Chapter 2
—Homer, Odyssey 24.205-212
The others went from the city, and presently came to the country place of Laertes, handsomely cultivated. Laertes himself had reclaimed it, after he spent much labor upon it. There was his house and all around the house ran a shelter, in which the slaves, who worked at his pleasure under compulsion, would take their meals, and sit, and pass the night.
Who Was Laertes?
To meet population pressure within Greece, cumulating at crisis levels during the eighth century, more land had to be put into agricultural production. Or existing land had to be used more productively. Or more and better agriculture were needed. That third alternative is exactly what we see in the twenty-fourth book of Homer’s Odyssey, in a human picture of men at work in the soil.
In these few lines of the last book of the Odyssey a vibrant rural life comes alive, centered on an efficient household’s intensive cultivation of the soil. The hero Odysseus, after his butchery of the suitors, leaves his palace at Ithaca to hike out to the farm of his father, Laertes. The aged Laertes had long ago left Ithaca proper in disgust at the suitors’ appropriation of his son’s royal residence, and for the past two decades has been able to do little more than survive in rural exile on his own. From Homer’s description it appears that Laertes’ small farm—long sought out by romantic archaeologists, improperly labeled a “garden” by literary critics*—is some distance from Ithaca and located in rough terrain (24.212). Once in the countryside, Homer presents a brief but fascinating look at a world quite unlike the life in Odysseus’s royal halls. There are no references to feasting, gaming, and the acquisitive arts of plundering, raiding, and thievery, which had characterized so much of the lazy suitors’ life in the banquet hall while the master was away.
The different mood out on the farm is not to be attributed merely to the abrupt change of scene from the leisurely, aristocratic pace of palace life. The sharp demarcation between master and slave in the poem is also gone: Laertes works beside his servants at menial tasks. Apparently work is something to be honored, not despised. Homer terms the property “handsomely cultivated,” a plot that the pioneer Laertes had created after investing “much labor” (24.205-207). His ground apparently was not inherited, or at least not inherited in its present state as developed farmland.
Laertes’ farm and indeed Laertes himself are something entirely different from past agricultural practice. Is it not possible to see in them elements of a novel agriculture quite at odds with what many scholars have called “peasant” or “subsistence” farming, or, on the opposite end of the social scale, “manorial,” “absentee,” or “estate” agriculture? Even at this early date, at the beginning of the seventh century, farming scarcely resembles at all the traditional scholarly portraits of “peasant” Greek agriculture revolving around nucleated residence, underemployment, and an absence of rural infrastructure.** Because Laertes’ farm reflects an agriculture crystallizing at roughly the same time as the appearance of the Greek city-state, the relationship between the two phenomena—farming and the subsequent culture of the polis—demands close scrutiny. Odysseus’s brief walk from palace out to farm is therefore a radical passage from the Dark-Age cloister of the aristocratic hall into the new world of the intensive geôrgos.
Consequently, Laertes was not a single, historical figure. He seems rather a representation of an entire class of new farmers—a vivid example of those anonymous men of the last chapter who ended the Dark Ages. Of course, historical representation in both of Homer’s two surviving epics, the Iliad and Odyssey, as was discussed earlier, is difficult to unravel and subject to constant scholarly reappraisal.* Nevertheless, Laertes’ farm provides a valuable snapshot, a brief hiatus from the epic pageantry of the poem. It most likely reflects modes of farming contemporary with Homer’s own life—that is, the era roughly around 700 B.C. The late eighth-century environment of the Odyssey is especially prevalent in Book Twenty-four of the poem, since the narrative here is pragmatic and clearly deals with common, everyday things in the life of an elderly Greek. The scene is quite devoid, in other words, of the less historical and utterly fantastic world of the epic. Gods, monsters, and feats of superhuman heroism are for a time absent.1
We must remember also that the Odyssey is a literary document. It is not history. Homer wrote poetry, not agronomy. The reason for this dramatic change of scene is not to portray the land, but rather its owner, Laertes, who is first and fundamentally aliterarycharacter. Dramatic and narrative necessity apparently requires in these closing lines that the dead suitors remain unavenged, and that Laertes have an emotional recognition scene with the son who had been lost for twenty years. Homestead residence, the slave work force, diversified crops, the isolated location, rough terrain, and the apparent small size of Laertes’ farm are not critical to the narrative of the poem as a whole. These agricultural descriptions are valuable only to the degree that they add detail, and thus aid Homer’s efforts to portray Laertes as isolated, hardworking, grim, and in the company of rustics and slaves.
