NOTES

Introduction

1 For the extensive modern discussion of the origin and nature of the city state, see, Weber 1968: 1,282-1300; Finley 1973a: 123-25; 1981b: 3-21; Sallares 161-64; Starr 1986: 43-51; 1977: 29-34; Fustel de Coulanges 109-215; Sculley 4-5; Ehrenberg 1937: 152-59; Murray and Price 2-5; and cf. M. H. Hansen 55-64. See also ancient views at Paus. 10.4.1; Arist. Pol. 1.1252b28ff.; [Arist.] Oec. 1.1343a10-11. I cannot be concerned here with an account of early urban culture. Nor is there much here concerning early Greek trade routes (cf. O. Murray 38-39). The origins of literacy, East-West contacts (Jeffery 1976: 24-29), Panhellenism, the spread of coinage, monumental architecture, or population growth and the development of metalworking (cf. Grant 1-34; Starr 1977: 21-97) are only discussed in passing. Those phenomena are the standard subjects of controversy when scholars now seek, as they must, motive forces for the “rise of the city-state,” the central moment in Greek and, indeed, Western civilization.

2 Some scholars argue for a more static history of agriculture. They see a Greek countryside without much change or innovation from Mycenean times down to the Hellenistic era. But that belief raises problems. If it is agreed that (1) the vast majority of the ancient Greeks were always rural people and drew their living from the soil and (2) the eighth-century rise of the polis was essentially a new social and political phenomenon in the Greek-speaking world unseen in either Mycenean or Dark-Age times, then (3) city-states must be reflections of fundamental changes in the way the Greeks grew food and held property. Otherwise neither (1) nor (2) can be an accurate generalization, and are we then to confess either that the Greeks were not a rural people or that their poliswas not novel?

3 There have been a few classicists, historians, and archaeologists who have always realized in passing that ancient Greece was primarily an agrarian society. See Finley 1973a: 97; Richter 5-6; Osborne 1987: 16, 26; Salmon 1984: 155, 158; Detienne 1963: 54; Francis 277; Alcock 12; pace Isager and Skydsgaard 114- Nor had much changed until recently in Greece. In 1821, still only six percent of the Greeks lived in an urban environment (Walcott 1970: 25). Modern ethnographers found that as late as 1960 well over seventy percent of the Greek population was still agricultural (e.g McDonald and Rapp 178; cf. Bintliff and Snodgrass 154).

4 Recently, for example, the revisionist James Whitley (Whitley 41; cf. van Effenterre 20-21), in a book on Dark-Age Greece (1100-700 B.C.), summarized nine agreed-on “symptoms” of early Greek state formation, the innovations that most scholars feel marked the novel appearance of the polis:

1.     a dramatic increase in the number of visible burials

2.     an increase in metal artifacts at Greek sanctuaries

3.     colonization

4.     the adoption of alphabetic scripts

5.     the development of figurative art

6.     the introduction of hoplite armor and tactics

7.     the creation of national and international sanctuaries

8.     an interest in epic and the cult of heroes

9.     the appropriation of a heroic past to create new cults and temples, as part of a reordering of the eighth-century present.

Whitley’s critique of the present status of modern scholarship omits agriculture entirely (and ubiquitous chattel slavery as well). No suggestion is made that the restructuring of Greek rural life (i.e., improved agricultural production and incorporation of permanent crops and marginal lands, creation of private farm properties, dispersion of land among a wide body of citizens) resulted in the creation of city-states, in increased capital and productivity that allowed for greater trade, commerce, and a larger minority freed from work.

Nor, to speak of effects rather than causes, is agrarian change mentioned as evidence for these new Greek communities—even though new polis ideas of broad-based oligarchy, hoplite protocol, and citizenship itself were all concepts based exclusively on novel ideas about the possession and role of farmland in society. So whether scholars now ask “what were the manifestations, the characteristics of a Greek polis?” or “what caused a Greek polis?,” agriculture and agrarian change continue to be left completely outside the discussion.

5 There have always been problems with such parallel lives. Stobaeus records the ancient story of a Stoic philosopher watching an inexperienced intellectual farm disastrously: “If you do not destroy the farm,” he says, “it will destroy you” (Stob. Flor. 15.31). The two professions, farming and academic contemplation, I have belatedly understood, are entirely antithetical, irreconcilable in every respect. That gulf was, I think, felt even in antiquity (cf. the Corinthian farmer, who, Aristotle apparently heard, had abandoned his vines and plot for philosophy [Arist. fr. 64 Rose3]; and see also the fragment of Diogenes of Oenoanda (fr. 21) about utopian Epicureans who “shall plough and dig and mind flocks and divert rivers. And such activities will interrupt the continuous study of philosophy for needful purposes; for farming operations will provide us with the things our nature wants”; emphasis added). Plutarch, at any rate, thought that the teacher of philosophy could learn from the no-nonsense character of the agrarian, in adopting both the rough and nurturing side of a farmer, who possessed the rare ability to tear out weeds violently but also to prune vines carefully (Plut. Mor. 529B).

I turn then often to my own experience as a fifth-generation tree- and vine-farmer on a 120-year-old small family farm near Selma, California, some thirty miles southwest of Fresno, roughly in the center of the San Joaquin Valley of California. Although the family farms of Selma are very different institutions from those surrounding the ancient Greek polis, their crops, climate, weather, and latitude are roughly identical. It is my view that they can provide some empathetic comparative perspective on the practice of Mediterranean viticulture and arboriculture.

6 Do not forget that much of Greek agricultural technique survives in Latin literature. Whereas the later Roman agricultural writers Cato, Varro, Columella, Pliny, and Palladius ostensibly confine themselves to Italian farming and emphasize the larger estates of their time (e.g., Spurr 1986: x-xiii; Frayn 54-55), nearly all their research either derives from lost Greek writers (Varro alone mentions fifty authors [Rust. 1.1.7-9]) or is drawn from experience roughly analogous to Greek agrarian practice. That is understandable. Nearly all Roman cultivated species and agricultural techniques were known earlier to the Greeks (Andre xiii-liv; Sallares 330-31; White 1970: 15-34; de Ste. Croix 1981: 508-509; Meiggs 260-61). Roman observations, even though they may be written by and for the estate holders of the leisured class, may also be relevant for some aspects of agricultural technique characteristic of homestead farming centuries earlier in the Greek countryside (but cf. Isager and Skydsgaard 6-7). The degree to which these Roman writers borrow from an earlier (and mostly lost) Greek agronomic tradition suggests an agricultural sophistication unlikely to have originated from a purely peasant society.

Chapter 1. The Liberation of Agriculture

1 More recent accounts of the social and cultural changes from Mycenean to Dark-Age society are found in Finley 1981a: 69-86; Donlan 1985: 293-308; Austin and Vidal-Naquet 36-49. Most note the catastrophic loss of population and political organization, but do not emphasize the opportunities that arose out of the destruction of such a rigid and collectivized regime. The chaos of post-Soviet Russia, replete with petty fiefdoms and rival gangs, nevertheless still offers more hope of eventual viable family-run enterprises than did the former communist bureaucracy.

2 On supposed Dark-Age kingship, see Drews 1983: 129-131. Donlan (1985: 305), notes that “by the middle of the end of the eighth century the fragile hierarchy of ranked chiefs had given way to a system of collegial rule by a landowning nobility.”

3 For serfs and indentured servants in the Odyssey, see Hom. Od. 14.14-28; 17.212-14. Snodgrass (1980: 35-39) emphasizes the Dark-Age concern with pastoralism. Throughout the Politics Aristotle emphasizes the transformation from monarchy to aristocracy, and is aware of its connections with horses and cavalry (Pol. 4.1289b31-9; 4.1290b10ff.; 4.1297b16). See Shipley 30-41 for early conditions on Samos.

4 For a brief sketch of Mycenean agriculture and land use, see Finley 1981b 209-213; Chadwick 102-133. On the general economic limitations of palatial bureaucracies, see Tainter 10-11; 201-204.

5 The Mycenean lords no doubt sanctioned the “siphoning of resources upwards to the elite” (Halstead 1992: 114-15) “The economic base of Mycenean states,” Robert Sallares (15) also reminds us, “was impoverished in the sense that it rested on a small range of what on the whole were rather primitive crops.” This is understandable when we remember that there is not much evidence to suggest that individual farmers ever owned title to their own plots (cf. Vernant 1982:31-35).

6 Even the ancients had some notion that horse raising was connected to small populations, cavalry, and less-intensive land use (Arist. Pol. 4.1297b12-25; 4.1289b35-4.1289b36; 6.1321a11). Since horses were not eaten, and only rarely employed in farming—lacking the slow, steady power of the ox—the justification for devoting valuable time and extensive land to their upkeep during the Dark Ages was primarily social. They were an accouterment of the wealthy to be used for showmanship, transportation, and war making. (Isager and Skydsgaard 85; McDonald and Rapp 57). Once they were largely done away with, areas could become densely settled with considerable food surpluses. See Hodkinson and Hodkinson 278, for the radical transformation of Mantineia.

7 Drews 1983: 112-15. Donlan has given a nice summary: “Given the conditions of life at this time—a sparse population of pastoral and farming families, huddled in unfortified hamlets, with no centralized authority or corporate kin-groups—the establishment of numerous small, independent bands, centered around local ‘big men’ (basileis), seems assured” (1985: 303).

8 Viticulture, arboriculture, and improved species were believed to be later, civilizing activities associated with the polis (Thuc. 1.2.2; Theopompus FGrH 115 fr. 276; Hes. Op. 146-7; Pl. Tim. 77B; cf. Polit.272A). The inferiority of both the quality and quantity of the harvests of feral species is striking and was recognized throughout Greek history (Pl. Resp. 9.589B; Polit. 272A). See McDonald and Rapp 181, 194, 249; cf. 49-50; J. Hansen 1988: 44-46; 47-48; Runnels and Hansen 1986: 302-306; Sallares 15-16; 301-8; Sarpaki 70; Hehn 65-68; 103-7, for the relative absence of intensive farming of domesticated trees and vines before the polis. For a more conservative, static view, see Boardman 1977: 188-200; Burford 1993: 8-10; 12; 137; Isager and Skydsgaard 20.

9 For the difficulty of propagating domesticated species in the wild, see Theophr. HP 2.2.4; cf. CP 1.9.1, and Plut. Mor. 86E; Amouretti 1992: 80-83; Gavrielides 153a. Sarpaki makes the fascinating observation that grafting and budding may have been deliberately restricted by the palaces: “The agricultural secret of how to tend and propagate both the olive and the grape, could have been well guarded, one could suppose, just as the production of silk was for the Chinese. This could explain their rather limited distribution in Neolithic Greece and even in the Bronze Age except for the Late Bronze Age when their distribution becomes far more extensive” Sarpaki 70; see also Runnels and Hansen 1986: 303-4; cf. Isager and Skydsgaard 33-43; White 1970a: 248. In short, “The technique of grafting only became known in the eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium B.C.” (Sallares 29)

10 On wild species of trees and vines before the polis, see Renfrew 125-34; but cf. Sallares 306-8. They took on less and less importance as domesticated agriculture spread (Amouretti 1986: 43-45).

11 These trees and vines species were not widely known or at least cultivated extensively during most of the Mycenean period (Sallares 30, 33, 305-7; Amouretti 1986: 41-46), but they were ideally suited to the natural environment of eighth-century Greece, where increased population called for new agricultural approaches. Imagine that for the first time in the agricultural history of Greece, its unique climate and relief were properly utilized.

12 McDonald and Rapp 144; Renfrew and Wagstaff 46-7; 143; Cartledge 1979: 68, 70, 92; van Andel and Runnels 1987: 98-101; Bintliff 1977: 259-61; Garnsey 1988: 90; cf. Sallares 67-68. For increase and variety in local pottery, see Desborough 19-20. The Greeks themselves felt that there had been marked growth in the countryside at the beginning of their polis history (e.g., Thuc. 1.13-15; Plut. Sol. 23-24). For motifs on coins, see Andrews 317-18.

13 For the importance of population expansion in driving the intensified use of land, see Boserup 38-43, Grigg 1982: 21-36; but cf. Tainter 110-11. Gallant 1982: 115; O. Murray 47, 65-66, 107-8; Donlan 1989: 144; all discuss Greek political and cultural responses to population growth. Runciman summarizes the trend best, “As nomadism and pastoralism declined, which they evidently did, there was a progressive shift to agriculture; and if population was simultaneously increasing, intensification of land use is the natural concomitant as well” (Runciman 1982: 367). For the general phenomenon elsewhere, see Netting (21): “Why do some groups rely largely on slash-and-burn while others systematically terrace, irrigate, fertilize, and rotate crops and in other ways seek to ensure permanent production from a piece of land? There is now considerable agreement that, other things being equal, the agricultural system is functionally related to the density of local population and the resulting pressure on land resources.”

14 For the idea that age-class systems retarded population growth in Greece, see Sallares 160-192.

15 For an absence of early famines, see Garnsey 1988: 17-39. On colonization, see Thuc. 1.15; Pl. Leg. 4.708B, 740E; Hdt. 4.153-159. Cf. Gwynn’s summation (91-92): “The constant pressure of a population outgrowing the productive capacity of land at home, and chafing too at the restraints of a social system wholly founded on the hereditary tenure of land.” In the chauvinistic Greek mind of this age colonization was also seen as the unstoppable march of Hellenic culture, the inevitable expression of a preexisting and dynamic local farming, an agrarianism which was spreading its civilizing agriculture from its home base in Greece proper to more backward indigenous peoples across the sea (see Vanbremeersch 85-87). On nonagricultural factors involved in overseas settlement, see Graham 1971: 40-47.

16 On farming marginal land, see Starr 1986: 38-39; Donlan 1989: 136-38. Netting has remarked on a similar trend in modern pre-industrial societies. “As population pressure introduces land scarcity and makes intensive methods increasingly desirable, group control of property encounters difficulties. … There may not be enough good land to go around, and people grumble about their shares. More important, those who improve their land are unwilling to see it revert to some community pool. If a farm has been brought into annual production by the investment of labor in planting trees, manuring the soil, or digging irrigation channels, in effect the rights of usufruct become permanent” (23). Xenophon, centuries after the establishment of agrarianism, reflected the standard Greek view of the polis, similarly contrasting tenancy with farm ownership: unlike the renter who “milked” the land, the owner of a farm was “like an established friend, not a passing lover” (Symp. 8.25-26), one interested in the long-term view of working the land.

17 See Jeremiah 35.6-10; I Kings 4.25; Isaiah 36.16; II Chronicles 2.10.15, cf. Boardman 1977: 194. At the end of the Dark Ages the Greeks, through trade, mercenary service, travel, and colonization, began to adopt and then greatly improve a number of Eastern discoveries, ranging from the alphabetic script to body armor and new crop species.

18 Cole 38; cf. 4, 7, 17, 45; Thuc.1.2.2.

Chapter 2. Laertes’ Farm: The Rise of Intensive Greek Agriculture

1 The realistic and commonplace character of the Laertes scene, an episode quite apart from the feasting, fighting, and raiding more typical elsewhere in the Homeric poems, is also further emphasized by the traditional controversy over the authenticity of the end of the Odyssey (from Book Twenty-three, line 297, to the end of Book Twenty-four). The question of authorship of Book Twenty-four (whether Homer or a later oral bard), is not fundamental to an understanding of the nature of early Greek agriculture. But it is significant that skeptics of Book Twenty-four’s authenticity, besides noting inconsistencies in Homeric diction within these last lines, have also remarked on the peculiarly “unheroic” nature of Laertes’ farm and his isolated lifestyle in comparison with the rest of the poem. In this view, Laertes in rags and on his knees is irreconcilable with his apparent perceived status as the rex emeritus of Ithaca (see Postlethwaite 187; Finley 1978: 90; cf. Wender, 45-62). The force of these arguments, whether we agree that Homer or some clever and subsequent imitator composed the scene, is to situate Laertes’ farm not in Mycenean times nor in the early Greek Dark Ages, but rather late in the oral tradition. That is to say: in the late eighth century, or even in the first quarter of the seventh century, roughly during the period when the Greek polis emerged from the obscurity of the Dark Ages.

2 In Books Six and Seven of the Odyssey, the estate of Alkinoös of Phaiacia has a variety of diverse crops: a “flowering orchard” (6.293), one “four measures (guai; i.e., about four acres) in size” (7.113), planted in “pear trees and pomegranate trees and apple trees with their shining fruit, and the sweet fig trees and the flourishing olive” (7.115-116). In addition to a “vineyard planted which gives abundant produce” (7.122), Alkinoös’ farm (it is no mere garden) also has, like Laertes’ estate, irrigated vegetables (7.127) and grain (7.104). His fruit trees are of widely diverse species, spreading the harvests throughout the year, and thereby providing a constant supply of fresh fruit. Alkinoös does not commute to his fields but seems to live on the estate. Although the land is near the town center, as befitting his role as king (land near city walls may have traditionally been the most prized [see Audring 1989: 17-32; Lewis 1990: 253-55]), it is clearly an isolated residence “near the road, and a spring runs there, and there is a meadow about it, and there is … the estate and the flowering orchard, as far from the city as the shout of a man will carry” (6.292-94). Alkinoös’ produce is similarly processed right on the premises. Servants are busy milling the grain into flour (7.104), straining processed olive oil over their woolwork (7.107), trampling grapes into wine (7.124-25), and laying others out to dry into raisins (7.123- 34). We are not told precisely that some of his fields encompass eschatia. But there is indication that Alkinoös’ farm extends into rough terrain. At one point, Homer says that one part of the vineyard is on “level” ground (7.123), implying also a part that is not. The idea that a hillside vineyard is meant is clear from Homer’s following description of the nearby garden which, he says, is “below” or “in front of” the vineyard. Finally, the farm of Alkinoös has a rudimentary irrigation system that provides water to his garden: “Two springs distribute the water, one through all the garden space and on the other side jets out by the courtyard door” (7.129-31).

Homer goes to great lengths to portray the wealth, prestige, and abundant resources at Alkinoös’ disposal. All are assets that Odysseus can draw on during his sojourn and relaxation. His farm, then, is part and parcel of a general image of serenity and affluence. It should appear on a more lavish scale than Laertes’ property. After all, the poet’s literary aims here are entirely different: Homer seeks now to emphasize the luxuriousness and bounty of Alkinoös’ land (e.g., “a Greek land of happiness,” Isager and Skydsgaard 26), rather than, as in the case of Laertes, to remind us of the hard work and isolation involved in farming.

Under close examination, however, the two farms seem nearly identical (e.g., Ferriolo 89-90; 92 n. 43). Both plots contained fine orchards, no doubt producing bountiful harvests after the investment of considerable labor. Naturally, Homer describes Laertes’ farm merely as “well-worked” (24.226), whereas Alkinoös’ land instead is exaggerated, described as “flowering” with “shining” fruit” (6.293; 7.115). Alkinoös’ estate must appear the more lavish: Laertes’ vines ripen one right after another, while Alkinoös’ fruit “never gives out, neither in winter time nor summer, but always the West Wind blowing on the fruit brings some to ripeness while he starts others” (7.117-19). So Homer has deliberately emphasized the realism of Laertes’ diversified farm, but in the case of Alkinoös, he has taken it to an excessive idealism, a near fantasy (cf. Isager and Skydsgaard 41). That does suggest once again that when Homer turns to the Greek countryside for various scenes in his epic he knows of a standard type of agricultural property, at times encompassing permanent residence on the property, servile help, diversified crops, food processing, and rough terrain—one that could have served well enough as a general model for the poet’s rural scenarios, whether the work or, in contrast, the wealth of the land was to be emphasized, depending on the poet’s own precise literary needs in the particular context.

