—Todd 1990: 160
Geôrgos does not simply mean “peasant.” A subsistence farmer was a geôrgos; but so was a rich landowner like Iskhomakhos, the hero of Xenophon’s Oikonomikos. If you are a subsistence farmer, you will tend to see your interests as being the same as those of the gentleman farmer. Consequently, the vast majority of the citizen body … will have tended to share the same values and aspirations
Just as Greek agrarianism argues for a new concept of chronological unity in polis history, so too the literary evidence rejects the traditional notion of a countryside divided between wealthy owners and impoverished workers, and instead argues for a new Greek, the family farmer. Since many classical scholars ask that for every Hellenic institution and idea there be a corresponding word in the Greek language, we must examine the vocabulary of ancient agriculture. If there were middling agrarians in ancient Greece, not just peasants and lords, surely the Greeks had names for them.1
The standard inclusive word in Greek after Homer for farming is geôrgia, derived from a combination of gê (“land” or “earth”) and ergon (“work”), resulting in the notion of “land-work,” on nearly the same principle as Latin “agricultura” and English “agriculture.” It refers nearly exclusively to the growing of cereals, vines, trees, and vegetables, but on occasion, like its Latin counterpart, geôrgia can refer to animal husbandry. Unlike “farming” in English, however, rarely is geôrgia used metaphorically in the wider, nonagricultural sense of “employing” or “using” (e.g., Dem. 25.82). It is instead almost exclusively in the Greek mind associated with the direct growing of food.
The Greek language, however, more than Latin and French, and even English and German, has an ability to form a variety of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and nouns from a single stem, using standard prefixes, suffixes, and other common rules of word formation.2Geôrgoi is the conventional Greek word for “farmers.” It is used often in this book in its transliterated, but untranslated, form to mean precisely that. Its verbal derivative, geôrgeô/geôrgein, means “to farm”; the adjective geôrgikos denotes “agricultural,” the diminutive noun geôrgion “field,” and so on. A related verb, geôponeô/geôponein (see Eur. Supp. 420-22), “to labor in the field” is used rarely of farming. Like similar antiquated English expressions (e.g., “to toil” in the fields), it is usually found in an exclusively poetic or archaic context.
Our ancient agrarians also show up with other names. That multiplicity of expression is quite logical, given the predominance of agriculture in the life of the Greeks from the eighth to fourth centuries B.C. Greek has an entirely separate family of agricultural terminology, but one which, by its association with agros (“field,” “land,” “earth”), a near synonym for gê, often means nearly the same thing. Agros, however, itself has quite an expansive range of meanings. At its broadest, it refers to the countryside around apolis(e.g., Pl. Leg. 9.881C). More often it can mean particularly a single farm.3
Is there a shade of difference in these two standard families of related words geôrgia and agros, as is the case between the English “agriculture” and “farming”? Sometimes distinctions exist, but they are of a completely different nature. They derived from the notion that agros (“field,” “land”), far more frequently than gê, carries the additional connotation of “wild” or “untamed” land. Hence agroikoi, more than geôrgoi, can sometimes mean “rustic” or “boorish” (e.g., Ar. Nub. 628; Isoc. 5.82.2), quite apart from, or in addition to, merely “farmers.” Perhaps agroikoi also was an earlier term, one derived originally from a more aboriginal sense of Greek rural workers, before the institutionalization of the agrarian culture of the geôrgoi during the polis period in Greece.
As might be expected, then, agroikoi during the polis period can on occasion be a term of endearment (i.e., “country folks”). More often, given the bias for urban life in surviving Greek literature, agroikoi becomes a word of rebuke and disdain, stronger than merely “rustics,” approaching more the English “boors” or the American “clods” or “hicks.” Usually, however, both the positive and pejorative nuances of agroikoi are easily identifiable from the context of the passage. They cause little confusion when the author means something other than mere “farmers” (i.e., geôrgoi).4
The rich variety of these general agricultural terms, unlike present-day American English, reflects the importance of land in the Greek vocabulary. This is further confirmed by a near infinite variety of more specific words in Greek referring to particular types of agricultural measurement and farm property.5
The astounding assortment of farmland terminology is not alone attributable to the long history and evolution of the Greek language. Nor is the abundance of the Hellenic agricultural vocabulary due merely to dialectal and poetic usages. Instead, all these precise words illustrate the ubiquity of farming in the lives of the ancient Greeks; there were as many words for types of farmland as there are now for kinds of automobiles.
