751-$2,250	[same]
(b) Wage labour as proportion of family heads	81 percent	49 percent
III. Historic factors:
1. Age of community (as of 1944)	31 years	56 years

	Arvin	Dinuba
2. Decade of major growth	1930-40	1910-20
IV. Agricultural production factors:
1. Value of production (1940)	$2,438,000	$2,540,000
2. Type of farming:
(a) Proportion irrigated land in orchard and vineyard	36 percent	65 percent
(b) Proportion in row crops	41 percent	11 percent
(c) Proportion in cotton	29 percent	7 percent
(d) Proportion of farms in fruit	35 percent	79 percent
(e) Proportion of farms in field	40 percent	17 percent crops
V. Farm organization factors:
1. Tenure:
(a) Tenancy	42 percent	14 percent
(b) Absentee ownership	36 percent	16 percent
2. Labour requirements:
(a) Man-hours of labour required	2.9 million	3.5 million
(b) Requirement for hired labour	2.3 million	1.4 million
(c) Minimum labour requirement as percent of maximum	25 percent	20 persent
(d) Maximum outside seasonal workers required	1.175	1,595
3. Size of farm operations:
(a) Number of farms over 160 acres	44 percent	6 percent
(b) Acreage in farms over 160 acres	91 percent	25 percent
(c) Average farm size	497 acres	57 acres
(d) Average value of production	$18,000	$,3400
From W. F. Goldschmidt, Small Business and the Community: A Study in Central Valley of California on Effects of Scale of Farm Operations, in C. V. Blatz, Ethics in Agriculture(Moscow, ID, 1991), 210-11.

But far from being saved by agrarianism, agrarianism has been ruined by us, as the farm has become more like city, not city like farm. So that equation between small farming and the creation of agrarian egalitarianism, that effort at establishing overall political and social equity out of rural values, is now, I am suggesting, in some sense irrelevant. For the last fifty years the family farm and small rural community remained a reassuring, dreamy image for the American public, never a pressing political concern: “Rural communities are just dim blurs along the gleaming superhighway that carries us into what we tell ourselves is an ever brighter future” (Davidson 71; cf. Strange 239: “The affection some of us feel for the family farm is about as deep as our affection for the unspoiled Garden of Eden”).

I say the lessons of agrarianism are now in some sense irrelevant because the choice that faces us now in America is not any longer entirely between agriculture run by corporate culture, and viable farming run by individual families. That battle to have 50,000 instead of 500,000 farms has essentially been lost. The issue now is the very existence of agriculture as we have known it in this country. In the past, the economic or social historian might chronicle the rise of latifundia and the subsequent demise of yeomanry through a variety of locales and ages, citing a wide diversity of cause and effect relationships—soil practices, irrigation, state policy, military service, infusion of nonlanded wealth and capital, climatic changes, social and political upheaval, emergence of new socialand religious organizations, and transformations in social and ethical values.

Agriculture arose and was transformed, leaving its mark on the culture itself: polis culture versus Hellenistic clientage, yeoman Roman republicanism set off against Italian manorialism. Historically there has been a cyclical sense of agrarian rise, fall, and reawakening, as societies themselves waxed and waned. The nation of small farmers idealized by Jefferson slowly gave way in this country during the Industrial Revolution and the World Wars to a growing network of agribusiness. In turn, farming corporatism itself seemed recently checked by its frequent wastefulness, occasional disregard for the environment, and growing dependence on expensive crop, water, and financial subsidies. To the naive and perpetually optimistic, it seemed challenged by an inevitable return to smaller and more responsible land strategies.