Elsewhere in the Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey there are recurring references to what can be legitimately understood as diversified crops, intensification of technique, servile agricultural labor, irrigation, marginal land, and on-the-farm food processing (e.g., Hom.Il. 5.87-91; 6.194-96; 9.578-79; 10.351-52; 12.314; 14.121-24; 18.541-86; 20.185; 20.495-98; 21.36; 21.257-62; Od. 16.139-45; 18.365-75; 19.110-14; 9.131-35; 13.242-47; 15.405-6). Even the antithesis of the homestead farmer, the lazy, cruel Cyclopes portrayed in the Ninth Book of the Odyssey, monsters who live apart from both law and religion, by negative example suggest that the poet once more has an image of what successful agriculture should be like (e.g., Sculley 3-4; Ferriolo 90-91). The land of the Cyclopes, Homer tells us, was “never held by farmers, never ploughed up and never planted.” Nonetheless, the poet emphasizes that “it is not a bad place at all, it could bear all crops in season, and there are meadow lands near the shores of the gray sea, well-watered and soft; there could be grapes grown there endlessly, and there is smooth land for plowing, men could reap a full harvest always in season, since there is very rich subsoil” (Od. 9. 122-35; emphases added). No wonder that there was a tradition that these anti-farming, bloodthirsty, and shiftless Cyclopes had driven out the agriculturally skilled Phaiacians from their original homes (Hom. Od. 6.4-10). In the Greek mind, without clear title to a parcel of agricultural property, without ploughed or planted farmland (cf. Od. 9.123), how could such brutes ever develop the culture of a polis?

3 See Odyssey 24.208, 358, 361-362.

4 Wood sums up the standard opinion best: “The evidence overwhelmingly testifies to the rarity of isolated farmsteads worked by farmers residing away from a nucleated settlement” (Wood 102). Cf. Bradford 180; Bolkestein 19-21; Finley 1952: 62-63; Kirsten 91-92; Michell 4-5; Semple 1932: 539; Osborne 1985a: 17-19; Morris 1987: 5; and cf. Burford 1993: 58-59; Chisholm 113.

5 On the excavations and sitings, see e.g., J. E. Jones 1974: 303-12; 1975: 63-140; Jones, Sackett, and Eliot 152-89; Jones, Sackett, and Graham 355-452; Young 1956a: 122-46; Pritchett 1956: 266-68. Subsequent skeptics of Athenian rural residence (e.g., Osborne 1985a: 32-35; cf. 1992b: 376), who believed that there was neither the water, the desire, nor the need to live in country residences, have sought to explain away the structures as rural cult centers, small villages, or temporary harvest barracks. Their efforts have, I think, found little acceptance. See Pritchett War 5.352-54; Langdon 1991: 209-13; Roy 1988: 55-59. A great many more isolated ancient farmhouses have been identified and explored, but not excavated systematically. See Langdon and Watrous 162-77; Hanson 1983: 38-39; Lohmann 1983: 98-117; 1985: 71-96; 1992: 29-60; Watrous 193-197.

6 Arist. Ath. Pol. 16.2-5; Pol. 5.1305a19-21; cf. Dio. Chrys. 1.75.3. Thucydides also (2.14-16) says that the Athenians from very early times had lived on their farms (en tous agrous), an observation hard to reconcile with the image of commuting peasants who predominantly lived in towns outside of Athens (cf. Cooper 1993: 59). That notion of numerous homestead farms in the countryside is also confirmed elsewhere throughout the ancient Greekspeaking world. Investigation—both through excavation, topographical reconnaissance, random salvage operations, and more systematic surface survey in Euboea, the Greek islands, the Crimea, the Argolid, Boeotia, and other places—continues to turn up isolated residences in a rural, agricultural context; see Kent 243-335; Keller and Wallace 1988: 151-57; Pecírka 1973: 113-47; 1970: 459-77; Pecírka and Dufkova 1970: 123-74; Boardman 1956: 41-54; Lambrinoudakis 295-304; Bintliff and Snodgrass 123-61; Cherry, Davis, and Mantzourani 294-297. As scholars gather additional archaeological evidence, the appearance of houses and towers in an agricultural setting in the ancient Greek countryside seems to have been commonplace. It reflects the good sense of Young’s initial identification of these towers as the ancient equivalents of “farmhouses” (see especially Pritchett War 5.352-54; 5.355 n. 510).

7 Passages in the Athenian orators: Isocr. 4.17; Dem. 18.38; 29.3.3; 30.1.29; 57.65; [Dem.] 47.62; 53. 4-6; 55.23; cf. Roy 1988: 57-59. Passages in ancient historians: Aen. Tact. 7.1; 10.1; Thuc. 2.5.4; 2.5.5; 2.5.7; 4.84; 4.103.5; 4.104.1; Hdt. 1.17; Polyb. 4.3.10; Xen. Hell 6.2.6; 7.5.14; 8.5.15; cf. Snodgrass 1990: 127-29. When Thucydides writes that the Athenians ransacked the houses around the isolated sanctuary at Delium, he must be referring to local homesteads (4.90.2). The Roman agronomist Columella (Rust.12.praef. 10) recalled that the ancient custom of antiquity had been to live on the farm.

8 Men. Dys. 5-6,23; Georg. 77; Eur. Elec. 78-79; 208-10; cf. Arist. Pol. 6.1319a36) ([Arist.] Oec. 1.1345a25-33.

9 See Bintliff and Snodgrass 136, 143. There is a vast literature on the nature of the ancient farmhouses, some still arguing that these remains signify only temporary harvest shacks. On the controversy, see Lambrinoudakis 303; Lauter 1980: 284-85; Osborne 1992a: 22-23; van Andel and Runnels 158-59; Snodgrass 1987: 116-19; 1990: 121-25; 128-29; Cherry, Davis, and Mantzourani 294-95; Langdon 1991: 212; Hanson 1983: 40-41; J. Carter 1990: 412; Lohmann 1992: 35; 30-33; Salmon 1984: 156; Isager and Skydsgaard 69. There are frequent references in Greek literature and inscriptions to rural walls, fences, farm buildings, wells, and storage facilities which suggest a settled countryside, cf. [Dem.] 55.11, 23; SIG3 963; Men. Dys. 376; Kent 297-99; Plut. Sol. 23.4; Osborne 1985c: 124-27; Richter 23-26; cf. Hanson 1983: 38-39; Burford 1993: 116; Ferriolo 87-88, and especially Lohmann 1992: 59. And the Greeks sometimes referred to family tombs on their property. Often the graves were part of a long rural tradition spanning many generations, places where several generations might be interred, see, e.g., Aeschin. 1.99; Arist. Ath. Pol. 55.2-3; Plut. Arist. 1. 27; [Dem.] 55.13; FGrH 228: 43, 45; Humphreys 1978: 97-98; 105-112; Wickens 96-98; and especially J. Carter 1990: 408-9; J. Carter et al: 305-9. This pattern of residence is especially true if the ancient Greek farm was not as widely fragmented as is usually believed, inasmuch as farm residence is usually associated with a generalized concentration of holdings (cf. Osborne 1987: 70; Chisholm 62-64; 113). Ancestral tombs on farms do not mean that every plot was unfragmented and equipped with a permanent residence, but it is one more piece of evidence that suggests that scenario was at least commonplace in the Greek countryside.

10 On the problems of the commute, Chisholm 45-49; 52-55; Engels 28-31; Weaver 217. Scholars in remarking on this contemporary practice at Melos (it is still common throughout the modern Greek and indeed the entire Mediterranean countryside) have concluded that “the consequent inefficiencies of daily travel must be offset by benefits which are almost certainly social in character.” (Renfrew and Wagstaff 110-11; 165-66; cf. Chisholm 51-59; 113). I can attest that after farming a parcel over ten miles distant from my home, any advantages accruing from “dispersed” ownership are overshadowed by the bothersome and wasteful commute.

11 On extensive farming in Greece after antiquity, see Halstead 1987: 83. On ancient farm buildings, see Osborne 1987: 70-71; 1988: 296. Problems with intruders and animals: [Dem.] 47.52; Hom. Il. 9.540; Ar. Vesp. 952. See Richter (97-98) for fencing. For the evacuation of Plataea, cf. Thuc. 2.5.4-7; and on the general Greek practice in time of war, see Hanson 1983: 87-101.

12 Odyssey 24.227-31. See Langdon 1991: 213; L.B. Carter 76-78, for the distinct culture of those who lived outside the walls.

13 See Osborne 1985a: 185. In this view there is no radical distinction between city and country, since almost all lived in town and commuted to work, see Humphreys 1978: 130-35; but cf. Ehrenberg 1951: 86-87.

14 Arist. Poet. 1448a36-bl; see Figueira 1985: 141; cf. Gernet 1981: 320 n. 24.

15 For avoidance of public service, Ar. fr. 100 Kock; for the expression “Back to the farm”: (eis agron), see Ar. Pax 552, 569; fr. 107 Kock; cf. fr. 387; unfair preference for city residents: Ar. Pax 1179-85; on farm work preventing frequent and needless trips to town: Arist. Pol. 6. 1292b25-29; 1318b9-14; cf. again 1319a30-36.

16 On the complete unfamiliarity of rural residents with Athens, cf. Arist. Ath. Pol. 16.5; Dion. Hal. Rom. Ant. 10.8.4-5; Isoc. 7.48-55; cf. Hodkinson and Hodkinson 285.

17 Polyb. 4.73.5-10; Isocr. 7.52; Pl. Leg. 745B; Arist. Pol. 6.1330a14-16; cf. Pl. Phaedr. 230D.

18 Plutarch Mor. 518F; 519E. On rural speech, see Ar. fr. 685 Kock; and cf. Eur. frs. 185, 188 Nauck; on wary, leather-clothed farmers: Alciphr. 1.25; Ael. Ep. 18; Ar. Nub. 268.

19 On the differences between Dark-Age residence and rural inhabitation during the polis, see Snodgrass 1991: 13; cf. van Andel and Runnels 165; Coldstream 1977: 312-13; Gallant 1982: 118-19; Donlan 1985: 301.

20 For watering small gardens and plots, see Hodkinson and Hodkinson 283; Anth. Pal 6.42; Theoprh. HP 7.1.3; 7.5.1; Pl. Euthrph. 2D, and Theophr. CP 3.4.3 for watering during vine planting. The Greeks and early Romans saw that their own agrarian communities were far different from the collective, irrigated regimes of Asia and the Near East; see Hdt. 1.193; Pliny NH 18.161; Strabo 16.1.9-10. For the critical relationship in modern Greece between homestead residence and irrigation, see Thompson 39. Absentee ownership is often associated either with dry farming or vast, public water projects. The Federal Reclamation Act of 1902 (“and no such water shall be delivered unless the farmer is a bona fide resident on land or a neighboring resident thereof,” see Scheuring 369; cf. Goldschmidt xxv) was justifiably concerned that dams and huge canals not lead to farm consolidation and an absence of homesteads.

21 Laertes’ garden: Hom. Od. 24.247; the Phaecaian irrigation system: Hom. Od. 7.112-30; the irrigation simile in the Iliad: 21.257-62; 346-47; see too 5.87-92; 16.384.

22 Strabo 1.2.15; Dem. 50.61; cf. too Eur. Med. 824-42. On dams and ditches, see Jones, Sackett, and Graham 81-82; IG I3 422.187-90; Murray 1984: 195-203. The remains of small dams and retaining basins have also been uncovered near ancient farmhouses of the fifth and fourth centuries in southern Attica (e.g., Lohmann 1992: 48, 51). Near Metapontum in southern Italy, a fifth-century Greek farmhouse was excavated, revealing a large sophisticated spring reservoir for its own use (J. Carter 1990: 410; Carter et al. 287).

23 CP 2.2.1-4; 3.8.3: “streams and irrigation ditches”; HP 2.7.1; 7.5.1-2. In other instances in Greek literature water ditches are also explicitly mentioned: “I dug furrows and deep trenches and so was able to plant my young olive trees and to bring them spring water from a nearby gully” (Alciphr. 3.13). Similarly in another later source (which also must draw on earlier accounts dating back to Aristotle and the literature of the fourth century B.C.), Aelian remarked that falcons did not drink from irrigation ditches if single farmers were there directing water, but did land “when many men were irrigating” (NA 2.42; cf. too Ant. Pal. 7.321). Plato says in his Laws that his rural patrols will make dams, along with walls and channels, “in order that by storing up and collecting the rains from heaven, and by forming pools or springs in the low-lying fields and rural districts, even the driest places can be supplied with plentiful amounts of good water” (Pl. Leg. 6.76IB-C). Here Plato seems to envision much more than small, private gardens. He must refer instead to more substantial irrigated farm plots that lie downhill from streams and lakes. No wonder he sees the need for “agricultural laws” (nomoi geôrgikoi) to administer the considerable infrastructure in the countryside (e.g., Leg. 8.842E; 843D-846B; 847-850A). These laws were a part of nearly every Greek polis and colony (Guiraud 184-191), statutes that gave ample attention to disputes over both irrigation and drinking water in the countryside (Klingenberg 62-123). To read Plato’s agrarian legislation is not to envision commuting peasants, who devote minimal labor and capital to a static agricultural regimen in a relatively empty countryside. Instead, farmland in the Laws seems to be the domain of busy, squabbling residents, likeminded agrarians who compete for precious land and water for their trees and vines, who thus warrant the constant attention from the legislative arm of the polis. Other Greek authors generally refer to legislation governing the use of rural water supplies, wells, and streams (Plut.Sol. 23; Arist. Meteor.349b30-34; 350a7-9; Men. Dys. 190-91; Xen. An. 2.4.13.), what Plato knew as the “excellent old laws concerning water established for farmers” (Pl. Leg. 8.844A). They also make random, almost incidental reference to “watered fields” (Ar. Nub. 282;Anth. Pal.7.321).

24 Arist. Part. An. 668al4-15. For rural roads, canals, and paths, see Dem. 55.10; Arist. Ath. Pol. 50.2; 54.1; Pol. 6.1321B20-21; Soph. Oed. Col. 10; Pl. Leg. 844A; Euthrph. 4C; IC IV 43B, 73A.

25 See Guiraud 70-77, for the presence of slaves before the polis. Garlan (1988: 25-29) and Howe (53) remark on the enormous growth of chattels at the end of the Dark Ages. Ancient views that slaves were a late phenomenon in Greek history: Pherecrates 10.1 (Kock); Hdt. 6.137; Theopom. FGrH 115 fr.122 (for the tradition that the Chians were the first of the Greeks to practice viticulture and enter into the slave trade); Timaeus FGrH 566 fr.11 (for the idea that the early Greeks were not served by purchased slaves). The need for slaves, not a prior, plentiful pool of servile workers, explains their growing presence in Greek agriculture, and in large part “made it possible for the Greeks gradually to acquire a position of hegemony vis-à-vis a barbarian world overflowing with human livestock” (Garlan 1988: 25-29, 40). In Mycenean and Dark-Age times, our scanty evidence suggests that adult male field workers were relatively uncommon. “The pre-Greek world,” M. I. Finley has written, “the world of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians, and I cannot refrain from adding the Myceneans, was in a very profound sense, a world without free men, in the sense in which the West has come to understand that concept. It was equally a world in which chattel slavery played no role of any consequence” (1981b: 114-15; cf. 1973a: 70-71; cf. van Effenterre 220-22). Agricultural slavery, even more than homestead residence, made intensive agriculture possible. It prevented the spread of helotage. It sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman in a way not found elsewhere.

26 The slaves are called dmôes at 24.210. They apparently live in a klision 24.208; cf. Kent 298. For the Sicilian slave woman, cf. 24.211. Laertes almost appears as a proto-hoplite of sorts, standing firm along side his slave attendant (e.g., 24.208-211; 223-27; 387-90; 400-409; 495-500).

27 For passages concerning Laertes and his slaves, see Odyssey 24.224-25; 363-65; Od. 16.140-41; 11.188-91.

28 See M. I. Finley on the modern political implications involved in the debate over ancient Greek slavery, 198Ib: 111; 1980: 11-66. De Ste. Croix 1981: 505-7, and Garlan 1988: 63-65, give a good account of the importance of slaves in the city-state, approaching the question from a largely Marxist viewpoint of exploitation. In contrast, most others discount the importance of slaves in the rural Greek economy in general and at Athens in particular. See Wood 42-80; Ober 1985: 22-3; 1989: 24-27; Starr 1977: 90-92; Glotz 1927: 202-3. Cf. Sallares 56; Gallant 1991: 30-33; Osborne 1985a: 144-45.

29 See Jameson 1992: 140-46; 1978: 122-45; de Ste. Croix 1981: 506ff; Garlan 1988: 63-65; Hodkinson and Hodkinson 279; Amouretti 1986: 212-14; Ehrenberg 1951: 182-83; Guiraud 452-53; Hanson 1992b: 21-25; and cf. Morrow 148-152. After Homer, Greek comedy, tragedy, oratory, philosophy, and history all record their presence in a variety of special circumstances: calls to a slave out in the field in a play of Aristophanes: “Let Syra call in Manes from the fields” (e.g., Pax 1146-1148, 1249), a remark by a historian about families who ate their meals side-by-side with their servile agricultural workers (e.g., Philochorus FGrH 328 fr. 97), an inscription at Mantineia associating land ownership with slaves (e.g., Hodkinson and Hodkinson 279), and Plato’s tacit assumption in hisLaws that slaves are ubiquitous in the countryside (lois oiketais tois en tô topô hekastô, 6.761 A).

30 For the idea that literary references to agricultural slaves are distortions, exaggerations, or a result of confused interpretations, see Wood 51, 173-77; but cf. Hanson 1992b: 222-23. Passages that assume that slaves are at work in the countryside: e.g., Alciphr. 3.24, 25, 26; Aen. Tact. 10.1; Ar. Ach. 243, 259; Vesp. 243-59; 433-47; Pax 1127, 1139, 1247; Ecc. 591-93; Plut. 26-29; 43ff; 254; 510-21; 1105; Men. Dys. 23-27; 208-210; 328-331; 414fF; Georg. 18ff, 33, 56; Theophr. Char. 4. 4-5; Dem. 18.21; 42.20; 53.5, 55.31, 35; [Dem.] 47.52, 56; [Arist.] Oec. 1252b; Pl. Leg. 6.761A; 6.763A; Hes. Op. 470, 573, 597, 766; Eur. Rh. 74-75; 176-77; Athen. 272d; Thuc. 3.73; 8.40.2; Xen. Hell. 3.2.26; 4.6.6; 6.2.6; 7.5.14; Plut. Mor. 519A; Lys. 7.18-19; IG V 2.262.

31 Terraces: Hanson 1983: 37-38; Men. Dys. 376. Pruning: Colum. Rust 5.9.15; Plut. Per. 33.4; Theophr. HP 2.7.2; CP 3.10.4; 14.1-15.5. Fertilizing: Hom. Od. 17.297-99; 24.225; Theophr. CP 3.6.1; 3.9.3; 3.17.5; 3.20.6; HP 8.2.9; 8.7.2, 8.9.1; Xen. Oec. 17.10; 18.2; 20.11; Varro Rust. 1.29; Pliny HN 18.43,670. Dense plantings: Xen. Oec. 16.9-15, 17.13-15; Plut. Sol. 23. Theophrastus sums up the key to intensive Greek viticulture and arboriculture as “digging, watering, manuring, and pruning” (CP 2.7.1; cf. 3.20.6, 4.13.3), strikingly familiar to the modern viticulturist’s dictum that summer’s work was mostly “water and weeds.”