But the real crux in Greek vocabulary usage arises when ancient agriculture is discussed in a context other than strictly the cultivation of the soil. That is one of the central issues of this book: passages in Greek literature concerning agriculture that reveal social, economic, and cultural ideologies, reflecting, for example, the particular nature and size of the farm, or the class and status of either its workers or owners. In modern English usage, we know well enough now that “big,” “large-scale,” “corporate,” or “factory” farm and related parlance of American agribusiness are used to denote large acreages, absentee ownership, lack of farm-owner residence, and the involvement of outside managers, shareowners, and partners. These operations usually derive their capital from industry and finance quite apart from agriculture.
Corporations see the cultivation of the soil strictly as a business enterprise, a percentage return on invested capital or a method of diminishing tax liability, rather than a way of life. Often the American agricultural terminology denoting this “bigness” in farming is used ideologically and in a pejorative context (oddly, often by those who themselves benefit from, or are employed in, the corporatization of agriculture). The usage may be deliberately set in opposition to “yeomen,” “homestead,” “small,” or “family” farms and farmers. Those smaller entities are thought to operate in nearly the opposite manner from that of corporations and vast estates: “family” rather than “corporate” still suggests that the production of food and the culture surrounding that activity in and of itself are as important as profit and loss. “Family” farmer implies that the owner lives on and works the land, which itself is of only moderate size.
The Greeks, unlike us Americans, in the polis period lacked just such a demarcation in their vocabulary usage. Herein lies a variety of problems that have plagued classical scholars. For without clear rubrics in the ancient language to distinguish the sociology of agriculture, how can we determine class and status in the ancient Greek countryside? How do we know who the other Greeks were?
But is the concern for a precise, specialized vocabulary of ancient Greek agrarianism sometimes not exaggerated? Is there not a reason for the vagueness of the Greek language in this area, a reason why the Greeks, who developed a rich terminology of differing soils and property types, did not during the polis period also create a commensurate complex vocabulary for the various statuses of people who worked that ground?
Although the absence of class distinctions for farmers in the Greek language of the polis is not proof in itself of a uniformity in agricultural status, of a sameness that blurred class differences, it is nevertheless suggestive. I believe I am faithful to the evidence of Greek literature in referring often to a particular and dominant brand of ancient Greek farming of the city-state between 700 and 300 B.C. as “small” or “middling” (owner/operators of ground from about ten to seventy acres), or “intensive” (the devotion of capital and labor to increase production), or “new” (farmers after the Dark Ages), or even “homestead” (the presence of a house on the farm), or, more confidently still, “yeomen” (those who own and cultivate their own small plots, in both a relative and absolute sense). These English rubrics are usually mutually inclusive terms and, I believe, can be justified by our Greek historical sources as well. The Greek polis, remember, lacked words on the two opposite ends of the scale for “extensive,” “wealthy,” “large,” or, in contrast, “tenant,” “poor,” and “peasant” farmers. Why might this be?
It reflects the notion, I think, that the Greeks in the polis period more or less envisioned all who worked their own land as more similar than dissimilar. They were seen as a roughly homogeneous group of geôrgoi. That, of course, is not to deny at all the presence of many poor and wealthy farmers in the ancient Greek countryside, the existence of both small plots and larger acreages, the occasional (and mostly later) use of geôrgos for the narrow act of working the soil regardless of social status.
Instead, the blanket usage of geôrgoi between 700 and 300 B.C. among the city-states to denote all who worked their own ground suggests that rubrics denoting class and status are not emphasized in our sources. This reflects the Greek view that there werenotextremely wide discrepancies in the nature of land holding or even in agricultural outlook for much of the polis period. During Hellenistic and Roman Greece, however, geôrgos can include almost anyone who is employed in agriculture, from slave to absentee landlord.
So geôrgoi to a Greek of the city-state between 700 and 300 B.C. was a clear enough label that needed little elaboration. It is one that I often use without translation throughout this book. After all, we know of no farm at any time in Attica of the polis period that exceeded one hundred acres. Outside the feudal worlds of Thessaly, Crete, Asia Minor, and the Black Sea region, no estates are found anywhere in the period of the polis in Greece. Corporate manors are instead much more characteristic of Hellenistic and Roman times, and perhaps earlier as well during the Mycenean era and the subsequent Dark Ages.
I argue also that after the Dark Ages, the cultivation of vines, olives, and cereals was predominant and practiced in an intensive manner. Geôrgia (“farming”) throughout four centuries often carried a generic meaning that cereals, trees, vines, and gardens were farmed intensively on small private plots. No huge estates were run by slave gangs for absentee owners until much later. In other words, there is a logic to the idea that the word geôrgia and its cognates could at least for a time serve well enough in most city-states for the activity of the entire rural population who worked their own soil (e.g., Arist, Pol. 6.1319a7-20).