In other words, the poet contrasts Laertes as much as possible with the luxury of the suitors in the palace below, the old world that, in the absence of his son, he has apparently lost. To describe this new life of hard, agricultural work requires Homer (or whoever wrote this passage) to draw on an environment completely familiar to him and to his audience as well. In all probability the poet adopted the characteristics of a class of intensive agriculturalists, a trailblazing group confined neither to Ithaca, the scene of theOdyssey, nor to Ionia, Homer’s own purported home. The poet’s artistic purposes are to make Laertes a believable “farmer”—pitied, if not scorned, by the traditional more pastoral elites who lounged in Ithaca below.2 By design, the unenviable life of the intensive farmer would also invoke sympathy and condescension, not admiration, from Homer’s own contemporary aristocratic and reactionary audience of upscale urban dwellers, listeners who themselves would have no desire to carve out new ground, to farm on their knees.
Laertes’ farm reveals at least six peculiarities of intensive agriculture that can explain why such late eighth-century operations were becoming more productive and more successful than past farming practice at any prior time in Greek history. Laertes’ plot, then, serves as a prototype by which later to distinguish intensive agriculture from other farming strategies. It is my belief that the following characteristics of Laertes’ farm, like the type of agriculture described in Hesiod’s Works and Days (Chapter 3), were all relatively unknown in the period before the eighth century, but quite common farming practices of the next four centuries of polis life. They were responsible for the increased capital and leisure fundamental to the culture of the Greek city-state. In sum, the emergence of the new agrarian practices described here—homestead residence, irrigation, slave labor, diversified crops, the incorporation of marginal ground, localized food processing and storage—has been largely unknown or underappreciated by ancient historians, and so the accomplishments of these farmers have never been central to, or even included in, the standard accounts of Greek history.
Increasing Productivity
It is striking that Laertes has built himself a permanent residence on his farm, an oikos that Homer calls “comfortable” and “well-furnished.” A farmhouse is thus clear from the context. Homer is quite unambiguous about that. Laertes’ residence is a building clearly isolated and apart from others.3 It is a permanent residence and it is owner-occupied.
But for most of the history of classical scholarship it was axiomatic that ancient Greek farmers, both rich and poor, in all eras of Greek history, commuted to work from the neighboring village, there being, in this view, no permanent housing on the farm itself. Most Americans who have grown up with the image of the family farmhouse, barn, and assorted pens, fences, silos, and other outbuildings would find this image startling, if not confusing. Scholars are correct to warn us about our modern prejudices, our ignorance of the peculiar environmental, economical, and cultural predilections of the ancient Greeks. They attribute the absence of isolated farmhouses in antiquity to scarcities of water in the arid Greek countryside, to worries about theft, the organized raiding party, or the full-fledged enemy invasion, to the underemployment of nonirrigated “extensive” agricultural practice, and to the social desirability of living in communal villages.4
All these factors are cited to explain why a farmer would be willing to walk hours each day out to his fields. In our first recorded picture of a Greek farm, however, the literary evidence shows that the owner is not a commuter. Homer’s Laertes is obviously living right amidst the fields he works. This passage long ago should have given rise to doubts about the traditional picture of farmer residence in town. In fact, traditional objections can be turned on their heads: it is the need to protect the rural infrastructure, the necessity for constant labor, the importance of water and small-scale irrigation projects, and the desire for a new rural identity—all characteristic of Greek agriculture after the Dark Ages—that actually argue for the notion of scattered homestead farmhouses.