32 For the harvesting of fruit, see Cato Rust 144; Colum. Rust. 12.52.3; Varro Rust. 1.55.5; Pliny HN 15.13.4; cf. Brumfield 27-8; Amouretti 1986: 73-74; and Hurwit 289 on the Antimenes painter. For vine stakes, see Men. Dys. 113. The old idea that half the ancient farm always lay fallow (and unworked) each year is simply not supported by the evidence. See Gallant 1991: 54; Halstead 1987: 83-85; Hodkinson 1988: 39-40, 41-50; 1992: 55. The sophisticated state of Greek agronomy and its awareness of plant deviancy (e.g., Theophr. CP 5.3.1-6.9), the knowledge of grafting technique, and the improvement of crop species all argue for an intensive routine, one of manured and cover-cropped fields beside (or intermingled within) established vineyards and orchards, notthe static monocropped world of the “peasant.” When Theophrastus (CP 3.203) advises that farmers mix light and heavy, red and white soils to remedy its infertility, he was referring to the most intensive of agricultural practices, requiring shoveling and transportation of earth (see Brumfield 156-70). As in the case of manuring (e.g., Semple 1928: 130-38), soil improvement was accomplished not with the modern tractor-drawn scraper (a formidable task in itself, as I can attest), but rather with a small spade, a wicker basket, an ox or donkey, muscular arms and a strong back.

33 On the practicality of ancient small farms for a family and a slave or two, see Jameson 1992: 145; Amouretti 1986: 204-8. The work needed for farmland development only increased if the terrain was rugged, the soil poor, and there was a garden or orchard irrigated. Terraced land, of course, was less often ploughed, more often intensively dug by hand (Halstead 1987: 85; Halstead and Jones 49-50). On following, see, Gallant 1991: 113-14; Halstead 1987: 81-83; Garnsey 1988: 93-94; labor needed for particular crops: Jameson 1978: 122-45; Halstead 1987: 77-87; White 1970a: 336-37. In our sources few women are found working in agriculture (see Brown 71-74). Their absence should not indicate that Greek farming required low labor inputs (e.g., despite Sallares 83). As the households of Laertes and Hesiod attest, the growing presence of adult male servants out in the fields relieves women of that obligation, and explains why, unlike the situation during Mycenean times, male slaves in the literature of the polis now appear in equal or greater numbers than female servants.

34 Xenophon on the diversified farm: Oec. 11.15-16; the Oeconomica on diversification: 1. 1344b29-31. For the constant labor demands of diverse crops, see McDonald and Rapp 50-52; Halstead and Jones 44-50. References to harvest laborers: Horn. Il.18.357-60, 550-59; Hes. Op. 370, 602-3; Ar. Vesp. 712; Theoc. 10.45; Dem. 18.51; Xen. Hier. 6.10; Hell. 6.2.37, 2.1.1. Such hired work was considered undignified for the free man, see Ste. Croix 1981: 179-88; Burford 1993: 186-91.

35 On the agricultural status of the slaves that fled to Decelea, see Hanson 1992: 218-19. Lazy slaves: Alciphr. 3.24; cf. the harvesters known as “figwood fellows” at Theoc. 10.45.

36 See Pritchett 1956: 255-58, 276-79; Ober 1985: 22-23; Jameson 1978: 139; de Ste. Croix 1981: 508; Markle 153 n. 11, and cf. Meiggs and Lewis 247 who point out the mean price of slaves in general on the Attic Stelae is 154 drachmas. It is not known whether each classical farm family owned body armor, livestock (e.g., Ar. Ach. 1022-36; Av. 582-85; frs. 82; 109; 387 Kock; cf. Thuc. 2.14), and a slave or two. It is surely possible. In any case for the yeomen who somehow purchased or inherited arms, it seems no greater difficulty to acquire or inherit a slave in place of, or in addition to, oxen—especially if recent studies are correct in seeing draft animals as somewhat rarer than once thought on Greek farms (e.g., Halstead 1987: 84). Scholars previously have seen that the so-calledzeugitai class of hoplite farmers at Athens had enough capital to afford slaves for their plots (e.g., Kinkel 56-58; Jameson 1978: 122-45).

37 On hoplite attendants, see Thuc. 3.17.4; Ar. Ach. 1123-96; Hdt. 9.29; Polyaen. Strat. 3.52; Theophr. Char. 21.8; cf. Welwei 57-65. Hired hands or relatives at work on farms were probably rare in peacetime (de Ste. Croix 1981: 182-84). For the servile status of hoplite attendants, see Sargent 205-7; Pritchett War 1.49-51; Garlan 1988: 64-65; Hanson 1992b: 222-23; Kinkel 52-54. See Jameson 1992: 141 on the apparent exceptions at Isaeus 5.11 and cf. the curious instance at Plut. Mor. 194F21. Cf. the opprobrium of a free man serving as a laborer in the army at Xen. An. 5.8.5.

38 On the importance of slaves to the rural polis economy, see Garlan 1988: 38-39. Aristotle remarks on the free man owning property and not working under compulsion to another, Arist. Pol. 6.1317b11-13; Rhet. 1367a28-33. Goldschmidt (379-80) has described the cultural ramification of an agrarian economy with few owners and many wage laborers. Kreibig contrasts Greek slave-owning yeomen with Eastern peasantry: “If individual ownership of land (the typical Classical ownership) brings forth slavery as the most essential factor within the conditions of production, the typical producer in Oriental society is the dependent peasant. The town is here, above all, the seat of government institutions (the court, the satrapy, and others) and all those producers whose work serves the court or the cult” (Kreibig 6).

39 On Laertes’ crops and livestock, see Od. 23.139; 24.215, 246-47, 340, 341, 364; cf. 14.5. It is odd that Laertes’ diversified scheme—appearing here at the beginning of Greek literature—has been unappreciated by scholars, who have usually seen early Greek agriculture as one of livestock and cereal specialization (Finley 1978: 57). Even when the later and more plentiful literary evidence of the fifth and fourth centuries made it clear that diversified crops were frequent phenomena on Greek farms, this trend was thought to be a “new” development of “garden-farming” or “cash-cropping” for large, urban markets (Ehrenberg 1951: 73-75; Mossé 1969: 54-55). It was not seen as part of a long tradition in Greek agriculture going all the way back to Homer and the emergence of small independent farmers around the eighth century.

40 See Il. 9,578-80; 6.194-95; 14.122-25. Much later the trend only continued. The chorus of Aristophanes’ Peace sings: “May the gods give wealth to the Greeks, allow us to harvest much barley, and plentiful wine, with figs to eat too” (1321-24). In Aristophanes’ earlier comedy the Acharnians (425 B.C.), the chorus of farmers had promised “first to lay out a long row of small vines, next alongside them small cuttings of young figs, and then a third row of domesticated stock, and—even though I’m an old man—olive trees all in a circle around the field” (994-99). In fact, a diversified farm is just the strategy the fourth-century writer Theophrastus later advised concerning the interplanting of various crops (CP 3.10.3-11).

41 See Hes. Scut. 291-301; Xen. An. 5.3.8-13. And the diverse evidence found in leases and sales: SIG3963; Osborne 1987: 42-43; Andreyev 15; Kent 288-89; 299-300; ephebeic oath: SEG 16.140; handbooks: Theophr. HP 8.1.2; cf. Plut. Mor. fr. 19. On crop diversity in general: Theophr. HP 7.4.1-7.5.4; CP 4.3.I-4.4.1; IG I3 422. 81-89.

42 See Alciphr. 3.20; Ar. Eccl . 817; Pl. Polit. 289E; cf. Zenob. 1.74. Aëthlius of Samos wrote that the Samians had developed a wide variety of cultivars that allowed them twice-yearly crops of figs, grapes, apples, roses, and a fruit called homomêlis (some type of apple or pear?), spreading the harvest season throughout the year (Aëthlius FGrH 536 fr.1; cf. Shipley 18).

43 See Theophr. HP 4.14.6,13; Ar. Vesp. 264; Ar. Av. 578, 587, 709; Plut. Sol. 23.5; Hom. Il. 18.579-82; [Dem.] 47.52; Theophr. HP 8.7.1-8.8.4; McDonald and Rapp 53; cf. Colum. Rust. 5.9.11-12; Pind. Nem. 11.39-42; Xen. Vect. 4.1-17; Arist. Pol. 1.1259 a10-39.

44 On the advantages of modern-day crop diversity in Greece, see Forbes 1976c: 236-50. On orchards as windbreaks, see Pecírka and Dufkova 1970: 153-57. Pliny on the barberry: NH 18.45.161; cf. Sallares 293.

45 For manuring on post-harvest stubble, and the role of livestock in crop diversity, see Hodkinson 1988: 45-50; Gavrielides 1976a: 155; Brumfield 25-27; cf. Xen. Oec. 5.3: “the art of raising animals is closely connected with farming”; Hodkinson and Hodkinson 37-39. Columella later wrote of a certain “ alliance and concord” (quaedam societas atque coniunctio) between farming and livestock (Rust. 6. praef. 2). For sheep browsing in vineyards: Weaver 213. Aelian knew of a tradition at Keos where farmers had little open pasture, but instead fed their livestock fig and olive leaves, husks, and weeds (HA 16.32). In turn, they supplied manure piles for systematic, heavy—and labor intensive—manuring, rather than random incidental fertilization (e.g., Halstead 1987: 83; Halstead and Jones 47-48.

46 Alternate bearing and problems of scarcity and surfeit: Theophr. CP 1.20.3; Pind. Nem. 11.39-42; Colum. Rust. 5.8.1-2; 5.9.11-12; Boardman 1977: 189; and cf. Xen. Vect. 4.6.

47 See Gallant 1991: 36, for reliability at the expense of output; cf. Semple 1928: 155-56. On the different type of labor requirements for a diversified farm, see Theophr. HP 8.1.2; Jameson 1978: 128-31; Halstead 1987: 83-85; Osborne 1987: 46-48. There survive various laws from antiquity prohibiting the early harvesting of wine grapes. Thus on the island of Thasos, a preserved inscription from the late fifth century warns: “No one is allowed to purchase grape juice or wine from the current crop still on the vines before the first day of the month Plynterion” (IG XII, suppl. 347; cf. Alc. fr. 119). These measures, which are designed to protect the reputation of the local wine industry, probably do not guard against a farmer’s desire to “beat” the market, since the grapes are to be sold as wine (requiring time for crushing and fermentation), not as fresh fruit. Instead, this legislation must be an acknowledgment that growers tended to harvest too early in fear that some of their crop might become overripe or (more likely) be caught by unseasonable weather during the protracted harvest (cf. Pl. Leg. 8.844D-845C).

48 Theophrastus on micro-climates and the suitability of specific crops for particular soils: CP 3.6.2-9; cf. HP 2.5.7, 3.6.7-8; CP 1.18.1-2. Deviations in agricultural conditions within small areas: Forbes 1976c: 244; Renfrew and Wagstaff 101-5; Osborne 1987: 38-40. Olives and vines as a means of utilizing otherwise worthless soils, cf. Amouretti 1986: 51-77; Richter 134-140. “They represent, in other words, a way of extracting a cultivated crop from soils unsuited for crops such as cereals, and which would otherwise have been given over to rough grazing” (Sarpaki 1992: 70).

49 For autarkeia, see Sallares 297-300; Campell and Sherrard 323-24; Osborne 1987: 17-18. For more specific examples of self-sufficiency in Greece, see Foxhall and Forbes 66; Boardman 1977: 192; Amouretti 1986: 177-196; McDonald and Rapp 54-57. “A farm,” the comic playwright Philemon makes his rustic say, “supplies every human want, wheat, oil, wine, figs, and honey” (fr. 105 Kock). Such bounty, Timocles says, is not a farm, “but a crown” (Timocles fr.36Kock).

50 Ancient views that arboriculture and viticulture were more recent developments of the polis: Pl. Leg. 6.782B; FGrH 115 fr. 276; Thuc.1.2.2; Plut. Sol. 23-24; Dio. Chrys. 1.75.3. See also Sallares 305-307; Amouretti 1986: 44-45; J. Hansen 44-46; Runnels and Hansen 1986: 302-6; Amouretti 1986: 43-46. On the relative rarity of early wheat species, see Howe 44-45; Amouretti 1986: 36-46.

51 “Distant from the city: 24.212; cf. 4.757: “the far-off fields”; “Much hard work”: 24.205-7; an “outer estate”: 18.357-65; Clearing stones and building terraces: 24.223-25; “the high ground of his vineyard”: Od. 1.194; cf. 11.187-93; 24.149. For Plato’s belief of early hillside reclamation: Pl. Leg. 3.680E. There is a vast literature on eschatia: see Audring 1989: 100-113; Lewis 1973: 210-12; Donlan 1989: 135-37; Richter 12-13; Jardé 42-43; Bisinger 31; Guiraud 65-68; 134-35; cf., too, Frayn 98-101.

52 See Xenophon’s statement that “nothing has greater profit than land that is transformed from the wild into a productive farm” (Xen. Oec. 20.19; cf. Plut. Mor. 552C; Is. 9.28). For terraces and stone removal: Horn. Il. 18.564; Od. 24.224; 18.359; SIG3 963 17-20; cf. Rackman and Moody 128; Bradford 1956: 172-80. Various problems in cultivating hillsides: (erosion) Dem. 55; Pliny HN 18.49; (less fertility) Colum. Rust. 2.51; 2.10.6; Theophr. HP 2.5,7; 2.8.1). In addition, elevation results in earlier and later frosts and difficulty in transporting harvests. See also Osborne 1992b: 375; Audring 1989: 93-94; Halstead and Jones 49.

53 Theophrastus: “Use rich soil for grains, thin soil for trees…. Trees, with long and strong roots, draw their nutrients from the depths. In rich soils trees develop their wood and foliage, but yield little if any fruit” (CP 2.4.2-3, 3.6.6-8; HP 3.2.5; Virg. Georg.2.179-83; and cf. Colum. Arbor. 17.1: “The olive tree thrives best in the hills which are dry and have clay soil; but in the damp, rich plains it produces lush foliage without fruit”). Xenophon: “Even land that lies waste reveals its potential. If the wild flora growing on the land are hardy, then by good farming that ground is also capable of producing excellent cultivated crops” (Oec. 16.4-6). On early Italian arboriculture, see Cato Rust. 1.2-6: “Grafting on wild trees makes it possible to include land that would otherwise not be arable”; Colum. Arbor. 18.2: “Land that is ideal for vines is also suitable for fruit trees” (cf. Colum. Rust. 2.1.4-6). “Fruit trees,” Theophrastus again reminds us, “as a class do fine in the foothills” (CP 3.6.7). Cf. Homer on the hillsides of Thrace as a fine wine district (Od.9.208). See also Isager and Skydsgaard 38, and Langdon and Watrous 175 (on the ancient cliff farm of Timesios in southern Attica).

54 Eurymachos challenges Odysseus to plant “tall trees” and build walls on his eschatia ( Od. 18.357-59). If this section of the Odyssey reflects practice contemporary with Homer’s own life (as I think Homer’s knowledge of agricultural technique must suggest), trees now seem to allow high ground to become quite farmable. The “higher-ups” there will be sturdy yeoman, not nomadic herdsmen nor vagrant woodcutters. Because Laertes himself apparently had carved out the land for his farm, and since he was to pass on to his son Odysseus the fruit trees that he had planted, the reclamation of his land and the creation of orchards and vineyards, as in the case also of Eurymachos’ farm, were simultaneous phenomena. In the Iliad, we hear on occasion of temenê, land “cut out” from surrounding plains and given to prominent men of the local agrarian community as rewards for past heroic service. (Notice that such lands are “cut out” from the largely private landowning domain, rather than vice versa.) In most of these cases, the bestowed farmland was not previously worked, but instead required considerable effort to draw off excess water in order to plant vineyards and orchards (see Donlan 1989: 140, 141-45; cf. later practice, Theophr. CP 5.14.2-3). In other words, a great deal ofeschatia land came into production earlier than is usually supposed, well before the fifth and fourth centuries. On the elastic nature of marginal land in relation to population growth and decline, see Audring 1989: 83; Osborne 1988: 287; Rackman 1990: 104.

55 Eurymachos’ farm: 18.357-59; Hesiod’s Ascra: Hes. Op. 640; Solon’s legislation: Plut. Sol. 23.7; cf. Phot. Bibl s.v. sykophantein; the rock farmer on Mt. Hymettus: Ath. Pol 16.6 ff.; Diod. 9.37.2; remains of ancient farms at Chios: Lambrinoudakis 303-4. Similarly, a later source tells us that under Peisistratus the country residents turned their attention to planting the slopes of Attica with olive trees (Dio Chrys. 1.75.3; cf. Guiraud 199), hillsides that were apparently assumed to have been previously implanted. Understandably at Athens in the early sixth century, there were farmers labeled either huperakrioi or diakrioi, the so-called higher-ups, early cultivators who probably farmed land that incorporated some hillsides and felt their interests were in opposition to more established men of “the Plain” (see Hopper 1961: 193ns. 41,42, 45). Aristotle, at any rate, believed that early factions at Athens—“Plain, Shore, and Hill”—“derived their names from the places where they farmed” (Arist. Ath. Pol .13.3-5; Hdt. 1.59; Dion. Hal.Ant. Rom. 1.13). In the southern Argolid, there were also efforts to work poor ground and plant olives in the face of population growth and greater economic opportunity for disposal of food surpluses. “Adjacent markets, methods of intensified production, and a shift from farming for subsistence to farming for cash crops brought a relative measure of prosperity even to a place like the southern Argolid” (van Andel and Runnels 104-5). And the well-known ancient reputation for the shallowness of Attic soil (e.g., Thuc. 1.2.5; Plut. Sol. 22.3; Plut. Crit. 111B-C; Alciphr. [3.35]: “We who live on the thin soil of Attica”) may reflect the widespread fruit-tree farming of rugged terrain there. Surely such a pejorative generalization does not capture well the rich farming plains found surrounding Athens, Eleusis, and Marathon, and in the hinterland of southern Attica. Instead the appellation “thin” suggests the efforts of the more numerous Attic hill farmers.

56 On California, see Scheuring 385. Perhaps half of Attica’s total land area by the fifth century was used for agricultural activities (e.g., Foxhall 156), possible only through the use of widespread terracing of upland ground, as intensive farming creeped onto even steeper terrain.

57 Isocr. 8.117; cf. Theophr. CP 3.20.4. The Palatine Anthology records the dedicatory epigram of one old Euphron, who “farmed not the furrowed plain, but shallow-soil just able to be scraped by the plough” (Anth. Pal .6.238). In a famous fragment of Attic comedy (fr. 380 Kock) farmers are reminded that “it is better for those who have bad neighbors to farm rocks than to cultivate plains.” A similar fragment of Menander’s advises that even if a farmer works rocks during peace, he will do better than the rich on the plain during war (Men. fr. 719 Kock). Another (anonymous) fragment of Attic comedy decries the amount of usable land on a farm; it is less than a laconic letter of the legendary terse Spartans (fr. 417-19 Kock). On preserved confiscation inventories of the late fifth century nearly one fourth of all the plots sold at Athens were marginal lands (eschatiai) (Andreyev 16). “Aches and pains,” “farming rocks,” “hill-men,” “bad in winter, bothersome in summer” are the disparaging, though understandable, descriptions of marginal lands that required a great deal of hand labor from their small-farmer owners. Outside of allusions to Thessaly and Messenia and other non-polis territory, rarely, if ever, are there references in Greek literature to the bounty of plentiful flat and accessible grain land.