So although we know there were wealthy and poor farms, some acreages larger than others, Greek, nevertheless, possesses no precise agrarian word for “baron,” “estate,” or “manor,” much less “large-scale” or “corporate.” No modification of, or addition to,geôrgoiever appears to express great landed aristocracy—never, for example, megaloi (big) geôrgoi or plousioi (rich) geôrgoi.6
Even specific words referring to “large” farmers illustrate more similarity than dissimilarity to those lower on the agricultural social scale. The vocabulary used to describe the wealthy elite is always expressed in a social and an aristocratic sense, “the good,” “the well-born,” “the beautiful,” rather than in a strictly agricultural framework. The closest we hear of an agricultural hierarchy in the polis is at Attica under the old agrarian census of the Athenian legislator Solon (about 600 B.C.). There, for example, thepentakosiomedimnoi (“five-hundred-measure men”) were originally the wealthiest Athenian landowners, whose estates could produce five hundred measures of dry or liquid agricultural produce. The next lowest classes, the hippeis (“knights,” who produced three hundred measures), the zeugitai (the “yoked,” who harvested two hundred measures), and the thêtes (“laborers,” “menial workers”) were merely differentiated by levels of agricultural production (themselves not at wide variance between the respective classes). They were never separated by agricultural technique nor even choice of crops. Under this Solonian system of social classification there were no implications that some Greek farmers were outright barons while others, in contrast, were serfs or debtsmen: the few “five-hundred-measure” men at Athens held ostensibly little more than twice what the great middle group of zeugitai possessed.
A vocabulary of agricultural impoverishment was found in the few non-poleis societies at all times in Greece (e.g., heilôtai at Sparta, penestai at Thessaly), and no doubt commonly most everywhere during the Dark Ages. But again, in our polis period, words such as hektêmoroi (“sixth-partners,” denoting a rental agreement), or pelatai (“clients”) seem either to have gone out of usage during the sixth century or, once the polis was fully established, to have retained a deliberately archaic flavor.
The absence of precise vocabulary for the wealthy estate or corporate farm, as we have thus seen in the case of “farm/farmhouse” is no final argument that such operations did not exist (though I know of no confirmatory evidence of their existence), only that the Greeks never felt a need to differentiate and specify these farmers in their agricultural terminology. The title of a lost play of Aristophanes’, “The Farmers” (Hoi Geôrgoi), or Menander’s later “The Farmer” (Ho Geôrgos) would carry no ambiguity about the drama’s content. The characters, the audience clearly would know, were all farmers who did their own labor on their own small plots. They would not be portrayed as indentured servants, nor be depicted as wealthy, absentee estate barons, nor as seasonal wage laborers.
The so-called Old Oligarch ([Xen.] Ath. Pol. 2.14) of the later fifth century, an anonymous right-wing propagandist, similarly was not thinking of the wealthy or the impoverished when he thought it necessary to explain that the ideological stance of hoi geôrgountes(“the ones who farm”) was often opposed to the landless poor. Isocrates, on the other hand, said that the farmers “were not at all wealthy” (7.49). Clearly, “farmers” could be seen at different times by different Greek authors legitimately as neitherimpoverished norwealthy.7
I think that these binary delineations—rich/poor, mass/elite, propertied/propertyless, oppressor/oppressed, exploiter/exploited, peasant/landlord—are better avoided. It is wiser to return to pedestrian, and in a sense old-fashioned, agrarian terms (often employed by astute Greek historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) such as the English “middle”/“middling”/“yeoman.” These nouns and adjectives, as I hope I have shown, much more accurately reflect Greek vocabulary usage and the actual sociology of the ancient Greek countryside during the time of the polis. Then the issues of class and status were more complex since there was a large group of agrarians sandwiched between the small group of aristocrats on top and the numerous landless poor below.
This general linguistic notion that farming in Greece could emerge in most places as an owner-operated, family-owned enterprise, its laborers engaged in working their own plots of cereals, vines, and trees on an intensive scale, receives some confirmation from two other peculiar but emphatic words in the Greek vocabulary that are sometimes used of farms and farmers. The general term autourgos (autos [self] + ergon [work]), although not a common term in Greek (it appears only a few times in the history of the language), does mean literally “self-worker.” It sometimes appears in an agricultural sense interchangeably with geôrgoi to refer to farmers in general, emphasizing that they do their own manual work.