So it seemed. In reality there was no brake in the 1980s on agribusiness. In that decade, small family farms continued to erode. With them went beneath our feet communities of independent farmers and businessmen. “Today our family farmer is in jeopardy,” writes Jay Staten, “the production of food is not. Because there is always food at the local supermarket, we may ignore or underestimate or not notice the issues connected with the loss of the family farm. The future of farming has political, economic, and moral ramifications. Those ramifications may be invisible or unimportant to the majority. They will not be unimportant to our children. Who will produce their food and at what cost? Who will own the land? How much government control and support will be involved? Our actions or lack of action today will decide the answers to those questions” (Staten 225).

What has caused the end of family-based agriculture? Population growth and technology on a scale heretofore unforeseen have disrupted the old cycle of agrarian death and renewal in midstream. In this new paradigm, the entire premise of producing food from the soil is being redefined. It is most unlikely that in our lifetime the limitations of corporatism will result in a return to yeomanry and the culture that arises when small farmers work their own ground.

The rise of corporate farming was not thrust onto family farmers—at least not entirely; the allure of immense size came just as much from within the agricultural community as from the market pressure without. Agribusiness emerged on two fronts, one political and completely predictable: the farmer’s turn to a comfortable conservatism. The other was more personal, but in itself entirely human as well: private greed and innate materialism, a notion of self over community.

First, as in the case of the Greek hoplite, the modern American farmer of the past two centuries—cultural conservative and rural pragmatist that he was—had a natural distrust of the foreigner, of cities, of cultural change, of the entire notion of social progress itself. For the agrarian intellectual in the guise of populist democratic legislator, who sought to engender a notion of stewardship, land preservation, environmentalism, widened marketing opportunity, and small cooperative efforts among farmers, the shortsighted agriculturalist had nothing but disgust. Too often in his mind (often correctly), Utopians seemed bent on organized unions. They liked centralized bureaucracies. They envisioned agrarian ideals as part of a much larger movement toward redistribution of income and the end of private property. To the agrarian, as to the ancient geôrgos, all this was anathema.

It was an idealized regime, one that threatened the yeoman’s absolute freedom to farm in the way of his ancestors, to rely on the old rather than the new prejudices of habit and custom. In desperation, American agriculture—the small farmer squeezed between poor commodity prices and continually higher costs—in the post-war era turned ideologically instead to the businessman, the agro-corporation, and the political professionals who were bought and sold to protect them. But to the agrarian, agribusiness offered only a shared social conservatism, the veneer of the old cherished idea of American values and patriotism. That corporate package, as the farmer has finally now learned, was for the most part a lie that had ramifications for us all far beyond the confines of the rural landscape.

For these large-farming men believed not in agriculture, but in agribusiness. They championed not an agrarian community, but a few clever, rather than rugged, individuals. Mouthing conservative shibboleths, they instead radically and systematically transformed the very economics of small farming. Corporatism saw agriculture, as it saw everything else, as a business to be run, a profit to made or lost, land to be sold off or reacquired as market investment strategy and financial planning dictated. Never was it to be a noble enterprise with a distinguished social pedigree from the dawn of Western civilization, much less a catalyst for rural social development, and not at all the linchpin of our cultural legacy.

American government, Democratic and Republican alike, in response offered its bureaucracy of support to agribusiness. Subsidies, tax exemptions, retailing incentives, insurance, advertisement, marketing, and chemical and biological research poured into this new brand of American agriculture. Employees of the Department of Agriculture nearly outnumbered family farmers themselves. Enormous investment kept depressed both farmers’ returns and the cost of food for the consumer (the profit for these conglomerates, after all, was in the processing and marketing, not the growing of harvests).

The strategy of the American government served only to destroy, rather than to promote, family-owned agriculture. It rewarded mostly the prominent and visible practitioners of scale. These were conglomerates that could lose money in the actual growing of food, but stay profitable through crop subsidization and the entire mechanical process of bringing produce to the consumer. Jay Staten concluded of this present marriage between government and corporate agriculture:

The “independent” farmer that prevails in the minds of most Americans is a dying breed. Tomorrow’s financially secure farmer will be process-oriented—taking inputs and redefining them into expected outputs. The decisions of the farm sector will be made beyond the farm gate. Farmers will most likely make their production decisions based on forward contracts made with food processors. More and more, the farm products will be controlled by the processing industry and made possible by the farm-supply industry; the consumer will have less to do with the type of product made available. This is despite the increase in consumer involvement in the safety of those products (Staten 212).