58 Pl. Leg. 4.704E-705B. Most Greeks felt that rich plains created an entirely different type of culture, cf. Plut. Mor. 181B; Isoc.8.117-18; Hdt. 9.122.

59 See Plato on the grower and processor, Pl. Theaet. 178D; Theag. 124A; and cf. his disdain for the middle man peddler, e.g. Pl. Resp. 2.371C; Polit. 289E. Laertes’ finished products: Hom. Od. 1.375-77; 2.56-78; 2.123-27; 17.212-14; 17.532-40. So the strictly economic advice of the later Roman agriculturalist Varro that “the threshing floor should be on the farmland” (Rust. 1.51.1; cf. Colum. Rust. 1.6.23) was generally followed earlier by Greek farmers; the science of on-the-farm food storage was an integral element in the Hellenic agronomic tradition (see Brumfield 42-43). Despite the occasional presence of communal storage centers and threshing floors (e.g., Starr 1977: 151-52; cf. Plut. Mor. 114E), in the polis period yeomen normally did not hand over their production to some centralized collection center, manor, or palace to be milled, pressed, and stored by others who themselves were not farmers (cf. Hes. Op. 618-45). We hear occasionally of slaves engaged on the farm’s threshing floor, winnowing the grain (e.g., Alciphr. 3.26). Pressing and milling right at the farm rather than shipping produce to village or palace centers also tended to reduce losses from spoilage and rot (Cato Rust. 96-144; Varro Rust. 1.55; Colum. Rust. 12.4-52). Worry about insect damage and spoilage on the farm abounds in descriptions of Greek farms (e.g., Theophr. CP 4.3.17; 4.15.3-16.4; HP 8.11.7; Plut. Mor. 676B). And at any given time, there may have been more food stored out in the countryside than inside the walls of the Greek polis (e.g., [Arist.] Oec.1348b17ff.).

60 Threshing floors and presses in the archaeological record: Pecírka and Dufkova: 125-29; Pecírka 1970: 471-73; van Andel and Runnels 106-7; Cherry, Davis, and Mantzourani 193-95; Halstead and Jones 79; Morris 1991: 32; and cf. Burford 1993:141-43. On the Aegean island of Chios, “fragments of olive-presses and millstones bear witness to the existence of a self sufficient, well-equipped farmhouse in the complex” (Lambrinoudakis 303; cf. Boardman 1956: 49-51). In Attica, threshing floors were found near farmhouses (Young 1956a: 122-23, 124-26; cf. Lohmann 1992: 42-43; Langdon and Watrous 173), and storage annexes apparently were a part of rural homesteads (Jones, Sackett, and Graham 419). Greek land-leases inscribed on stone often refer to hundreds of permanent storage jars and vats that are to come with the property (e.g., Osborne 1985c: 124-25; IG I3 426. 4-56). Unlike mention of metal or wood fabrication, during the polis-period we rarely hear in Greek literature of food processing operations (ergasteria)in town, where raw agricultural products might be transported to be milled and pressed (Heichelheim 2.102-103). Presses in villages and cities seem more a Hellenistic phenomenon, when a densely populated Greek countryside was disappearing (see Isager and Skydsgaard 68).

61 That is what Philodemus meant when he reported that the poor, who did not have storerooms (unlike the intensive agriculturalist), were at a disadvantage because they had to sell all their produce at once cheaply (Philod. Peri Oik. 7.26-27). Hesiod advised his middling farmers: “It will not always be summer; build yourself granaries” (Op. 503). As we have seen, every diversified farm must have taken careful precaution to have grain bins, plenty of wine amphorae or vats, and other storage facilities for food right on the farm (e.g., Alciphr. 3.14). This picture is quite understandable within the framework of homestead residence. But is it not difficult to imagine vats, bins, and presses on the land in an exclusively commuting peasantry? In the Aristotelian Oeconomica, there are anecdotes in which poleis in times of crisis pass decrees asking the populace to empty their private stores of grain and oil for public consumption (Oec. 2.1348b17-23; 1348b34-1349a3). In an extant boundary description from Sicily, a threshing floor appears as part of a rich rural infrastructure; mention is made in the inscription of roads, a threshing floor, orchards, ditches, streams, and a farm tower (IG XIV 353). The contexts are usually understood to be rural. The storage vessels found in the vicinity of ancient farms suggest that rarely would a Greek intensive agriculturalist have left valuable food out on his land, and then commuted into town. Even historians who envision a primitive state of Greek agriculture during the polis, distinguished by town living and relatively unsophisticated farming technique, note the potential advantages of the opposite regime, see, e.g., Isager and Skydsgaard 70.

62 Early slavery and viticulture: Theopompus FGrH 115 fr.122; fr. 276; hillside farmhouses on Chios: Lambrinoudakis 295-304; Boardman 1956: 49-51. For the inscription from Chios, see Meiggs and Lewis 8; cf. Finley 1981b 114; Ehrenberg 1937: 152; Garlan 1988: 38-39; Koerner 444-45.

Chapter 3. Hesiod’s Works and Days: The Privilege of the Struggle

1 For the view that Greece was largely a society of peasants, see Millet 1984: 103-6; Walcot 1970: 12-17; but cf. Burford 1993: 85-86.

2 Although the Works and Days is, like the Homeric epics, composed in dactylic hexameter and exhibits the repetitive formulae characteristic of oral composition, there are fewer problems in Hesiod’s work caused by multiple layers of historicity. Although Hesiod drew on a long tradition of Near Eastern and local Boeotian epic, little in his Works and Days can be intended to represent the life of the Greek Dark Ages (1150-800 B.C.). Even less are his images distant echoes from the Mycenean palaces (1600-1250B.C.). Hesiod’s world is vintage early seventh-century, a community of small farmers in central Greece. The value of the Works and Days as “a historical document,” Paul Millet has written, “has been persistently underrated. This is a striking omission, as by general consent we have in the Works and Days a written source, giving detailed information about life in the early archaic period, for which virtually no other documentary evidence exists” (Millet 1984: 84).

3 Controversy among scholars rages over the precise class and status of Hesiod. Central to this are the poet’s own ideas about work. Redfield has suggested that for peasants “agriculture is a livelihood and a way of life, not a business for profit” (J. M. Redfield 27). Other scholars, despite vast differences in locales and chronology, have added all kinds of criteria to this sweeping definition of “peasant”—baffling, contradictory, and unworkable concepts reflective of the historic difficulty of distinguishing the various classes who work the soil. Chief among the usual economic qualifications of “peasantry” are the subsistence level of the peasant’s production, his manipulation by a nonfarming class of overlords and city folk (e.g., de Ste. Croix 210-11), his resistance to new techniques and crops, his chronic underemployment, his skepticism that success or failure are in his own hands, his disbelief that increased labor can create new wealth and thus improve his status—in short, the complete absence of an economic ideology associated with agriculture.

Hesiod, like Laertes himself, is something altogether different than a peasant. Like most later small farmers, he sees agriculture both as a way of life and as a means to obtain profit (cf. Pl. Leg. 5.743D). Of this balance between marketoriented profit and the need for self-reliance, Peter Garnsey has written: “The pull of the market was never powerful enough to engender a thoroughly entrepreneurial mentality. Profit was looked for, but not profit maximization, the ‘productivity ratio’ was understood partially, not in its totality” (Garnsey 1992: 152; cf. Détienne 1963: 56-57).

4 See Hodkinson and Hodkinson 276, Table III, for estimates of the numbers of hoplite yeomen. Ruschenbusch (1985: 258, 263) discusses the “typical” polis of twenty-five to a hundred square kilometers of territory and an average population of adult males numbering between 130 and 800. Problems also arise in assessing whether a majority of Greek geôrgoi failed and fell into the ranks of the abject poor, or found unusual bounty and became part of the landed elite. In the case of Hesiod, one is at least able to differentiate him from both the very wealthy and the very poor: “Hesiod is often called a peasant, but he totally fails to fit the modern anthropological definition of a peasant as a rural producer dependent on a secondary group which uses the surpluses extorted from the peasant class for itself and other non-farming groups. Hesiod did not belong to the top level of society, but economically he occupied an independent position and addressed the bulk of his poem to farmers capable of finding capital for the purchase of a team of oxen and female and male slaves or the maritime trips to dispose of surpluses on their own account” (Starr 1986: 93; cf. Burford 1993: 85-86; Detienne 1963: 26-28).

5 On modern Italy, see Galt 210; Walcot 1970: 97-106, for peasant resistance to traditional authority.

6 Of the creation of this early hoplite farming stratum in the Greek polis, Max Weber observed: “It was of decisive importance for the development of the characteristic features of Hellenic civilization, including its art, that members of this order did not lead the life of grand seigniors. Rather, they were compelled to live in a simple, unpretentious manner, and this precisely in the period when they were developing self-consciousness as a class” (Weber 1976: 184-85).

7 For the idea that Hesiod resembles the modern peasant, see Walcot 1970: 12-18; Millet 1984: 85-88; cf. Wood 54-56; Francis 294-95. On the need to redefine the range encompassed by “peasant,” cf. Millet 1984: 89: “Historically, there have often been significant groups of better off peasants set apart from the mass of poor peasantry.” We should not forget the accurate, but currently unfashionable, note of Western chauvinism in Chester Starr’s observation: “One final point, however, cannot be emphasized too strongly. Culturally the modern connotations of the word peasants’ are seriously misleading when applied to the chorus of the Acharnians in Aristophanes or to any other Greek rural elements. Those Greeks who visited the Persian empire or the Nile valley met abjectly ignorant, downtrodden masses very different from the small farmers they knew at home, who were citizens in the polis” (1977: 167; cf. Forbes 1989:88).

8 See Osborne 1985: 142. The dynamic nature of the early Greek agrarianism must explain why in G. E. M. de S te. Croix’s monumental Ciass Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, no more than a few pages are devoted to the Greek city-state of the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries. Despite the sweeping title, the preponderance of de Ste. Croix’s examples of rural exploitation, and of conflict between landed and landless, by necessity must derive from the latter fourth century, and even more frequently from either Hellenistic and Roman Greece or outside the culture of the polis altogether.

9 Howe 60. Implications of limiting rural families: de Ste. Croix 1981: 278-79; Starr 1977: 119-46. This “manual” of Hesiod is, in fact, the forerunner to a rich agronomic tradition, to a whole host of later Greek technical writing, which like the Works and Daysalways reflected a pragmatic, not solely a theoretical, approach to agriculture. “There is some evidence,” wrote the circumspect Albert Trever of the Works and Days (159), “of a growing interest in the details of successful agriculture. This knowledge of cultivation is, of course, to be expected in a poem by a farmer. The very fact that an epic should be written, at this early age, with such a primary emphasis on the agricultural life, is significant in itself. Though the theme of the Works and Days is not agriculture, it is the pioneer of a long line of Greek and Roman works on the subject.”

10 “The dependent kakoi of 1050-750 B.C. became the citizens of Late Geometric times” (Morris 1987: 175; cf. Starr 1977: 126-28).

11 At this time a general topos in Greek philosophy thought that the middle course was best. “It was this center that was now valued; the welfare of the polis rested on those who were known as hoi mesoi, because, being equidistant from the extremes, they constituted a fixed point on which the city was balanced” (Vernant 1982: 125; cf. Busolt and Swoboda 212; Ehrenberg 1951: 250-52). This fixation with the “mean” was not mere theory, but a precise sociological term used to distinguish groups present among the citizenry (e.g., Rhodes 72). There is no reason to suppose that a middle group of farmers did not, in fact, exist. Their presence and success during the early years of the polis (i.e., the eighth and seventh centuries) gave rise to the later philosophical fascination with citizens neither rich nor poor (Bisinger 4-7). Even though all political factions in the early polis were still fairly undeveloped, and even though hoplite wars were at this time small and exclusively over minor border disputes, there was enough common ground, enough common experience to forge shared principles in the agrarian middle.

12 Gernet 1981: 305. See Osborne 1989: 319-22, on political recognition of the emerging hoplite farmers. Cf. Rhodes 72-73, 182-83; Whitehead 1981: 282-86.

13 On the early notion of “Plain, Shore, and Hill,” see Hopper 1961:196-208; and cf. Rhodes 184-85.

14 On the early strife between aristocratic livestock men and yeomen, see Gernet 1981: 282-83. Hodkinson (1988: 36-37; 1992: 53-59) discusses the complex and evolving relationship between livestock and intensive agriculture. Even in the fifth and fourth centuries, livestock raising was dominated by and for the rich.

15 Starr 1986: 46-47. For the new disdain for horses and cavalry, see Sallares 311; cf. Hodkinson 1988: 37.

16 Most standard histories of early Greece until very recently have glossed over agriculture and farmers. Similarly, theorists (not always simply poststructuralists, and Marxists) sometimes associate anything in the middle with their own antibourgeois sentiments, and so, I believe, have been traditionally reluctant to acknowledge the presence of a sizable, stable middle citizenry in the Greek polis, of the mesoi themselves, e.g., Lintott 1992: 126-28: “The domination of the mesoi is a pipe-dream or a might-have-been for Aristotle”; Ober 1990: 119-121; Burford 1993: 80: “There is really no middle group that has just about enough.” Much less do scholars employ the romantic term “yeomanry” to describe Greek farmers.

It is therefore surprising just how often both ancient literary sources and occasional modern historians have remarked in passing on this middle agrarian presence. M. I. Finley, himself always one to caution us about the naive usage of modern rubrics when describing the sociology of the ancient Greek polis, quite clearly labeled these new landowners of the seventh century “a middle-class of relatively prosperous, but non-aristocratic farmers,” including “the hoplite soldiers who held sufficient land” and “who were given a role in government for the first time” (1981a: 98-99).

By “class” Finley did not, of course, mean the modern idea of bourgeoisie, not the contemporary notion of a manufacturing or commercial stratum, but simply middling farmers neither wealthy nor poor (see Patterson 183-85). The gifted Russian scholar V. N. Andreyev similarly wrote of Attica: “On the contrary, Athens maintained a large ‘middle group’ of owners and this imbued it with a surprising degree of internal stability” (23), a group that W.S. Ferguson had seen as crucial: “The presence of a middle class in the background, made up largely of agriculturalists, could never be ignored by extremists. It was a steadying influence in everyday politics and an arbiter in the event of a crisis” (Ferguson 4). Peter Spahn devoted an entire study to the role of middleness in the formation of the Greek city-state, demonstrating that the presence of the mesoi was an early development, not a later manifestation of mere political infighting (Mittelschicht und Polisbildung; cf. especially 7-15; 174-82). See also the sober discussion of de Ste. Croix 1981: 69-89.

17 On Aristotle and the middle group, see the various, sometimes conflicting, views of de Ste. Croix 1981: 71-72; Ober 1990: 120-21; Mossé 1962: 247-52.

18 Paul Rahe has rightly concluded that this political idea of moderation, sprung as it was from the broad-based group who created the city-state, was eventually extended to become the entire sociopolitical foundation upon which the later Greek polis was based:

“This is why to meson comes to be identified with the political community itself, and it accounts for the fact that the middle ground was thought to be the proper sphere in which to weigh and determine what is measured, fitting, timely, needful, and the like. It also helps to explain much that would otherwise be puzzling about ancient life—why, for example, rightful authority was thought to emanate from to meson, why the middle position was deemed the seat of honor, why a Greek proverb associated occupation of the middle or common ground with the assumption of risk and the rolling of the dice, why departure from the middle ground (ek mesou) was synonymous with withdrawal from the contest for rule, and why neutrals who distanced themselves from the debate taking place in the common council were described as sitting or standing ek mesou. If the Greek polis of the archaic and classical periods was peculiar, it was because it offered its citizens more than mere protection. It provided them, in addition, with middle ground in which to display those qualities which distinguished them from animals” (Rahe 42; cf. Starr 1986: 96-97; Morrow 534-43).

19 Rhodes 91; cf., N. Lewis 150-51; Woodhouse 18-19; but cf. Busolt and Swoboda 779-80. See Rihll 102, who notes that the nobles could not have owned all of Attica. Information about Solon’s legislation derives largely from his own poetry, a cursory account in Herodotus’s history (e.g., 1.23-33, 86; 2.177; 5.113), Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens (5-12), Plutarch’s biography (Sol. 13), and scattered anecdotes concerning his legislation in later compendia.

20 In short: “Hoplites might reasonably be expected to oppose violent revolution whilst maintaining sympathy with any reasonable complaints of the poor” (Holladay 1977: 51). This Solonian package ensured that Athens would never turn to serfdom, helotage, and the culture of oppressed peasantry found in the atypical polis societies of Crete, Thessaly, and Sparta (see Woodhouse 196-98; N. Lewis 156), where those who owned the land outright and those who worked it were often separate peoples “in an everlasting state of war” (Isager and Skydsgaard 152). On land that reverted to the wild on the exit of their owners, see Rihll 118; for Solonian protection of the family plot, cf. Asheri 1963: 8-12.

21 For later hoplite pride in the Solonian timocracy, see Asheri 1966: 106; Ostwald 337-411; and especially Morrow 521-43; cf. 79. Elsewhere even more dramatic solutions codified the economic contributions of the mesoi in the growing city-state. It is perhaps incorrect to speak of an “Age of Tyrants” in the history of the Greek city-states, since only between twenty and thirty of more than a thousand poleis experienced anything that could be formally called “tyranny” (Snodgrass 1980: 111-13; but cf. Thuc. 1.13.1). Most communities instead made the transition well enough from Dark-Age aristocracy to landed timocracy without recourse to extreme measures. But between the eighth and sixth centuries we do hear of some of the major Greek city-states—Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, Mytilene, Megara, Athens, and others—experiencing a radical, though temporary, change from aristocratic government to personal despotism (the Lydian word “tyrant” implies nothing much more in its original sense than an unlawful seizure of power). Even in city-states like Corinth, Mytilene, Samos, and Athens—traditional centers of trade and maritime commerce—there was often an agrarian connection with tyranny, an association between a strong man and hoplite-landowners, as well as the destitute landless. This tyrannical affinity for the mesoi suggests that in some instances the changeover from aristocracy to representative government, typical of most of Greece by the fifth century, was simply too slow. “The tyranny,” writes M. I. Finley of this agrarian support for usurpers, “was the period when the class of small and medium-sized farmers became firmly entrenched” (1981a: 124; cf. Spahn 158-60). Of the Corinthian tyrant Cypselus, John Salmon observes: “The strength behind the political upheavals in the mid-seventh century was provided by hoplites: Cypselus was successful because he enjoyed their support” (1984: 191). On the Aegean island of Samos in the early sixth century Syloson, followed by his successors Aiakes and the famous Polycrates, ended the dominance of aristocratic estate-holding geômoroi. Samian tyranny (about 590-522 B.C.) encouraged the arts and craftsmanship, but also achieved increased economic prosperity through growing exportation of foodstuffs and the construction of rural bridges and roads (e.g., Shipley 48-99; 240-42), measures indicative of the activity of small landowners.

So in some areas of Greece, the gradual ebb and flow of agrarianism had been interrupted, and cultivators turned to the more radical solution of tyranny (e.g., Arist. Pol. 5.1310b25-1311a23). Perhaps that is what Aristotle means in a controversial passage in hisPolitics, where in a general discussion of the end of aristocracy he remarks that “as the city-states grew and those who wore hoplite armor became more influential, then more people began to take a part in government” (Pol. 4.1297b23-25). Earlier the philosopher had pointed out that the tyrants Theagenes of Megara and Peisistratus of Athens had both taken up the cause of small agriculturalists “who lived on their farms busily engaged in agriculture” (Pol. 5.1305al9-21).