Pericles supposedly labeled the entire population of the Peloponnese (perhaps with the exception of Sparta proper) at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War as autourgoi, farmers who did their own labor, no doubt loosely in contrast with his own Athens, which had a sizable minority divorced from the soil. The honorable farmers of Euripides’ Electra, and Orestes, who own their own plots and houses, and do their own work, are simply known to the audience as the autourgoi.8
A much different word, klêros (“share,” “lot,” “part”) is also used commonly of one’s inheritance. More specifically the term often means one’s farm or landed property, ground that was allotted to a person at the creation of the polis community (e.g., Hes. Op.37, 341), when in many areas the land was traditionally believed to have been divided, or at least redivided, by lot into equal shares.9 In Homer’s Odyssey, Nausithoös supposedly allotted equal farms to the original settlers of Scheria (6.9-10; cf. Il. 15.495, 6.243). Later in Greek literature, there is the implication that most Greeks felt that the klংros or “home” place originally was a small plot of agricultural land roughly equal to that of all the other citizens of the polis, a farm that was somehow crucial to the continued existence of the family and even the agrarian community at large. It is clear—in an economic, emotional, and spatial sense—that although there are few, if any, words in Greece during the polis period to denote “big/wealthy” or “small/poor” independent farmers, there are terms such as the more specialized autourgos and klêros. They reemphasize that the general rubric geôrgos at this time referred in most cases to a man who owned and worked his own inherited piece of ground.
Hoi mesoi (“the middle ones,” see Chapter 3), hoi hoplitai (“the hoplites,” see Chapter 6), and, at Athens, hoi zeugitai (“the yoked ones,” see Chapter 3) are often used in association with the geôrgoi, and likewise suggest yeomanry. The notion, linguistically at least, is that the farmers were originally “middle” people, who fought as “hoplites” in the phalanx—at Athens and perhaps elsewhere being drawn from the so-called “yoked” class.
In this country, the noun “agrarianism” is now infrequently used. It is also unfortunately confused with the more nondescriptive adjective “agrarian” in its most simplistic sense (i.e., “related to land or farming”). Most people, I have discovered, now believe the term “agrarianism” is roughly equivalent to “farming” or “agriculture.” But “agrarianism” (“the principle of a uniform division of lands,” OED) has always had political connotations. Thus good standard English definitions usually concentrate on the egalitarian aspect of land holding, defining the idea of agrarianism as “the theory of equal or equitable distribution of lands,” “the agitation for the redistribution of lands,” or “the calls for the equalization of farm income, especially by government control.”
The problems, however, in all these definitions are their subjective political and social context. “Redistribution of lands” can be voiced by the landless poor, who demand either land confiscations or collectivized agriculture, or by the middle-class yeoman farmer, who either fears encroachment on his small plot by utopian bureaucracies or wishes to break up corporate conglomerates, or finally by wealthy estate holders, who feel they are losing political influence to mercantile and commercial interests. A much better English definition of agrarianism for our purposes in this book is simply to emphasize the importance to society of agriculture and the people who farm. Here, I do not mean that farmers are merely important. Agrarianism instead refers to the idea that farmers are the mostimportant element in a culture, important in both the sense of the general perception by the community at large, and by the actual fact of their contribution to the life of the society as a whole. James Montmarquet (viii) has written similarly and, I think, described the concept of agrarianism in a fashion nearly identical to the manner in which it is used in this present study:
Agrarianism, as I conceive it, is committed to that very basic value judgment about the worth of agriculture and those who are involved in this activity. Of course, like most value judgments, this one is imprecise. The bare idea of agrarianism does not carry any specific implication about just how valuable agriculture is or whether it is necessarily more valuable than this or that other occupation. But it carries at least the strong suggestion that agriculture is more valuable than most other activities—in particular that it is more valuable than ordinary commercial and legal ones. An agrarian will not typically hazard a judgment about the relative worth of farmers and doctors, but an agrarian will typically be quite definite about the relative value of farmers versus lawyers, bankers, stock traders, and grain shippers!
Agrarianism, and its accompanying culture of independent small communities—the Greek city-states, for example—are notions, it seems to me, impossible when there are either sizable majorities of impoverished subsistence “peasants” or, on the other hand, enormous estates comprising the majority of the community’s farmland, controlled and owned by the few and worked exclusively by the unfree or propertyless many.
In the ancient Greek world during our polis period, agriculture and the families employed in it were perceived by Greek society in general as its most important constituency simply because farmers were in a factual sense the most valuable members of the community. The geôrgoi usually composed the largest segment of the free citizen population of the early polis. They employed the greatest number of workers. They set the political, economic, and political agenda of most of the city-states of Greece. Until the fifth century B.C. they supplied nearly all the food of their surrounding communities and fought nearly all the wars.
This book argues that the ancient idea of agrarianism—that farmers were the most important members of the ancient Greek community—emerged at the end of the eighth century B.C. in Greece and endured to the end of the fourth century B.C., corresponding to, and responsible for, the life of the Greek city-state. For most of this time there was no word at all in their language for agrarianism. After all, for the Greeks agrarian life was an accepted daily reality, not a sought-after ideal. Under our definition of agrarianism, the Greeks were agrarian. We, for example, are not.10