That the suffocation of agrarianism has social, political, and ethical ramifications well beyond the mere economics of farming is, I suggest, not confined to ancient Greece. A near half-century ago Walter Goldschmidt felt that eventually American corporatization of the farm would transcend agriculture and begin to affect us all. “The examination of the treatment of the Arvin-Dinuba study, however, tells us what this industrialized agriculture does to our national life. It shows how knowledge gets suppressed and truth distorted, how bureaucracies are entered and destroyed, how national policies are subverted, and the character of our nation reshaped” (487).

The decline of American agriculture was not merely a lapse in political judgment. It was not a mistaken alignment on the part of farmers with those conservatives who sounded kindred, but acted in a way revolutionary and entirely antithetical to agrarian ideology. To be fair, the mistake also lay in the dark heart of the American small farmer himself. He too saw the specter of riches and expansion. Soon he was nursed on the promise of efficiency, unknown profits, large houses, pressed uniforms, and bright tractors. He was, in other words, greedy.

In place of a vineyard that had been his nursery to an entire way of life, he saw half-mile rows of laser-leveled land, with thousands of shiny metal stakes, absolutely straight and in-line, all designed and guided by a manager who computed chemical and fertilizer schedules from the cab of a new pick-up. This abject capitulation of modern farmers to the narcotic of agribusiness, to the “process-oriented” mentality, led James Montmarquet to abandon all hope for the present agricultural community, to look instead for some Utopian (and, I think, frankly impossible) emergence of a new American grower, one cast in the noble but lost agrarian tradition:

Rather than educating the sort of people who happen to be farming, fundamentally what we need to do is to attract a different sort and, in the ways I have suggested, a better sort of individual to farming. We need to attract educated young people from both rural and urban backgrounds, young people with a capacity to learn farming but not necessarily with a farm background, young people whose idealism and whose naturalistic interests could bring about a genuine renewal of rural life and culture in the United States (Montmarquet 245).

The more sober historian, however, can see that the status of agriculture in this country has reached its penultimate stage, quickly to be replaced by the science of “food production,” far distant from “naturalistic interests.” Soon, I am afraid, the name “agriculture” will be abandoned by these new practitioners of food production, who see themselves in no way necessarily connected with either “land,” the ager, or its “culture” (cultura). These are men who believe that there is presently “excess production capacity” and that there are now “too many farmers” (cf. Cornstock 31).

Forecasters instead optimistically envision genetic engineering, newly designed crop species to thwart the elements, frosts, insects, and idiopathic crop failure, the centuries-old banes of the wily agriculturalist. Generations of pragmatic expertise are to be replaced by textbook formula and business acumen. Enriched water, scientifically blended fertilizers, and varieties of interactive herbicides are to be tubed intravenously through the soil to the “plant’s” roots on precise computerized schedules. Land, and animals designed and then cloned for the machine, are to be cultivated and harvested in large factory-like settings, run by an efficient cadre of elite engineers, economists, and responsive employees. The whole complex—and ultimately vulnerable—enterprise is to be capitalized through the profits of insurance and investment strategy, with financial gain its only motive.

“Farm” size is to increase even more radically. Farm settlement will become ever more nucleated. Crops will be more specialized, labor more rare, and the total acreage of farmland in the United States always more reduced. All this will be packaged for the consumer through the promise of cheaper food and expanded urbanization onto prime farmland. It will all be debated, nuanced but ultimately legitimized by the usual array of subsidized social and natural scientists.