That statement seems believable, for Peisistratus especially was associated with a distinctive program of visiting rural districts and encouraging olive production, homestead residence, and accessible capital (e.g., Arist. Ath. Pol. 16.3; Dio. Chrys. 7.107-8; 1.75.3; cf. J. Holladay 1977: 48-50). His supposed tax on the wealthier estates of aristocrats perhaps even provided the grubstake for some tree and vine farmers (J. Holladay 1977: 50-52). Of these general practices, Anthony Andrewes observes: “In classical times the hoplites are a sort of middle class, including the more substantial of the small farmers, for the equipment of Greek armies was not provided by the state, and the hoplites were just that income-group which could afford hoplite armour. Thus we might expect, as a political effect of the change to hoplite tactics, that the middle class would start to claim its share of power in the state, breaking into the monopoly held by the aristocrats” (Andrewes 1963: 34; cf. Nilsson 1929: 240).

Another often associated with the connection between tyranny and the hoplite-landowner is the usurper Pheidon of Argos (about 700 B.C.), a tyrant who led his Argives—” the goads of war”—on to victory against the Spartans at Hysiae in 669 B.C., perhaps with the aid of small farmers also equipped with hoplite armor (Anth. Pal. 14.73). In his aftermath, the epigraphic and archaeological record at Argos suggests the growth of a landed hoplite timocracy. For example, of the surface evidence from the landscape of the southern Argolid, modern archaeologists observe: “The evolution of the rural economy is, we think, what lay behind the origin and growth of the small Argolid towns we know from Classical sources” (van Andel and Runnels 107). Rural infrastructure and small farms apparently went hand in hand at Argos with the destruction of hereditary aristocracy. Already by the early and middle sixth century, well after the end of the tyranny, a few Argive inscriptions (SEG XI 314; SEG XI 302; SEG XI 336; SEG XVIII 147) suggest that constitutional government, a broad-based oligarchy or timocracy of farmers, was well established at Argos, replete with a board of annual magistrates and law courts.

Chapter 4. The Ways of Farmers

1 Burford 1993: 31. On land as the key to all social and political privilege in the Greek polis, see Guiraud 143-45. Ironically, it was in an atypical polis, Sparta—where the equation between hoplite fighter and yeoman farmer was perverted by the presence of the indentured helots—that women may have been granted an exceptional voice in landholding. Aristotle, in his general critique of inegalitarian property ownership, cites the example of Sparta. There, because of the peculiarities of a professional army, an enslaved helot population, a dwindling population of elite “Peers” and traditions of inheritance, “women own nearly two-fifths of the entire country,” a region that Aristotle believed could have supported thirty times more hoplite infantry than it fielded in the late fourth century (Pol. 6.1270a17-32).

2 Urban residents of the polis could also have their belongings stolen or might quarrel with an irksome family nearby. The difference is that all such disputes were more social, and not exclusively economic. Bothersome and sometimes expensive as theft or assault might be to the town dweller, those losses, nevertheless, usually did not threaten a family’s entire way of life. But the attack on the homestead farmer, subtle or direct, ultimately was seen by every grower as both a social and an economic challenge, something that would not merely disturb his peace, but end his existence as well. Xenophon reasoned that a farmer who saw his own land attacked—being in superb mental and physical shape, and knowledgeable about the gravity of the situation—could just as well go on the offensive to plunder the farms of his adversaries (Oec. 5.13).

Was it not a fundamental difference in urban and rural outlook that Aristophanes played on so successfully in his Acharnians (425 B.C.)? In that comedy, the rustics of the deme Acharnae saw the Peloponnesian occupation of their farms in a far different light from their kindred urban citizens at Athens. For them the sight of ravagers on their soil was an economic, social, and psychological challenge to their existence, not a mere chapter in the grand strategy of the Peloponnesian War (Ar. Ach. 204-37; Thuc. 2.21; cf. Hanson 1983: 148-51). In response to this tension between farmers and city residents that arose during the Peloponnesian War and continued in its aftermath, both Plato and Aristotle thought the ideal state should mandate dual ownership on the part of each of its citizens. “Of the land that belongs to private persons,” Aristotle wrote, “one portion should be in the outlying districts, while the other should be near the polis. This way two plots might be assigned to every citizen, and everyone then would have a stake in both districts. Consequently, there is both equity and justice, and also there is a general overall consensus in regard to border wars. When this system is not followed, one group of the citizenry is too ready to struggle with neighboring states, while the other group is too cautious and overlooks provocation” (Arist. Pol. 7.1330a14-18; cf. Pl. Leg. 5.745C).

3 Another defense was probably the sheer stoutness of the farmers’ enclaves. The stone towers discussed in Chapter 2, which appear so ubiquitously in the archaeological record, could provide some defense if the farmer brought his family, livestock, and slaves inside his fortification and rode out the attack (see Hanson 1983: 62-63, 88-101). The image of a farm “besieged” is reminiscent of the Rhodesian civil wars of the late 1960s and mid 1970s, when men drove armored tractors and irrigated carrying side arms. That is too dramatic a picture for ancient Greece. Nevertheless, even in the relatively tranquil times of the polis there must have been some anxiety that during general unrest attack could come suddenly and from unexpected quarters to anyone toiling in the countryside. Of those stout farm towers in southern Attica, Hans Lohmann (1992: 39) remarked: “Although the towers—even the stronger ones—could have not withstood an organized siege, they provided adequate protection against attack by robbers or pillaging soldiers.”

4 Aristotle in his Politics records a statute at Thebes that regulated the procreation of children, designed “to preserve the original number of land allotments” (2.1274b3). Plato in his Laws has a lengthy, ingenious discussion about how the ideal state might limit the number of children to prevent the disintegration of the family plot (5.740B-D; cf. Resp. 5.460A). Later (Leg. 11.923C-D); he went further, and raised the possibility that in his utopia the property owner might simply name one son as the principal heir who would inherit the family plot: “the owner of the klêros shall always leave behind [as heir] one son, whichever one he wishes.” Aristotle, in his criticism of Plato, also addresses maintaining the family estate: either fertility had to be limited or some offspring left without inheritance, if the original number of plots in the community were to remain constant—the keystone to the entire agrarian regime of the early Greek polis. He suggests that birth control be carefully monitored to prevent fragmentation of farm properties(Pol.2.1265.b1-28).

The historian Polybius later believed (wrongly?) that by his own time (the second century after the end of the agrarian polis) Greece had become depopulated in many areas because that old fear of diluted inheritance had led to the opposite extreme, farmers apparently limiting severely the size of their families to ensure integrity of the ancestral plot (36,17.5-8). Rivalries among offspring and disputes over inheritance were a constant worry for the farmer, who had managed to solidify his own position on the farm, and thus had pragmatic experience with siblings to chart the best course for the next generation of owners (cf. Burford 1993: 36-46).

Nevertheless, assume that in most cases farmers triumphed, carried on, and prevented farms from becoming fractionalized. David Asheri, in a review of constitutional practice among the Greek city-states, detects ubiquitous concern over divisive inheritance. In response to the problem, early Greek agrarian communities often drafted precise preventive legislation. “We may conclude,” Asheri wrote (1963: 6), “that moderate constitutions were generally inclined to preserve the integral lots by allowing their succession only as undivided units to a single male heir, being interested in preserving, as much as possible, the original distribution of land property and the original composition of the citizen body.”

In Greece today land fragmentation is a perennial problem (Campbell and Sherrard 329-33; K. Thompson 213-52), because of the absence of primogeniture, the dowering of daughters, and the prestige of land ownership. In modern villages envy can discourage the concentration of even small plots (Slaughter and Kasimis 130-31). The average farm in many areas of Greece today is no larger than two or three acres, with widely distant component plots of even smaller dimensions. Modern ethnographers and anthropologists who have studied this system and interviewed local farm owners suggest that fragmentation does have advantages in spreading risks from natural disaster and crop failure (Gallant 1991: 41-5; Osborne 1987: 37-39; Forbes 1982: 324; 1989: 91ff.). To some extent this is true (as I can attest from farming two widely distant parcels), even though micro-climates do not vary widely among small dispersed plots in the same general area.

But hedging against disaster cannot hide the intrinsically uneconomical nature of working tiny plots widely dispersed (as I can also confirm: many farmers defend their farming of unconnected land until they finally can consolidate their farm; no one would pass up such an opportunity merely in order to “spread risks”). Time is lost in commuting to various scattered plots. Numerous pathways and borders gobble up arable land; confusion and argumentation with scores of neighbors over multifarious boundaries raise havoc (e.g., K. Thompson 10-12; Chisholm 46-64).

Nor must we imagine, as is often assumed, that land fragmentation was the norm in ancient Greece. (“It may be concluded,” concluded Kenneth Thompson, “that, generally speaking, farm fragmentation in Greece, at least in its present form, is amoderndevelopment” [21; emphasis added]) Besides the attention in utopian literature of the polis to limiting offspring, we also hear that lessees of farm land attempted to consolidate by renting parcels adjoining their own (Osborne 1987: 71-72; 1988: 316-17; cf. Chisholm 64-65), or through trading and other special arrangements (e.g., Lane-Fox 1983: 210, 219-20; Hodkinson 1988: 40-41). There seems to be little evidence that the ancient Greek farmer was ever forced to farm a number of minuscule, widely separated plots, or even to dower all daughters with land. The few scattered bits of evidence that do suggest multiple parcels are nearly all from Attica in the late fifth and fourth centuries—and all, I think, refer to the estates of the most wealthy (e.g., Davies 1971: 52-54; Pritchett 1956: 275-76; Osborne 1985: 48-52; 1987: 38-40). I can find nowhere in ancient literature mention that the five to fifteen acre farms of the hoplite farmers were routinely broken up into smaller and widely separated plots. On every occasion when scholars assert that the Greeks worked fragmented farms, the chief evidence cited is simply the custom in modern, not ancient, Greece.

The Greek farmer, given time and patience, resolved the issue of inheritance in a manner that preserved the integrity of his farm. Sometimes a man could deliberately limit offspring or would prove infertile (e.g., Arist. Pol. 2.1265b5-12; Plut. Sol.21.3). More radically, farmers might disown heirs (cf. Ael. Ep. 19), or acquire land from (childless?) others (e.g., Pl. Resp. 1.330B-C). Untimely death—from disease, accident, or war—could reduce the potential number of inheritors. Constant peril is a fact somewhat ignored; many recent studies show that in antiquity only two of six children might outlive their parents, indicating there was often a likelihood that only one male child was in a position to take over the farm. It has been argued that sixty-seven percent of Athenian families numbered only between two and four persons (e.g., Gallant 1991: 23-24). Robert Sallares, quoting more precise figures, argues that an average completed family size of 5.5 children was no guarantee that male children would survive the father. In fact, in over fifty percent of such cases either no children at all, or only a single male heir, would outlive the father. There were mechanisms—trading, marriages, special bequests—by which heirless landowners were able to transfer their holdings to those who had inherited either small properties or none at all (see Sallares 214-16; Osborne 1988: 309), in order that land intactness could continue (see, e.g., Galt 182-91; Forbes 1982: 151).

Some children who had no wish to farm or even to own property (e.g., Is. 2.28; Dem. 44.10) could receive payment in cash or other property in lieu of land (e.g., Halstead and Jones 1989: 42). Perhaps the question of land division might be put off for a generation, two siblings agreeing to share the land. That way, if one proved childless, the other’s offspring could inherit the grandfather’s farm. In short, no uniform picture is possible for agricultural inheritance in ancient Greece. Farms, if all else failed, might be partitioned, later recombined, and then partitioned again, generation after generation. An endless cycle of diminution and then aggregation is far more likely than inevitable fragmentation, which logically would have no end. The ancient Greek family farm plot may not always have remained pristine within its exact ancestral borders, but farms would tend to remain largely in the same area, expanding and contracting depending on the changing success or failure of each ensuing generation.

5 See Forbes 1976c: 7, for soil pulverization; Semple 1928: 96, for straw mulches. On the reverence for gardens and groves, see Ferriolo 89-91; Osborne 1992b: 377-82, 39.

6 In general, the ancients were well aware of a wide spectrum of tree and vine pests, and knew various substances (e.g., minerals, plants, animals) that could be placed in orchards and vineyards as repellents (see Burford 1993: 138-9). Their rich agronomic tradition is surely a sign that ancient Greek farmers continually experimented with various methods of improving crop production (e.g., Theophr. CP 5.8.2-5.18.4; cf. especially Amouretti 1986: 223-238). Simplistic and mistaken is the old idea that “agricultural techniques were stabilized at a rather primitive level and thereafter did not develop” (Weber 1976: 147; cf. Isager and Skydsgaard 199).

7 Most anecdotes in literature revolve around agrarians traveling into the polis to peddle their harvests (e.g., Aen. Tact. 28.5). The image of Chremes in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (815-22; cf. Pl. Polit. 289E; Plut. Arat. 8) selling his grapes in town to buy barley was not a new phenomenon of fifth- or fourth-century Athens, a time when considerable profits and losses on the local level were constantly taking place (Osborne 1988: 290-91). Nor is Theophrastus’s “loud mouth” simply a fourth-century “character,” when he babbles on about the falling price of wheat and his uncertainty of what to plant the next year on his farm (Theophr. Char. 3.3-4). The picture of the Attic farmer packing food for the local market is also confirmed in a play of the comedian Philemon (e.g., fr. 89 Kock). Herodotus believed that the ubiquity and accessibility of open markets (like the Hellenic brand of hoplite fighting) made the Greeks quite unlike their Persian and Egyptian neighbors (1.153; 2.35, 39; 9.7.2; cf. Pritchett War 1.42), Hesiod’s early seventh-century farmer likewise was advised to travel off the farm to unload surpluses (Op. 617-40; cf. Hahn 1983: 30-31).

8 Theophrastus warns of strong manure: “But even things that help the tree and give it aid will destroy it if accumulated in too much quantity or potency or at the wrong time, as for example, manure that is put on either without interruption all at once or in too much quantity or having too much power, as for example tanner’s manure. For this manure when put on undiluted is believed to kill just about every kind of tree. And so do all manures that are too hot and dry and in short too strong, and that are not the right type for the particular tree. For as we have said, there are certain manures that are suited for different trees” (CP 5.15.3).

9 On the complexity and greater labor and skill required by viticulture, see Amouretti 1988: 5-6; Brumfield 28-37. The Greek notion that civilization could be gauged by the degree of intensive, stable agriculture is explored by Vanbremeersch 79-82.

Chapter 5: Before Democracy: Agricultural Egalitarianism and the Ideology Behind Greek Constitutional Government

1 Modern political science has rediscovered that egalitarian thinking and shared economic enterprise lead, not follow, political reform: “Where norms and networks of civic engagement are lacking, the outlook for collective action appears bleak…. The civic community has deep historical roots. This is a depressing observation for those who view institutional reform as a strategy for political change” (Putnam 183).

2 E.g., Plut. Mor. 226B2; cf. Aristotle’s comparison of Greek municipal layout to the planting of a vineyard (Pol. 7.1330b29-30) or Thrasyboulos’ identification of those citizens with excessive ambition with the tall ears that tower over the others in a grainfield (Hdt. 5.92; cf. Arist. Pol. 3.1284a30-1). This ideology of agrarian egalitarianism and uniformity was definitely not communistic (Arist. Pol. 2.1263b2-1264b25). The notion of common property ownership is discussed (and more or less rejected) in the utopia of Plato’sRepublic, in the fantasy of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (revealingly, both works derive from the fourth century when agrarianism gradually came under assault) and found in a few atypical communities on the fringes of the Greek world (Dawson 37-43; Figueira 1984b:204-6; Guiraud 638-639). Everywhere else equality in property ownership was to be accomplished through social pressure, constitutional government, military arms—and ethical, moral, and religious stricture.

3 Davis 1991: 131 (emphasis added); cf. Starr 1977:159, 246. Other rural sociologists bear out these observations that small farms are more efficient economically and thus have a greater propensity to foster rural development: “Quality of social conditions is associated with scale of operation … and it is reasonable to believe that farm size is the most important cause of these differences” (Goldschmidt 423).

4 Evidence of larger farms: Ar. Eccl. 592; [Dem.] 13.30; Dem. 23.208. On the estate of Phainippos: [Dem.] 42. 5, 7, 9, 20, 24, 28; de Ste. Croix 1966: 112; Burford 1993: 69-70. On the holdings of Alcibiades, Aristophanes, and Lysimachos: Pl. Alc. 123C; Lys. 19.29, 42; cf. de Ste. Croix 1966: 111; Davies 1971: 19-21; 202; Isager and Skydsgaard 78; Dem. 20.115; Plut. Arist. 27.1; Is. 5.22; see Finley 1981b: 64-65. On Plato’s “myriad plethra,” see Pl. Tht.174E2; Lucian Icar. 18.5; on the occasional exaggeration and inexactness of the Greek “myriad” cf. Hanson 1992: 210-15.

5 Finley 1981b: 65; on moderate farm size as the Greek standard, see Hodkinson and Hodkinson 274-76; Weber 1976: 197-99; Bolkestein 26-27; Finley 1952: 58, 63; Guiraud 391-434; Jardé 120-22; Michell 43; Pritchett 1956: 275-6. For the “big farms,” cf. Lohmann 1992: 51; Osborne 1992a: 23-25; Foxhall 1992: 156-57. For the Cliff House, see Langdon and Watrous 175; southern Attica: Lohmann 1992: 49-51; farms on Euboea: Keller and Wallace 1988: 154.

6 Andreyev 14-15; see also Finley 1952: 58-60; Lewis 1973: 187-212; Cooper 1978: 168-72; Burford 1993: 67-72. On the viability of small farms in antiquity, see Bintliff and Snodgrass 142; Gallant 1991: 82-86; Osborne 1987: 46; Cooper 1978: 168-72; Hanson 1983: 37-38; Isager and Skydsgaard 78-79; Burford 1993: 27-28. The ten-acre size of farm seems to have been fairly common in Attica in the fifth century. If the cultivable area of ancient Attica surrounding Athens was a little larger than 200,000 acres (Cooper 1978: 171; see Jardé 49-50; 78-79; Garnsey 1988: 90-91; Osborne 1985a: 225 n.82) and if there were about 20,000 landholding citizens (cf. Hanson 1992: 225-28), then there may have been about 20,000 farms of the typical eight- to ten-acre-size, perhaps including 1,000-2,000 larger plots, together with a few very small farms of the poor. That there was an average size plot of about ten acres, that there was a total of about 20,000 landowning citizens in fifth-century Athens, and that the available land in Attica was somewhat greater than 200,000 acres are all compatible, rather than incompatible, figures. Later, at Athens in the fourth century there may have been a census qualification of about 2,000 drachmas demarcating infantry service, a cash qualification used in place of the old Solonian classification of 200-300 annual measures of produce. (A. H. M. Jones 1957: 142 n.50; Ferguson 25-26; but cf. Patterson 176-78). We also have seen that Athens could sell farm property for a uniform price of about fifty drachmas per plethron (.221 acres, Lewis 1973: 196-97; Andreyev 14-15; cf. Boeckh 89). If we translate plethra into drachmas (i.e., farm size into cash equivalents), the 2,000-drachma qualification would be about the same as owning forty plethra (8.9 acres). This equation might suggest that in the fourth century Athens for official purposes may have based its net cash worth for the hoplite census on the old notion of a typical yeoman plot. Michael Jameson has correctly rejected the idea of a subsistence “peasantry” at Athens: “If all of these hoplites owned land and we use the largest current estimate for the cultivable land of Attica (96,000 hectares = 237,120 acres) and suppose that their properties averaged 50 plethra (4.5 hectares = 11.115 acres) in size they would have held 90,000 hectares (222,3000 acres), leaving some 6,000 hectares (14,820 acres) for the richest and poorest…. In any case, the notion of a mass of self-sufficient, independent subsistence farmers as the backbone of Athenian society becomes very questionable. It seems much more likely that the bulk of Classical Athenian farmers were in the hoplite class, had at least one male slave and generally lived above the subsistence level, as in most of the more populous and prosperous parts of Greece” (Jameson 1992: 144). Critics on the other extreme, who argue not for a “mass” of minuscule plots owned by a horde of subsistence peasants, but an “elite” in the Attic countryside composed of a few aristocrats, can prove much less than they think. They have suggested that the Athenian liturgical class (about 1,000 to 2,000 male citizens) held nearly twenty to thirty percent of all land in Attica (e.g., Osborne 1992a: 24-26; Foxhall 1992: 156-57). Even if that were true (and there is no evidence that it is), it still would suggest that these more elite farms were of only about fifty acres or so in size (i.e., 1,500 wealthy estate holders owning fifty-acre farms = 75,000 acres or .316 percent of the 237,120 total acres in Attica), and that nearly two-thirds of the arable land of Attica was in the hands of the hoplite, landowning class, which perhaps numbered half of the citizen population. This pattern was a remarkably egalitarian system of property ownership!