Since the 1940s a number of country residences have been excavated in rural Attica surrounding Athens. John Young, for example, in brilliant research after World War II, found a complex of farm “towers” (purgoi) in southern Attica, most of which he convincingly associated with ancient farms. He also spotted some sixty-one similar extant structures elsewhere in the Greek countryside, suggesting that these towers illustrated rural residence—not military garrisons or mining facilities, but farmhouses whose stoutness could provide both protection and safe storage for harvested crops. A few years later, a team of British and American archaeologists excavated in Attica two substantial farmhouses on the slopes of Mt. Parnes, and later at Vari south of Athens. Since then the remains of other ancient farmhouses in Attica have turned up with increasing frequency. In the environs of Athens, the picture of a settled countryside has thus become clearer.5
This archaeological record of preserved farm sites makes perfect sense if one keeps in mind a literary tradition that early on the Athenians, like Laertes at Ithaca, lived “dispersed” throughout the countryside. Later there was also the tradition that the Athenians had lived scattered “all over Attica.” That picture of farmstead residence may have been just what Aristotle had in mind in his Politics when he wrote that in “early times the city-states were not large, but rather the common people lived on their farms (epi tôn agrôn)busily engaged in agriculture.”6
Other literary evidence confirms the view that people often lived on the plots they worked, and that Homer’s Laertes was representative of a growing custom of homestead residence. In the Athenian orators of the fourth century, we often hear of rivalries among unruly rural neighbors over property boundaries, or disputes between descendants over the family land and house. The Greek historians also write of invasions that catch sizable numbers of farmers unawares out on their plots—families who clearly live in their country residences full-time. These are geôrgoi, who apparently feel that it is crucial to maintain their rural residence, despite the threat of war and the protection that the nearby village might offer.7
In drama there are portraits of hardworking farmers, who like Laertes live permanently in isolated residences that are clearly at a distance from town. The rural homestead farmers in Euripides’ Electra and Menander’s Dyscolus and geôrgos both show that the phenomenon is not restricted to any one era or locale during the polis period, but characteristic of city-state culture in general. The Aristotelian Oeconomica, no doubt, is thinking of homestead residence in its advice to build a house with ample consideration for food storage, both dry and moist crops, and shelter for livestock and slaves.8
Throughout nearly every region in Greece including Attica, Boeotia, the Crimea, the Argolid, Ionia, the Peloponnese, southern Italy and Sicily, and the Aegean islands homestead farmhouses were a significant part of the ancient Greek landscape, as their first appearance here in Greek literature suggests. Recent survey work in Boeotia has speculated that there could have been 10,000 rural “sites,” a countryside teeming with small farmers. Perhaps it is an indication too that many of the feared Boeotian hoplite infantrymen of antiquity (modern estimates independently peg their numbers at about ten to twelve thousand) resided on the land they farmed. In this instance, perhaps sixty percent of all the Boeotians lived outside Thebes and its small satellite villages of the Boeotian confederacy.9
But why and how was farm residence integral to Greek intensive agriculture and the rise of polis agrarianism? In short, why did Laertes, and the new farmers like him who emerged from the Dark Ages, frequently choose now to live on the land they worked?
First and foremost, one might say that a farmhouse illustrates an effort on the farmer’s part to enhance and protect his property. Therefore, these residences must have been a reflection of the growth of private property and individual control over agriculture. The regular commute—in this case measured by the walk of Odysseus from the palace at Ithaca—which is a frequent agricultural phenomenon in both medieval and modern Greece, costs the new intensive farmer too much precious time.