This description is no brave new world. It is a scenario unfolding now, right now in our midst. Its next stages are proudly outlined in current agribusiness publications. Its ultimate evolution is under cheery discussion in university agriculture, biology, engineering, economics, sociology, and business departments, whose staffing and buildings grow as farmers and farms shrink. Farmhouses, sustainable agrarian communities, small plots, independent viable agricultural operations, crop diversity—all will become rarer. Ultimately they will be the stuff of pastoral literature, nostalgic film, and the occasional agrarian activist’s call to resurrect an ideology that is to be no more.

To this growing American agribusiness of the Hellenistic and imperial brand, much hostility is now being expressed. Publications worry about our present food supply. As calls to arms, they identify and assail the costly prerequisites of corporate farming: the environmental hazards of mass applications of synthetic chemicals into a fragile landscape, the eventual exhaustion of soil and water through nonsustainable agricultural practices, the specter of sudden agricultural catastrophe through fuel or fertilizer shortages, soil salinity, or mutated plant pathogens, and the growing pollution of the air and scarcity of water once farms are turned into housing tracts. They point out that the loss of crop diversity and farm decentralization will eventually make these complex food systems—that is, all of us as well—as vulnerable to sudden collapse as the palatial agricultural economies of the pre-polis past.

But my own anxieties are now more about the immediate present, concerned more with people. I worry most about the men and women who farm, the present-day geôrgoi, and the culture they create, the fragile American polis, the continuation of three classes rather than two and the community values that we all now profess to hold so dear and that appear always to be the egalitarian precursors to democratic institutions.

My fear is not whether we will have a sizable presence of family farmers, but whether we are to have any farmers at all! I have tried in this survey of Greek history to answer the usual challenge posed by the growing number of American anti-agrarian historians and social scientists, who ask. “If we are to be persuaded that now when family farms are so few in number we have a moral obligation to save them, advocates must explain why this is so” (cf. Comstock 97).

To explain “Why is this so?” I end this book with a second question, rather than a simple reply. In the next century—now a mere few years distant—when this present, this awful cycle comes to its ultimate fruition, a far more critical issue in America will remain unsolved: where will be the needed counterpoint to our amoral philosophy, to our national ethos? Where will be the singular critic, the often unpleasant individual, the cratered veteran of a continual, a personal struggle with nature, the cultural dissident who will still choose to go it alone in order to protect the old notion of a community, who will have innate distrust for authoritarianism, large bureaucracy, and urban consensus? Where will be the person prerequisite to, the exemplar for, democratic and egalitarian government?

As the Greeks tell us, he always argues for, continually insists on, a military, a political, an economic community of autonomous middle citizenry. His is the now increasingly rare voice that says no to popular tastes, no to the culture of the suburb, no to the gated lodge. He can always tell those of us of a different brand, an aggressive and materialistic urban stripe, how far adrift we have become from that ideal. His is the voice that can say finance, insurance, advertising, and law—the great tetrad of the last decade, the ever “increasing costs of legitimizing activities” (Tainter 116)—are not the real work, the true production, the noble professions of our nation.

What other profession is there now in this country where the individual fights alone against nature, lives where he works, invests hourly for the future and never for the mere present, succeeds or fails by his own intellect, physical strength, bodily endurance, and sheer nerve? In what other vocation now does an American care so little about his own appearance, about the type of car he is to drive, about the title of the job he is to enjoy, about the status of his associates, and so much about the promptness of his action, the unambiguity of his intent, and the value of his promised word?

Will our contemporary and abstract policy-making or learned philosophical discussion, will the novelists among us, will the American university professor and consultant of the day, will the institutionalized scholar, government planner, and academic theorist on the Left and Right, will they provide the needed counterpressure, the necessary barricade to the growing tyranny of a uniform, materialistic, urban, selfish, and ultimately Hellenistic culture?

Or at long last, when we seek in vain for our lost American polis, will we look for it amid the ghosts of our own geôrgoi, now gone to a world beneath our feet?