7 Hellenistic and Roman farm size: PI. HN 13.92; 18.35-37, 33.135; Ep. 3.19; Sen. Ep. 87.7; Col. Rust. 1.3.12; cf. Day 230-51; Rostovtzeff 1979: 75; Green 368; Duncan-Jones 127-42; Jones 1974: 120-24.

8 For Melos, see Thuc. 5.116; cf. Jameson 1977: 125; for later Roman and Hellenistic farms, see Finley 1973a: 111-13.

9 The agrarianism in Plato’s Laws is clear (indeed an entire set of agrarian legislation [nomoi geôrgikoi] is found in his Laws at 8.842E6-846C8; see Klingenberg 29-139). Every citizen by law is to retain a plot of land, his klêros. This ground cannot be reduced beyond a necessary minimum (Leg. 5.744D-E; 9.855B, 8.850A). Such farm property is sufficient to support a citizen’s family. It is to be forever unchangeable, indivisible, and incapable of being sold, donated, mortgaged, or confiscated by the state (Leg.5.740A-741E, 740B, 741B, 9.855A, 11.928E-929A; Klingenberg 5-20). Plato desires a reactionary return to the agrarian property-holding scheme of the early polis of at least a century past. In his ideal countryside “the klêros remains forever tied to a single individual, passed on to a single natural or adopted heir” (Fuks 148-49; 153; Guiraud 582-88). “The egalitarian logic of this development,” Paul Rahe points out, “Plato carried to its conclusion. In constructing his imaginary Cretan city, he proposed a comprehensive body of legislation aimed at stabilizing the division of wealth. To foster concord, he made the original allotments of farmland roughly equal in product and decreed them inalienable” (Rahe 71; cf. Lauffer 233-39; Bisinger 12-55).

10 Even at Sparta, which was in many ways an atypical city-state, there was a long tradition that the privileged Spartiates held land on an equitable basis. Much of Spartan land-tenure remains obscure (see Hodkinson 1986: 404-6; cf. Isager and Skydsgaard 129-32; Spahn 88-111), but it seems that the mythical lawgiver Lycurgus supposedly had parceled out the land of Laconia, dividing it up afresh as a basis of uniformity among the citizens (e.g., Plut. Lyc. 8.3.6). The difference at Sparta was her conquest of neighboring Messenia and the ensuing need for constant subjugation of that larger land and its subservient population. Annexation of foreign territory had arrested the usual evolution of Greek agrarianism: serfdom in place of chattel slavery; a much smaller landowning citizenry than the other Greek city-states of comparable size in both relative and absolute numbers; a huge cultivable area under the control of a single polis; a farm-owning, but not farm working, citizenry; a professional, rather than an amateur, hoplite army; public rather than private ownership of arms. True, we see a veneer of agrarianism among the few Spartiates (cf. Plut. Mor. 226B2)—hoplite infantry, equal plots, restrictions against the wealthy, the idea of shared ordeal (e.g., Plut. Mor. 228E27). But the majority outside the agrarian net was so large that the population of the surrounding region as a whole was never able to create agricultural poleis along more typical Greek lines. The nature of Spartan society in general reflects a nonagrarian direction for the vast majority of the population.

11 For agrarian egalitarianism in colonies, see Asheri 1963: 20-21; Runciman 1982: 366; Isager and Skydsgaard 123; Boyd and Jameson: 332-37. For the Crimea, see, Pecirka and Dufkova 123-74; for Halieis: Boyd and Jameson 332-37; for southern Italy: J. Carter 1981: 167-78; for Thurii: Dawson 23-26. So-called foundation decrees, surviving formal public documents on stone and metals that outline precise procedures to be followed in creating Greek colonies, confirm the evidence of archaeology. The inscribed laws concerning the foundation of the Greek cities Cyrene (630 B.C.?) and Naupactus (500-475 B.C.?) list provisions concerning the systematic division of land along egalitarian lines and strict laws governing inheritance (e.g., SEG IX.3. 31-37; Meiggs and Lewis 20.17-19, 22-29, 35-38; cf. Koerner 445-48). Similarly, statutes governing new settlements in West Locris and at “Black” Corcyra (an island in the northern Adriatic) stipulated penalties for any who advocated redistribution of the original egalitarian land division (see Graham 1983: 58-60; Métraux 75-78). The epigraphic evidence also confirms the archaeological picture that colonies started out with an equitable division of farmland, a product of careful land division and statutes outlining inheritance and land acquisition procedures (Graham 1983: 59-62). In short, in colonies “subdivision, inalienability and fixed allotments of land are basic principles” (Métraux 87; Isager and Skydsgaard 124-25).

12 Michael Jameson has written that these remarkably uniform colonial grids, “like new constitutions, have the great virtue for the historian of making explicit the principles espoused by community. Initially the principle of equality prevailed” (1990: 175; cf. especially Guiraud 81-89). If we examine carefully some additional formally organized colonies, land divison there inevitably proceeds from the assumption that existing territory should be divided into equal shares, not simply sold to the highest bidder. There may have been a few colonists who, for some meritorious service, were granted parcels two or three times larger than the ideal size. But this was rare and apparently something decided by the community as a whole. Even as late as the third century, during the twilight of Greek agrarianism, many colonists apparently maintained the old creed that property divisions should be small and roughly of equal size. At Pharsalos in northern Greece in the third century sixty plethra (13.3 acres) was the standard-sized farm, a stereotypical figure also appearing at Larissa in Thessaly, where a redistribution scheme resulted in an average-sized plot of about thirteen acres (see Gallant 1991: 86; cf. Burford 1993: 67). On the Crimean Chersonesos a vast complex of about 25,000 acres of rectangular agricultural plots has been uncovered. The land was at some date (the fourth century) parceled out according to a uniform grid, resulting in roughly equal farms (usually with an accompanying farmhouse) of about eleven or twelve acres (Pecírka and Dufkova 129-31, 134).

13 On the concern of the wealthy for the poor, see Gallant 1991: 148-49; 194-95; Isocr. 7. 20, 31, cf. Fuks 57-59; Métraux 64-65; Woodhouse 143 n.42.

14 Rarity of Greek property tax during the polis period: Padgug 101; Alcock 26. Eisphora at Athens falling largely on the more wealthy: Hodkinson 1992: 54; Thomsen 140-41; Isager and Skydsgaard 141-42. On Dionysius’s looting and taxing, see Polyaen.Str.5.2.19, 21; Arist. Pol. 5. 1313b25-30. For the general increase in taxes during Hellenistic times, see Kreibig 11-12. For deleterious effects of taxation on the countryside, see Arist. Pol. 5.1313b25-29; cf. Pl. Leg. 8.850A-B.

15 Even at Athens by the fifth and fourth centuries—a city-state hardly the most devoted of the Greek poleis to local farmers—E. M. Wood believed that the would-be exploitive wealthy man and his apparatus of government “were restricted by the configuration of social and political power represented by the democracy, which limited opportunities for concentrating property and afforded protection to small producers against certain forms of dependency” (Wood 56). J. K. Davies has pointed out that “of fifth and fourth century Athens fewer than 1,000 men out of a total population which may have reached 250,000 could be called ‘rich’ in normal Greek parlance” (1981: 35).

16 Small percentage of public land at Athens: Lewis 1973: 198-99; 1990: 259; Andreyev 43; cf. Thuc. 3.50.2; cheap rents of temple estates: Osborne 1988 284-85; temple lands rented to the less well-off: Métraux 63-66. Taxes for unproductive Hellenistic monarchs and Christian dignitaries: Kreibig 20-25; de Ste. Croix 1981: 495-96. In fact, most of Greek religion was agrarian centered and without large bureaucracies. The goddess Athena’s blessing in Aeschylus’ Eumenides was largely agrarian and called for sunlight, breezes, and enough harvests to keep the polis strong (Eum. 905-9; cf. 938-45). At Athens, a city where the myth of the gift of the olive tree by Athena (Hdt. 8.55) was the foundation of Athenian public religion itself, all olive stumps and “sacred” olive trees were protected by religious strictures, and often bypassed during enemy invasions (e g., Dem. 43.71; Lys. 7.7; 7.25; Androtion FGrH 324 fr.39; Philochorus FGrH 328 fr. 125; Istros FGrH 334 fr.30). Some fig trees, like olives, were also given religious protection (see Boeckh 62-63). Recent arguments have suggested that the birth of the polis in its formal sense is not to be marked by the construction of the infrastructure in the city-state proper, but rather by the prior appearance of rural sanctuaries and cults, which reflected the immediate needs of the incipient farming population (e.g., de Polignac 49-66; cf. 23-34), which arose before a resident municipal citizenry. City-state religion, in short, was originally of an agrarian nature, and continued to cherish rural cults and festivities, which were based on precise tasks of the agricultural year (Brumfield 1-10; 54-117; 223-40; Isager and Skydsgaard 165-68; Burford 1993: 104-5). At Athens, the festival of the “holy sowing” was a ritualistic public enactment of cereal planting with imprecations and offerings given up to ensure continual supply of food for the polis (Ashmole 9-10). We hear of a variety of local and minor deities who had a hand in the agricultural success of farmers (cf. Jameson 1951: 54-56). In addition to communal religious observance, individual geôrgoi often, like modern farmers today, prayed privately and constantly for agricultural success. A man offered a lamb to Demeter so that “every year she should make his field rich in barley and wheat” (Anth. Pal. 6.28). Xenophon’s Socrates observes: “The gods are in control of farming operations no less than they are in war.” He adds: “The prudent offer prayers to them for their fruits, cereals, cattle, horses, sheep, and for everything they possess” (Oec. 5.19-20; Plut. Mor. fr. 67; cf. Plut. Mor. fr. 67; Xen. Oec.5.19-20). Quite unmistakably, the impression we receive from Greek literature is that whether a farmer sowed, reaped, planted, or dug, he prayed, sang, and cursed to the gods who inhabited the superstitious world out on his farm (e.g., Hes. Op. 780-2; 391-3; and cf. 764-821).

17 Asheri 1963: 2; 20-21; see Pecírka 1968: 192-95; Métraux 86-88; cf. Isager and Skydsgaard: “Everything indicates that there was no major difference in the size of farms in Classical Athens. It was a direct consequence of a consistent legislation with regard to citizenship and inheritance.” Asheri posits an agrarian exemplar between the two extremes of rich estate holders and landless poor, between rightist aristocracies and left-leaning landless democracies: “The freedom of selling family lots happened to be frequent in radical democracies and narrow oligarchies, while the moderate constitutions abated or limited this power in order to prevent land concentration” (Asheri 1963: 4). The impression in our ancient sources is that the moderate agrarian constitution with a low property qualification was the model of Greek constitutional government among the Greek city-states of the entire polis period, the benchmark from which those few “deviant” communities both on the left and the right either expanded or restricted the franchise as they saw fit. No wonder that one scholar, despairing of the inadequacy of Greek constitutional rubrics to identify these agrarian governments, recently concluded that “the differences between the ideal middle constitution, the moderate democracy, and the moderate oligarchy do not seem that significant anyway” (Dawson 109 n.45).

18 Early Greek vocabulary for equality: Carm. Convival. 893, 896 [Page]; Alcmaeon 4; Anaximander 12B1[DK]; Theogn. 678; cf. Hdt. 5.92.al. Aristotle’s agrarian democracy not the same as radical Athenian democracy: M. H. Hansen 68-69. Aristotle at least “clearly recognized that democracy normally meant the absence of a property qualification for citizenship, or the participation of all freeborn and native-born males in government” (Dawson 48 n. 35; cf. Larsen 3).

19 Displeasure over influence of urban poor at Athens: [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.2, 2.14; Xen. Hell. 2.3.48-49; Pl. Leg. 4.706B-C. On the numbers present in the Athenian ekklesia, see M. H. Hansen 130-32. For the idea that those in the assembly and law courts more often were urban and poor, see Ar. Eccl. 300; cf. M. H. Hansen 127; A. M. Jones 1957: 109-11.

20 In that same tradition, much later the agricultural grandee Cicero could write in Roman times: “Nothing is better than agriculture; nothing more fruitful, nothing sweeter, nothing more suitable for a free man” (Off. 1.150-51). Throughout the Roman Republic most agronomists and philosophers echoed the advantages of the legacy of Greek agrarianism—just as the Italian yeoman was giving way to the absentee owner and the much larger estate. Columella believed that a well-ploughed small farm produced more profit than a (typically) poorly managed estate (Rust. 1.3.8-13), a truism that soon became a hackneyed theme in Latin literature in general: “Praise large estates but cultivate a small one” (Virg. Georg. 2.412); “It is wiser to sow less and plough more” (Pliny HN 18.7); and in general, cf. White 1970a 346-47; Wolf 67-74.

Chapter 6 The Ways of Fighters

1 Exaggeration of phalanx innovation in the fourth century: Hanson 1988: 204-7; tactics of Spartan phalanxes: Lazenby 1991: 103-5; use of cavalry during the polis period: Greenhalgh 96-145; Bugh 36-38; reluctance for sieges, missile troops, and integration of heavy and light infantry before the fifth century: Hanson 1989: 27-39; Anderson 1970:111-40. Traditional interest in the improved military science of the Hellenistic era: Delbrück 175-252.

2 See Salmon 1977: 90. On this presence of less formal massed attack in the eighth century, see Wheeler 1991: 126-50; Anderson 1991: 15. Mass fighting without the hoplite panoply: Xen. An. 1.8.9; 7.8.15; Gyr. 6.2.10; 6.3.23; 7.1.33; various weapons employed in the mass: Tyrt. 10.21-25; 11. 23-24; 35-38; complex construction and difficult usage of the panoply, see Blyth 14; Cartledge 1977: 20 n. 71.

3 Cavalry were often irrelevant in battle between phalanxes (Bugh 36-37; Adcock 47-53; Nilsson 246), but became of real value in rugged terrain against non-hoplite troops, cf. Bugh 39-78; Delbrück 55, The idea that wealthy knights would play no important role in the defense of their community was a peculiarity of classical culture, not to be embraced by any society in the West until modern times.

4 On our knowledge of hoplite warfare before the fifth century, see Hanson 1989: 43-44; Connor 3-24; cf. Wheeler 1991: 125-26; Frost 183-86; Lonis 28-30. For the connection between farming and hoplite service, see Starr 1977: 177-87; Finley 1981a 120-52; Andrewes 1956: 31-42; Busolt and Swoboda 823-24. For the unusual idea that farmers should not be the infantry of the community, cf. Pol. 7.1329a40-1330b43; Pl. Resp. 2. 369E; 374E; cf. Isager and Skydsgaard 149-52.

5 Ironically, hoplite fighting originated over poorer soil distant in highlands and foothills; see Jameson 1991: 210; Connor 9; Pritchett 1956: 256; Métraux 50-52. We do hear occasionally of men killed, ambushed, and lost in rough terrain. But at least before the fifth century, these occurrences either happened under special circumstances or were not decisive resolutions to major campaigns. Instead, they involved rout and escape, the presence of foreign troops, or the frequent plundering raid, rather than formal pitched battle between like-minded equals of warring poleis.

6 For the wings of phalanxes, see Pritchett War 1.134-54; War 2.190-207. For the usual neglect of trickery, see Pritchett War 2.156; cf. Wheeler 1988: 25-49. On occasional collapse before battle, see Hanson 1989: 96-104. Some examples of rudimentary tactics of the phalanx are the following: the strengthening of wings at Marathon (490 B.C.), the exchange of Spartans and Athenians at Plataea (479 B.C.), the outflanking attempts of the Spartans at Mantineia (418 B.C.), Coroneia (394 B.C.), Nemea (394 B.C.), and Leuctra (371B.C.), the Theban tendency to stack deep at Delium (424 B.C.), Coroneia (394 B.C.), Nemea (394 B.C.), Leuctra (371 B.C.), and Mantineia (362 B.C.. Lack of opportunity for battlefield command: Hanson 1988: 200-206; Hanson 1989: 107-16; cf. Delbrück 286. Agrarian distrust of those in authority: Walcot 1970: 97-106.

7 See Pl. Ion 540C-542B; cf. Ar. Ran. 1034-5; Pl. Lach. 191A-B; Xen. Symp. 4.6. Hoplite initiative and insubordination in decision making: Hdt. 9.53.2; Plut. Phoc. 25.1; Xen. Hell. 6.4.4-5; An. 3.4.4-46; Thuc. 5.6.2, 5.7.2, 5. 65.6, 8.78.1; Theophr. Char. 13.7. A soldier’s general: Hanson 1989: 106-16; questioned by Wheeler 1991: 152-154; but see Pritchett Topography 8.62. n. 67.

8 For the old and poorly fit in the phalanx, see Hanson 1989: 89-95; Andoc. fr. 3.1; Hdt. 1.30; Eur. Heracl. 723-25; Plut. Mor. 192C-D; Pl. Resp. 8.556D. Examples of idealized youth on vases: Ducrey 51, 56, 136. Even today in the final decades of American agrarianism to see an exclusive array of farmers is an arresting enough sight, far from the sanitized photo on the farm magazine cover. Visit a farm auction or an end-of-the-year cooperative meeting. The visual and acoustical imagery is striking: deeply tanned and wrinkled folk of few words and weathered hands and faces, overwhelming middle-aged. They present with the incongruous combination of muscular arms and ample guts, their more formal attire in worse taste than their everyday work clothes; they are men whose word for “yes” is inevitably “you bettcha,” “sure can,” or “why not?” (cf. Ar. fr. 685 Kock: “rugged speech with a rural flavor”).

9 On the hoplite war cry, see Xen. An. 1.8.18; Ar. Av. 364; Aesch. Sept. 270; Plut. Thes. 22.4; Pind. fr. 78. For hoplite activity and relaxation in the hours before battle, see Lonis 126; Hanson 1989: 126-31; Ducrey pl. 39; Hdt. 1.63; Pritchett War 2.155.

10 Loss of morale when losses were tallied: Aen. Tact. 26.7-8; the use of wagons after battle: Aen. Tact. 16.5-6; occasional rotting and bloated corpses: Men. Asp. 69-72, 109-10; Pl. Resp. 10.614b; Thuc. 4.97-101; decaying bodies improve the soil: Archil, fr. 148; cf. Plut. Mor. 669A; Strabo 16.4.26; Plato’s protestation against stripping bodies: Resp. 5. 469C-D; problems in identification of remains: Men. Asp. 76-77; cf. Polyaen. Strat. 1.17; Diod. 8.27.2.

11 Occasional Spartan victories abroad at the battles of Amphipolis (422 B.C.) and Nemea River (394 B.C.); cf. Thuc. 5.6-11; Xen. Hell. 4.2.9-23. More numerous defeats outside Laconia: Cartledge 1979: 126 (Hysiae); Hdt. 1.66-68; 7.212-19; Xen. Hell. 3.5.22-24; 4.5.11ff.; 6.4.16-26; Plut. Pel. 16.1-17.3.

12 Twenty-one major battles involving hoplites on at least one side: Hysiae, Tegea, Sepeia, Marathon, Plataea, Dipaea, Tanagra, Oinophyta, first and second Coroneia, Delium, Amphipolis, first and second Mantineia, Syracuse, Assinarus River, Haliartos, Nemea, Tegyra, Leuctra, Crimesus. Sixteen of the twenty-one battles where there were clearly hoplite defensive troops fighting on their native soil: Hysiae, Tegea, Sepeia, Marathon, Plataea, Dipaea, Tanagra, Oinophyta, first Coroneia, Delium, Syracuse, Assinarus River, Haliartos, Tegyra, Leuctra, Crimesus. Twelve of these sixteen battles where the defenders were victorious: Hysiae, Tegea, Marathon, Plataea, Tanagra, first Coroneia, Delium, Assinarus River, Haliartos, Tegyra, Leuctra, Crimesus.

Chapter 7. The Economy of Agrarian Warfare

1 On the laws of the Greeks, see Wheeler 1987: 180; Pritchett War 2.251-52; Karavites 13-26; Arnould 138-53; de Romilly 1968: 207-20; Garlan 1975: 23-77; Busolt and Swoboda 1260-62. Fourth-century views of the prior economy of hoplite warfare: Polyb. 18.3.3; Aeschin 2.115; Plut. Phil. 13.6; Thuc. 5.41; Isoc. 8.48-54; Pl. Resp. 5.469B-71B; Menex 242D.

2 For defense expenditure during the Peloponnesian War, see Kagan 36-42; Meiggs and Lewis 61, 78, 84; Michell 361-63; Gomme Comm. 2.16-47; Kinkel 84-87; and cf. especially Boeckh 345-400. Fourth-century awareness of the cost of fighting: Arist.Rhet.1.1359a-1360a; Xen. Vect. 1.1-2.

3 Plundering and raiding as sources of financial gain in warfare: Finley 1978: 49-50; 99-100; 125-128; Pritchett War 5.568-504.

4 On Spartan military practice, see Lazenby 1985: 3-7; Anderson 1970: 225-50; Cartledge 1987: 43-46. Her military infrastructure (i.e., training, finance, organization, control of arms) is unlike any found in the other Greek city-states. After all, few other agrarianpoleis chose to solve their growing problems of population and food supply in the eighth and seventh centuries by simply annexing and enslaving their neighbors. Incidentally, the same ambiguity is nearly true of Sparta’s agrarian infrastructure. Her nightmarish system of helotage—the ancient equivalent of apartheid—was reproduced only sporadically in a few kindred atypical poleis. Nevertheless, the crops grown and the agricultural technique practiced on her farms by helot workers may not have been dissimilar to farms elsewhere surrounding other Greek city-states. Among the small elite of Spartiates themselves, most farm properties until the fourth century were probably of about equal size.

5 Distrust of seafaring: Theog. 1200-1202; Hes. Op. 630, 641-42; Plut. Mor. 239E42. For the absence of early navies, see Thuc. 1.13-14; Hdt. 7.144; cf. Amit 19-20; Morrison and Williams 128-29; de Ste Croix 1972: 393-95. The trireme—the backbone of the later fifth-century Athenian navy—may not even have been invented until 550 B.C. (see Davison 18-24). That was a full century and a half after the appearance of hoplite arms and armor and the emergence of diversified, intensive agriculture.

6 For unusual conditions when hoplites might not supply their own arms, see Xen. Lac. Pol. 11.2; Ages. 1.26; Nep. Ages. 42.4; PL Men. 249A; Arist. Ath. Pol. 42.4. For the later practice of state-supplied armies or individual donations, see Diod. 12.68.5, 14.43.2-3, 15.13.2; Polyaen. Str. 3.8; Dem. 18.116; cf. Thuc. 6.72.4, 8.25.6.

7 For the cost of arms, see Connor 10-11 n. 30; cf. Jackson 1991: 229; McKechnie 94 n.12. On the wage of a day worker, see Busolt and Swoboda 195-210.

8 To take a better illustration of the affordability of the hoplite panoply in the fifth century, 75 to 100 drachmas might represent only a moderate cost to the owner of an average forty to sixty plethra hoplite farm (about nine to thirteen acres). At that time it was worth in a cash equivalent perhaps 2,000-3,000 drachmas (i.e., 50 drachmas/per plethron; Lewis 1973: 196-97). By the fourth century, many Greek farms were mortgaged out at an average of 1,000 drachmas—ten times more than the cost of a panoply alone—for private expenditure on dowries and gifts (e.g., Finley 1982: 66). The equipment of a larger citystate’s armed force of (say) five thousand men (cf. Delbrück 63-66) represented the local agrarian community’s total investment of about sixty to eighty talents (five thousand panoplies at 75-100 drachmas one talent = 6,000 drachmas). Sixty to eighty talents is a small fraction (i.e., three to four percent) of our token city-state’s collective worth in land alone of between 1,660 and 2,500 talents (five thousand hoplites owning farms each worth 2,000-3,000 drachmas would have a total value roughly between 1,660 and 2,500 talents). At Athens in the later fourth century, 2,000 drachmas of net worth may have officially signaled the landowner’s eligibility to purchase armor and so to enter the hoplite phalanx. (In actuality, these rubrics were by this time often ignored.) The farmer’s outlay on military equipment (about 100 out of 2,000 drachmas) represented about five percent of his assessed landed capital. We must thus change our notion of the cost of hoplite arms and its relationship to service in the Greek phalanx: hoplite-farmers were not an elite bunch. Too often scholars have assumed that early census figures, such as the various classes of annual agricultural produce established by Solon at Athens (about 600 B.C.),were based solely on the individual’s ability to purchase or to fabricate arms. These qualifying requirements were more likely predicated on more general economic and political criteria (e.g., Bugh 26-28).

9 Weapons dedicated, stockpiled, and stored: Hdt. 8.27; Polyb. 5.8.9; Xen. Hell. 5.4.8; Plut Mor. 598B; cf. Pritchett Topography 8: 73-74; see too Snodgrass 1980: 131 for the hypothetical estimate of 100,000 helmets dedicated at Olympia alone between 700 and 500 B.C.; Pritchett War 3.258-59, for the hundreds of shields stored on the Athenian acropolis. Duplicate sets of arms and armies outfitted in mass: Aen. Tact. 10.7, Thuc. 6.72.4; 8.25.6; Xen. Hell. 4.4.10; Diod. 12.68.5; 15.73.2; 14.43.23 (140,00 shields, 14,000 helmets); for mass gifts of arms: Dem. 18.116; Diod. 17.85; Strabo. 10.4.16; Plut. Mor. 761B; Demetr. 17.

10 Enemy’s weapons are “no good”: Men. Sent. 239; Soph. Ajax 664-65; Spartans’ reluctance to collect weapons of the defeated: Jackson 1991: 231; Pritchett War 3 292-93; Utopian objections to stripping fallen Greeks: Pl. Resp. 5.469C-470A; Polyb. 10.17.1-5. Reemployment of enemy weaponry: Archil. 5; Diod. 16.80.6; Polyaen. Str. 3.8; Xen. Ages 12.6; cf. Plut. Pel. 12; Xen. Hell. 5.4.8; sale of defeated’s arms: Xen. An. 5.3; adoption of enemy’s weapons: Diod. 16.80.6; Polyb. 5.8.9; cf. Archil. 5; sale of weapons on the open market: Diod. 16.80.6; Dem. 45.65.

11 Mass production of weapons in workshops: Lys. 12.19; Diod. 14.43; Pl. Polit. 280D; Plut. Mor. 835B-C; Ar. Aves 491 Pax 1210ff; Dem. 36.11; and Ducrey pl. 135. Suggestions that a community’s arms might be sold to rivals: Pl. Leg. 8.847D; Dem. 19.286; cf. Aen. Tact. 29-30.

12 Evidence that hoplite weapons might last for extended periods of time: Paus. 4.16.7; 8.21.1; 9.39.14; Arrian An. 1.11.7; Diod. 17.18; cf. Weiss 195-207. Breakage of wooden shields and spears: Plut. Mor. 219C; Xen An. 4.1.18; Ages. 2.14; Men. Asp. 75; Diod. 15.86.2; Hdt. 7.22.5; Anth. Pal. 6.84; and cf. the epitaph of Pythion of Megara (446 B.C.): who “broke seven spears (hepta logchas) in their bodies” (Meiggs and Lewis 51.2-3) and the ceramic evidence of at least seven broken spears portrayed about 570B.C. on an unguent vase (Hackett 75).

13 For the literal pushing of phalanx battle, see Thuc. 4.96.2; 4.35.3; 6.70.2; Xen. Hell. 2.4.34, 6.4.14; Ar. Vesp. 1081-85; cf. A. J. Holladay 1982: 94-104; Pritchett War 4.65-67; Hanson 1989: 171-84. For many inside the phalanx in the center and at the rear, the shield must have been their chief mechanism for affecting the outcome of the battle.

14 For the rarity of major infantry campaigns before the fifth century, see Connor 5-6; Adcock 10; Wheeler 1991: 156n.19. Border hot spots that became the focus of repeated hoplite clashes: the high upland plateau of Thyreatis between Argos and Laconia (Hdt. 1.82; cf. Thuc. 5.83.2; Anth. Pal. 7.244; 7.431-2); the Mantinean-Tegean border (Thuc. 5.41.2); the Phocian-Locrian disputes over Parnassus (Hell. Oxy. 13.3); the battle in 461-460 between Megara and Corinth over boundary land (Thuc. 1.163.4); the Megarian-Athenian territorial squabbles over the hiera orgas (Thuc. 3.70.4-6; Dem. 23.212); the methoria at Panakton between Attica and Boeotia (Thuc. 5.42.1); the Oropos between Boeotia and Attica (Xen. Hell. 7.41; Diod. 15.76.1; see, too Thuc. 1.15.2, 4.134), and squabbles between members of the Boeotian confederacy (Hdt. 5.79.2).

15 Hoplite training in weapon handling and tactical maneuver was minimal for most of the life of the polis, see Xen. Mem. 3.12.5; Lac. Pol. 13.5; Thuc. 2.38-39; Arist. Pol. 8.1338b25-40; and see Pritchett War 2.208-31; 4.61-65; Anderson 1970: 84-110; Parke 54; Lazenby 1985: 3-5.

16 For the relationship between campaigning and the agricultural year, see Thuc. 1.141.3, 5; 1.142.7; 3.15.2; cf. 4.84.1-2; 4.88.1-2; Plut. Agis 15.2, Hdt. 1.82; 7.9.2; Thuc. 5.41.2-3; Strabo 10.1.12. Hoplite warfare not intended for extended mobilization and conquest: Arist. Pol. 7.1338b24-29; Thuc. 1.141.3-5; 2.39; 3.15.2; Plut. Ages. 26; Mor. 190A.

17 That is a scenario like German submarine or Allied bomber crews during the Second World War, who took no solace in the mathematics of a five percent “acceptable” loss ratio on any given mission, in light of their thirty-mission requirement and the slow, steady slaughter of kindred in their midst. When losses began to reach ten to eleven percent per mission, the rates immediately prompted “reappraisal” by strategic planners (e.g., Keegan 1989: 429).

18 Passages suggesting that casualties may have been light in hoplite fighting before the late fifth century: Lelantine War: Strabo 10.1.12; cf. Wheeler 1987: 157-82; monomachia: Eur. Phoen. 1227; Apollodorus 3.68; Hdt. 9.26.4; 9.75; cf. 5.1.2-3; battle of the three hundred: Hdt. 1.82; battle of fetters: Hdt. 1.66-68; Persian War battles: Hdt. 6.117; 7.228-29; cf. Pritchett War 4.166-73; Hdt. 9.70.5; but cf. Plut. Arist. 19.5; Lazenby 1993: 246. Fatalities in fifth- and fourth-century hoplite battles at Delium, Mantineia, Coroneia, and Leuctra were never more than four thousand combined dead: Thuc. 4.101; 5.74; Xen. Hell. 4.3.1; 6.4.15; Ages. 7.5; Diod. 14.83.1; 14.84; Plut. Ages. 28.5; Paus. 9.13.12.

19 Generals at the head of their troops: Xen. Hell. 4.7.38, 6.4.13; Plut. Per. 10.1; Mor. 231F4; and see Adcock 82-91; Anderson 1970: 67-83; Hanson 1989: 107-116; Delbrück 133-71. Few battle victories can be attributed to superior tactics or generalship (cf. Lazenby 1993: 257-58).

20 Brief tenure of hoplite commanders: Polyaen Str. 1.18; Diod. 8.37; Paus. 4.15.6; Arist. Ath. Pol. 26.1; little supporting command staff: Anderson 1970: 39-40; killed or wounded hoplite generals: Thuc. 1.63.3, 4 .44.1, 4.101.2, 5.10.9; and especially 3.109.1, 4.38.1, 5.74.3, 2.79.7, cf. Hanson 1989: 107-8; 1988: 201-2.

21 The idea that anything other than stand-up fighting between hoplites was unheroic is frequent in all genres of Greek literature, see, e.g., Thuc. 4.40.2; Eur. HF 157-63; Plut. Mor. 191E; 234E; Hdt. 9.72.2; cf. Thuc. 3.98.4; Polyb. 18.3.3; Diod. 30.18.2.

Chapter 8. Hoplites as Dinosaurs

1 The topographer Pausanias preserves a tradition that at Marathon even Athenian hoplites had not been enough. Instead the polis had enfranchised slaves to join the ranks against this most unusual challenge (Paus. 1.29.7; 1.32.3; 7.15.7; cf. Sargent 209-11; Loraux 35-36; Welwei 22-36). The French historian Henri van Effenterre ended his history of the Greek city-state with the “defeat of Marathon,” correctly seeing that the Athenians’ victory on the battlefield in 490 B.C. was a harbinger of the end of the traditionalpolis.Marathon was proof in the battle’s aftermath that the Greek city-state was now to be reintegrated with larger economic, military, and political challenges far beyond its control (268-84).

2 See Polybius for the natural limitations of the later phalanx (Polyb. 18.30-32). On the Athenians’ belief in their superior courage at Marathon, see Pl. Leg. 4.707A-D; Meiggs and Lewis 26. See Hdt. 7.9.2, for the famous caricature of hoplite battle.

3 On the size of Xerxes force, see Hignett 1963: 40, 94-95; 355; cf. Delbrück 35-36; 118-20.

4 Consider also the Theban turncoats who joined forces with the Persians at the battle of Plataea. As we have seen in Chapter 5, no region better typified the agrarian infantry ideal than the rural Boeotians. But now most notoriously (they later blamed their treachery on a narrow cabal of aristocratic elements) they fought to enslave other Greeks (Hdt. 9.2-3; 9.15-17; 9.31; 9.67; 9.77-78). Boeotian duplicity was in sharp contrast to the patriotism of the landless sailors of the other Greek city-states (Hdt. 9.8.1-2). The treachery of Thebes further brought into question (and disrepute?) the two-century exclusivity of war by hoplite phalanx. While much has been written about the effects of the Greeks’ naval victories on the old polis, it is too readily forgotten that the disgraceful conduct of Thebes, the agrarian city-state par excellence, during the Persian Wars also irrevocably harmed the reputation of hoplite agrarianism.

5 On the problems of agricultural states in the new war, see Thuc. 1.141; cf. 3.15.1, 3.16.1-2. For the thousands of Athenians not involved in farming, see Ar. Vesp. 709; Arist. Ath. Pol. 24.3; cf. Plut. Per. 9.1. On the importance of capital, see again Thucydides 1.41.2-1.42.1. Hans Delbrück (341) once remarked of the unusual strain on Roman manpower during the second Punic wars that only fifth-century Athens had a larger percentage of its population under arms, something only supportable from the tribute of subjectpoleis. Similarly, in lieu of cash contributions, the Spartan army and its entire culture of a permanent, mobilized military rested on the agricultural labor of some 170,000-200,000 indentured helots (cf. Cartledge 1987: 174-75).

6 E.g., Xen. [Ath. Pol.] 1.1-2; Pl. Leg. 4.706B-C; 707C; Arist. Ath. Pol. 27.1; Pol. 7.1327b5-17; Isocr. 8.48, 64, 69, 75, 101; Plut. Them. 2.3, 4.3, 7.9, cf. Hdt. 7.144.4; Thuc. 1.93.3. On the changes in battle practice during the Peloponnesian war years, cf. Busolt and Swoboda 1194-98; Cartledge 1987: 45: “Set-piece battles, however, were thin on the ground in the Athenian War”; Adcock 17: “Before the first summer of that war was over, it had become plain that it would not be decided by a great pitched battle on land.” On the unrivaled escalation of fighting between Athens and Sparta, see Thuc. 1.1; 1.23.1-3.

7 Arist. Pol. 7.1327b5-18. For noncitizen rowers, cf. Thuc. 1.121.3; 1.143.1; 7.13.2; 7.63.3-4; Xen. Hell. 1.6.24; cf. scholiast to Ar. Ran. 694.

8 On Sparta’s use of non-hoplite warfare, see Thuc. 2.19-28, 8.5-44; Xen. Hell. 1.1.1-6.37; 2.1.1-2.2.23, and for the composition of her crews, cf. Gomme Comm. 4.35; Welwei 195-97; Garlan 1988: 165-69. For the various locales where non-hoplite battles took place in the Peloponnesian War, see Thuc. 2.2.12, 2.71-8; 3.2-4; 3.27-8; 3.36; 3.52-68; 3.98.4; 4.8-23; 5.114-116; 6.99-7.54. For sieges in the war, see Pritchett Topography 8.127-28, and on the various non-hoplite contingents, Parke 15-17.

9 For Brasidas, see Thuc. 2.93-94; 3.76-81, 4.11-12, 4.78-89, 4.102-16; 4.120-22; 4.123; 5.6-11; Demosthenes: Thuc. 3.94-98; 3.102; 3.105-14; 4.2-5; 4.8-14; 4.28-40; 4.66-74; 4.76-77; 7.16-17; Gyllipus, Lysander, and later commanders: Thuc. 5.93, 5.104; 7.1-2; 7.3-7; 7.59-85; Cartledge 1987: 90-98; Xen. Hell. 2.4.2; 2.4.28; 4.8.32; 7.1.12; cf. Lac. Pol. 14.4; Alcibiades: Thuc. 6.15; 6.90-91; 6.61; 6.88-93; 8.11-12; 8.14-17; 8.81.

10 For the fourth-century changes in warfare, see Garlan 1974: 106-47; 1975: 127-33; Hanson 1983: 68-69; Ober 1985: 32-50; Kromayer and Veith 87-88; McKechnie 26, 79-107; Wheeler 1988: 24-49; Lazenby 1985: 38-40; Lonis 16-19; Karavites 77-90. On the oath of Athenian ephebes, see Tod 2.204; Poll. 8.105. Stob. Flor. 4.1.8.

11 On confiscation of arms, see Diod. 14.10.4; 16.10.1; Aen. Tact. 10.7, 17.2-4, 29.4-30.1; enormous armories: Diod. 14.41.3-4; Xen. Hell. 3.4.17; ad hoc arming of infantry: Thuc. 8.25.6; Xen. Hell. 4.4.10; Diod. 12.68.5; 15.73.2; 14.43.23; use of non-hoplites as hoplites, cf. McKechnie 80-85.

12 On Socrates’ purported poverty, see Pl. Ap. 36D, 37C, 38B, and on his military service: Pl. Lach. 181B; Symp. 221B; Plut. Mor. 581D; Plut. Alc. 7.3. See Jameson 1980: 213-235; cf. IG I3 138; IG IV 42-43, for the gulf between citizen status and military service; Thuc. 2.13.6-7 records Athenian forces by battle, rather than citizen, status. There was growing chaos in the mustering of infantry troops, the increasing acceptance that neither agricultural produce nor middle-agrarian status was the sole determinant of Greek war service, or even of duty in the phalanx. At Athens now it was almost certain that many residents (small craftsmen, day laborers, urban property owners) could qualify for hoplite service on strictly a cash basis (perhaps 2,000 drachmas of net worth,rather than annual income) without either meeting the old annual food production requirements (300-200 medimnoi of liquid or dry harvests) or even possessing an appropriate net worth in landed property. Cf. Busolt and Swoboda 839-40.

13 On public or private arming of armies: Thuc. 6.72.4, 8.25.6; Diod. 12.68.5, 14.43.2-3, 15.13.2; Xen. Hell. 4.4.10; Polyaen. Str. 3.8; Dem. 18. 114-16; Aen. Tact. 10.7, 13.1-2; cf. Lys. 16.14, 31.15. On middling citizens and non-thetes used as rowers: Thuc. 3.16.1, 3.18.3-4; [Dem.] 50, 6, 16, 47; cf. Arist. Pol. 7.1327b13-15; see Rosivach 53-54. On metics and foreigners as hoplite infantry: Thuc. 2.13.6, 2.31.2; cf. 4.28.4, 5.8.2, 7.57.2; Xen. Vect. 2.2-5. On absence of class considerations in the ephebes: Arist. Ath. Pol. 42.3-5; Lycur, Leocr. 1.176; cf. Arist. Ath. Pol. 42.4. Slaves on land and sea: Xen. Hell. 1.6.24; Dem. 4.36; Paus. 1.32.3, 7.15.7. Wealthy knights as hoplites, rowers, and skirmishes: Lys. 14.7, 10-11, 14-5, 22; Xen. Hell. 1.6.24. Specialized contingents: Plut.Phoc. 13.2-3; cf. Aeschin. 2.169.

Chapter 9. The Erosion of the Agrarian Polis

1 On grain imports into Athens and the significance of importing food, see Thuc. 6.20.4; Isoc. 17.57; [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 2.2-3; IG I3 61.32-41; Arist. Pol. 7.1326b29-30. See also Garnsey 1988: 131-133, 150-164; but cf. Pritchett War 5.465-472; Ehrenberg 1951: 93.

2 See Gomme 1933: 24-26; Garnsey 1988: 90-91; A. M. Jones 1957: 165; M. H. Hansen 92-93; Guiraud 156-59. These modern estimates of metic and slave numbers at Athens can only be approximate guesses, but they do show enormous numbers of adults without access to political participation in democracy.

3 Quite a few scholars have seen the integration of the Greek polis into the Mediterranean as a crisis for its traditional agrarian exclusivity and chauvinism, See Fuks 17; de Ste. Croix 1981: 295-300; Runciman 1990: 365-67; McKechnie 16-29; Pecírka 1976: 19-21; Padgug 92-104.

4 A few examples of such tension can be found at Xen. Hell. 5.1.33-34; 5.236; 7.1.44; Diod. 15.57.3-58.3; 70.3; FGrH 434 fr. 1; Just. Epit. 16.4.20ff.

5 Hoplite infantry used outside of phalanx battle: Thuc. 1.98.2-4; 1.100.1; 1.100.2; 1.102.1-2; 1.104. 2; 1.105.1-2; 1.106; 1.114; 1.115-117; Plut. Per. 23.4.

6 Most authors take a dim view of the rise of the landless, maritime “mob,” see [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.1-2; Hdt. 7.144.4; Thuc. 1.93.3; Plut. Them. 7.19; Nep. Them. 2.3; Pl. Leg. 4.706 B-C; 707C; Arist. Ath. Pol. 27.1; cf. Isoc.8.48, 64, 69, 75, 79, 101.

7 For playwrights’ preference for Athenian democracy see Eur. Andr. 445-53; 595-601; 724-26; Suppl. 187; Aesch. PV 1069-70; cf. Eur. Suppl. 352-53; Ion 670-75; Phoen. 535-45.f; for acknowledgment of the role played by landless rowers: Aesch. Pers. 373-81; Ar. Ach. 162-63; Ran. 1072-73; Vesp. 909; Eq. 1065-66; 1186; 1366-67; Aves 108; praise for hoplite landowners: Aesch. Pers. 85-86, 147-49, 238-45; Ar. Ach. 179, 625, Eq. 1334; Nub. 986; Pax 353-56; Vesp. 711; Eur. Andr. 681; Vita Aesch; cf. Eur. Orest.920; Ar.Pax 603, 511.

8 Role of hoplite marines in sea battles: Hdt. 8.90.2; Diod. 13.40, 45-46, 77-80; Thuc. 7.70; 8.104-5; cf. especially Plut. Cim. 12.2. For hoplites recruited onto ship as rowers, see Rosivach 54-56.

9 For late fifth-and fourth-century investment in the protection of the Attic countryside, see Garlan 1974: 19-86; Hanson 1983: 78-83; Ober 1985: 69-86.

10 See, for example, Diod. 12.443; 12.76.3; Thuc. 1.98.1-2; 2.26, 32, 69.1; 3.51, 96; 4.41, 45.2; 5.56.3,116.2; 6.105.2; 7.18.3; 8.35.1-2.

11 Reduction in power of the Areopagus: Arist. Ath. Pol. 25.1; 28.2; 41.2; rise of the assembly, council, and law courts: Arist. Ath. Pol. 25.2; Athenian aid in Spartan suppression of helot revolt: Thuc. 1.102; Ar. Lys. 1138-44; Plut. Cim. 15.2; 16.8-17.3 ; Arist.Ath. Pol. 26.1; Pay for public service: Arist. Ath. Pol. 27.3; Pl. Gorg. 515E; Plut. Per. 9; Ar. Ach. 66, 90; Thuc. 8.67.3; [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.3; building program: Plut. Per. 13-14; manning of permanent fleet: Thuc. 2.13.

12 Arist. Ath. Pol. 7.3-4; 26.2; 47.1; see also M. H. Hansen 106-7; A. M. Jones 1957: 79-81.

13 Dem. 23.199. For Thessaly in general, see Arist. Pol. 2.1269a34ff; cf. Weber 1976: 219, “the second largest area which remained largely untouched by polis organization.” It was the rich plains (in a purely agricultural sense) of Sparta and Thessaly that fostered agrarian stasis. The more rugged and marginal ground (as we saw in Chapter 2) elsewhere in Greece actually enhanced the emergence of hard-working geôrgoi. “The Greek concepts of freedom and autonomy, then,” E. M. Wood rightly observed of the differences between all Greek city-states and Spartan/Thessalian/Cretan serfdom, “may have their roots in the experience of a free peasantry, a distinctive phenomenon which existed not only in the democracy, where the last vestiges of peasant dependence disappeared with the abolition of debt-bondage and clientship in the reforms of Solón, but perhaps even before those reforms and in any polis in which peasants were not serfs or helots, permanently subjected to an alien ruling community” (Wood 135; cf. Burford 1993: 193-207). “Before those reforms” and “in any polis in which peasants were not serfs or helots” refer to the creation of agrarianism and the culture of yeomanry throughout the Greek-speaking world in the eighth and seventh centuries.

14 “In the late-classical and the Hellenistic Age, from the seventies of the fourth century to the middle of the second century, I count about seventy cases of social-economic conflict and social-economic revolution, as compared with six such cases in the classical period, from the Persian Wars to the end of the Peloponnesian War.” So wrote Alexander Fuks (17) in a sweeping generalization, the truth of which has never been refuted. The value of Fuks’ observation, besides the notion that the viability of small farmers seems to have been a natural check on social chaos and disequilibrium, is that it shows that the decline of agrarianism was felt throughout the Greek-speaking world.

15 Susan Alcock has systematically collated the recent evidence from some twelve of these regional field surveys of various Greek landscapes. While there are local differences and occasional incongruities that can nuance generalizations, the rough picture for Greece after the last century of the polis period as a whole is clear. “All the regions for which detailed information is available experienced a drop, often severe in the number and area, of inhabited settlements. There is some variation in the phenomenon from region to region; the starting point for this development seems to come in the middle to end of the third century in some areas, slightly later in others. If survey performs best in revealing activity at the lower end of the settlement hierarchy, then settlement patterns are a prime index of the intensity of land use. With the large-scale evacuation of the countryside, witnessed in the loss of most loci of rural activity, it seems an inescapable conclusion that land earlier pressed into service was either allowed to revert to wild or was less intensively cultivated” (Alcock 66, 67).

16 Modern scholars have generally been impressed by this archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence of rural depopulation, farm abandonment, and the creation of enormous landed estates in Hellenistic and Roman Greece. “There is little doubt,” Robin Osborne has remarked in this regard, “that the move away from isolated residence and back to town life led to a reduction in the continuity of agricultural activity, even perhaps to a reduction in the area farmed” (1987: 135). John Day summarized the epigraphic evidence of land ownership in Hellenistic and Roman Attica: “The formation of comparatively large holdings in landed properties took place at a rapid rate” (Day 235). Of the evidence from land records in the Roman Empire, Richard Duncan-Jones concluded that “almost all the registers point unequivocally to heavy aggregation of property in the hands of the rich. Although the registers vary so much, the proportion occupied by the largest single estate is almost always significant” (Duncan-Jones 140).

17 Tainter 145-46. A. M. Jones earlier comes to the same conclusion: “The evidence does suggest that over-taxation played a significant role in the decline of the empire…. It can be plausibly argued that the high rate of tax was the main reason for the abandonment of marginal land and the consequent impoverishment of the empire” (1974: 88; 166-185). On the Aegean island of Keos nearly the same process had already occurred by Hellenistic times. “Neither depopulation nor brigandage can explain the remarkable transformation of the archaeological landscape of northwest Keos; there is on the other hand no evidence of the kinds of impact on the archaeological record that likely resulted from small-scale diversified farming in earlier times. The most likely explanation seems to be that expansive tracts of land had been redirected to other purposes; if so, such a change implies at the very least a restructuring of rights of land use and perhaps suggests the formation of large estates” (Cherry, Davis, and Mantzourani 343). “Restructuring of rights of land use” is a euphemism for the destruction of hoplite agrarianism. “A marked redirection in rural settlement,” and “an overall decrease in the intensity of cultivation” (Cherry, Davis, and Mantzourani 340) are synonyms for the end of Greek yeomanry.

18 Alcock 44. Of the vulnerability of complex systems in general, Joseph Tainter (e.g., 115-16; cf. A. M. Jones 1974 129-39; 166-85) adds that this bureaucratic interference from above finally wears away the agrarian productivity of the countryside, by creating specialization that does not provide a commensurate return in investment. He notes: “The reasons why investment in complexity yields a declining marginal return are: (a) increasing size of bureaucracies; (b) increasing specialization of bureaucracies; (c) the cumulative nature of organizational solutions; (d) increasing taxation; (e) increasing costs of legitimizing activities; and (f) increasing costs of internal control and external defense.” All such phenomena are characteristic of the Hellenistic kingdoms, and to a greater extent Roman control in Greece, but not at all applicable to conditions during the earlier polis period, when the countryside was under the protection of Greek yeomanry.

19 “In the all important agrarian base of the economy, disintensification in agricultural production on the regional level is signaled by the observed changes in settlement and land use patterns” (Alcock 176; emphasis added; cf. A.M. Jones 1974: 82-89; 120-23; 135: “Taxation rose so high as to discourage the cultivation of marginal land and the cultivated area, and with it agricultural production, sank.”)

20 “In the late Archaic and the Classical Periods,” Michael Jameson once remarked, “private wealth was exploited for political purposes and then harnessed by the city in the form of liturgies. As it reappears in the Hellenistic period it is more an instrument for the social advancement of the rich than a reliable resource for the community” (Jameson 1983: 13; cf. Garnsey and Morris 104-5).

Appendix: Farming Words

1 The meaning of “agriculture” is clear enough in English. It reflects its Latin etymology ager (“field”) plus cultura (“cultivation”). Thus agriculture means “cultivation of the land.” The only ambiguity in its usage may arise over the inclusion of animal husbandry and livestock. Both activities are more an indirect, rather than a direct, result of the cultivation of the soil. The ancients might at times assume stock was included within definitions of “farming” (e.g., Pl. Leg. 2.674 C; Arist. Pol.1.1256a35-b20), although the more precise ancient agricultural writers often point out that, strictly speaking, agriculture should denote land, not animals (e.g., Cato Rust. 8-9; Colum. Rust. 2.16-17).

In this book, I therefore use the English “farming” interchangeably with “agriculture,” although properly there should be a slightly different emphasis in its meaning. One can, for example, “farm” fish (i.e., aquaculture), or “farm” out particular tasks, in contexts quite unconnected with the working of the soil. These nuances in the meaning of the English “farming,” then, do not only reflect general metaphorical language. They can also include more specific aspects of land use beyond the strict cultivation of the soil, such as rents, payments, leases and other elements of property ownership (thus “farm” derives from Latin firma: “firm,” “a fixed payment”). In general, no real ambiguity arises over the interchangeable use of “farmers” and the more formal “agriculturalists.” Both words in modern American parlance identify those who grow crops or raise livestock on plots of ground.

2 There is no comprehensive discussion of the Greek vocabulary of agriculture. But helpful analyses of particular words are found randomly in Richter 6; Rhodes 72; Pritchett 1956: 262, 268-69; Guiraud 446-51; Osborne 1985: 143; Isager and Skydsgaard 153-54; Burford 1993: 15; Audring 1974: 447; Jameson 1992: 145; de Ste. Croix 1981: 13.

3 Xen. Mem. 3.11.4: “Have you an agros?”; see also Is. 6.33; [Dem.] 53.6. From this root word agros (cf. Latin ager), we also find agroikoi (agros + oikoi “field dwellers”) a rough equivalent to geôrgoi “farmers” (as are the earlier and more poetic words for farmers, agroitai and agrotai, and a host of other related terms, such as agronomoi “country magistrates,” agroponoi “field workers,” and so on.

4 There is yet a third and even larger family of words used by the Greeks to describe farming. This group is connected to the more general term chôra, and the nearly identical chôros, “space” or “room,” which, by extension, often (even more than agros) denotes the open space or roominess of the countryside. Typically, this particular root supplies an array of related Greek agricultural vocabulary. Good examples are chôrion (“plot” or even “farm”) and chôrikos (“rural”). Chôrites properly means “rural dweller,” but likeagrotês occasionally implies patronization along the lines of “boor” or “rustic” (e.g., Xen. Hell. 3.2.31). Because chôra is a more expansive term, including space as well as land proper, it is usually used in a broad context in reference to agriculture. Thechôra is all the land surrounding the Greek polis (whether farmed or not). It is the general idea of “rural” when used in opposition to “urban”: chôra versus polis.

5 For example, land measurement: plethron, guês, akaina, ouron, schoinos; types of land: haloê (developed ground), aroura and arotos (plowable or arable cereal land), pedion (fertile land in the plain), kêpos (irrigated or garden ground), gêpedon (land within the city, gardens), eschatia (marginal, rugged, or distant land), psilê (open or unplanted land), phutalia or orchatos (vineyard or orchard ground), and skiros (wild or forested land). On the vast vocabulary of land and its measurement, see Ridgeway 325-27; Richter 5-7; 13-14; 90-91; 96-7 Cooper 1978: 169-71; Audring 1989: 5-14; Osborne 1985:19-20; Donlan 1989: 130, 138-39; Pritchett 1956: 261-69; Hennig 45-46; Brumfield 156-57; Burford 1993: 113-15; Glotz 1927: 38-39; Hehn 124-26; and especially Guiraud 64-66.

6 The odd adjective “most-acred” (poluplethrotatos) is a rare and late Greek word (e.g. Lucian Icar. 18.5). Instead, when an ancient Greek author wishes to contrast the poor against the middling farmers and the very rich, he usually speaks of these wealthier two groups as distinct entities: the plousioi and the geôrgoi (e.g., [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 2.14; Ar. Eccl. 197). That makes it clear that these two classes, “farmers” and the “rich,” were not usually seen as one and the same group (Arist. Pol. 4.1296b37-1297a13). When those rare wealthy landowners of the polis period appear in literature (often in an archaic or quasipolis context), specialized and localized vocabulary that never becomes widespread is used. For example, occasionally we see geômoroi (“land sharers” or “landed gentry,” Hdt. 7.155.2; Thuc. 8.21) or basileis (“barons” or “princes,” Hes. Op. 37-39; cf. 248-73). Outside of the non-polis systems of Sparta, Crete, and Thessaly, where we do see rubrics denoting specific types of farm size and wealth, labels of tenancy and lordship nearly always are associated with archaic Attic practice in general, and the Solonian class structure in particular (i.e., hektêmoroi, “sixth-partners”), a vestigial language of an early age (about 600 B.C.) during the establishment and emergence of small Athenian farmers.

7 Similarly, even today in Greece one can argue there are no distinct social classes among Greek farmers: “all citizens own property and resources. There are no extreme variations in wealth or property-holding” (Gavrielides 1976b: 271). Robin Osborne rightly rejected the term “peasant” for the Athenian small landowner, partly because “there was no sharp dividing line between small and large landowners” (1985: 142; Audring 1974: 447; Jameson 1992: 145). Even the Marxist historian G. E. M. de Ste. Croix wrote that until the end of the free Greek polis “although the cultured gentleman living in or near the city could be a very different kind of person from the boorish peasant, who might not often leave his farm, except to sell his produce in the city market, they spoke the same language and felt that they were to some extent akin” (1981: 13). That affinity was possible only because there was not wide divergence in farm size, agricultural technique, or agrarian outlook during the era of the Greek polis.

8 “Autourgos may be as close as we get to the concept of citizen farmer or yeoman farmer in the Greek world” Burford 1993:172. On Pericles, see Thuc. 1.141.3; scholiast on Thuc. 1.141.3; for farmers in Euripides, Eur. Or. 920; Elect. 37ff; see also Plut. Per. 9; Men. Dys. 326; Arist. Rhet. 1381a23. The word autourgos is also discussed in Heitland 12-13, 123; L. B. Carter 76-79; de Ste. Croix 1981: 263; Burford 1993: 168-172.

9 See, e.g., Bisinger 15-17; Richter 14-17; Ridgeway 330-31; Guiraud 100-105. The ideal of dividing the land up equally among the citizenry reflects an agrarianism far removed from large tracts and concession run by lords, worked by serfs.

10 Only sporadically in our period do we hear of an ancient expression somewhat equivalent to agrarian agitation, gês anadasmos, the “redistribution of land” (see Bisinger 14-16; Asheri 1966: 21-25; Busolt and Swoboda 214 n. 1). Quite revealingly, that phrase is usually heard during the first and last centuries of the polis period (i.e., 700-600 B.C. and 400-300 B.C.), at a time contemporaneous with the original establishment and later erosion of the geôrgoi as the backbone of the city-state. “Redistribution of the land” is an expression, in other words, largely out of place in Greek history during much of the polis period.