Similarly, on the Aegean island of Melos survey archaeologists found that modern Greek farmers averaged a mean time of two hours fifty-five minutes traveling to work each day. That subsequent loss in farming productivity explains why governments have sometimes attempted to force farmers to live in homestead residences as part of a concerted effort to increase overall agricultural efficiency, and why typically sheds and barns often accompany houses. Kenneth Thompson reported that many modern Greek farmers claimed three weeks lost per year in simply walking to their disparate fields. One farmer spent almost five hours a day in commute time, sometimes simply to do a fifteen-minute operation on his distant plot. Another agrarian apparently traveled five thousand kilometers in a year to and from his farm.*
Clearly, fragmented holdings are often associated with nucleated settlement; farmsteads, in contrast, often illustrate consolidated farms. Similarly, Robert Weaver noted that he “rode a donkey from a village in the Vostizza (northern Peloponnese) for 30 or 40 minutes up steep slopes, with the grower, to a vineyard property of only one-fourth acre”—a common enough sight to anyone who has traveled through the countryside of modern Greece. It is my belief that precisely the opposite situation more often prevailed in many regions of Greece during the period of the polis, when agrarian necessity was a completely different notion from that of either Dark-Age or contemporary Greece. Commuting over some distance was not the price of social acceptance, but antithetical to the social, political, and economic environment of intensive agriculture—and the growing agrarian chauvinism of the Greek polis itself.10
This may be the moment to observe that analogies with modern Greek agricultural practice (in this case, the frequent absence of farmhouses), although certainly valuable for an understanding of ancient Greek agrarianism, are not always a reliable guide to every aspect of past farming strategies.** Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Turkish, and modern Greeks after the polis period may well have farmed more extensively than their more ancient counterparts, commuted more, and had more fragmented landholdings than their modern descendants. Indeed, we will show that the eventual erosion of the polis period was the direct result of a decline of agrarian values and practices such as intensified labor, diversified crops, and farm residence.
With intensive farming, there is often a variety of crops. Little slack time exists to allow the farmer either to stay some days in the village, or to invest hours each day in commuting time. Laertes and his slave workers, then, must sleep and eat amid their fields, not walk up each day from the palace at Ithaca. Residential buildings in themselves become proof of intensification. The more valuable farm plots in antiquity seem to have been either near the city-state walls, or those with homes and other buildings.
Clearly, the presence of a farmhouse reflects greater investment in the agricultural infrastructure of Laertes’ farm—fruit trees, vines, vineyard stakes, pens, outbuildings, livestock, and slaves, Laertes needed close supervision to ensure against damage, theft, or vandalism from both men and animals. Capital crops such as trees and vines demanded constant attention when planted, protection against browsing animals, extra irrigation and fertilization. In addition to the construction of costly fencing, this frequently required the agriculturalist to spend the evenings, nights, and early mornings on the farm. These circumstances explain why the poor Plataeans were on their farms on the spring night in 431 B.C. when the Thebans invaded their village and countryside.11
Besides the demands of intensive farm work and the need for property protection, farm residence also reflects a growing ideology of “aloofness” and “quietism,” of an “apartness in the fields.” After all, ancient agricultural custom is not exclusively economically oriented. The home-steader, unlike the modern villagers of Melos, deliberately sacrifices the social “advantages” of communal living in favor of a new identification with agrarian life in general and his own farm in particular. Indeed, the permanent creation of houses on the land may itself explain the independent nature of the Greek city-state, which in its origin was more a forum than a home—really no more than a point of assembly where the larger community of outlying farmers could gather to exchange produce and to craft legislation or deliberate on other crucial matters. It is therefore not surprising if independent and strong-willed hoplite-farmers fashioned a separate existence beyond the confines of the city and its mores.
Significantly, Odysseus is struck by Laertes’ seeming indifference to his shabby appearance—rough tunic, patched and ugly, ox-hide leggings, gloves to prevent scratching, and goatskin cap—garb that would likely draw rebuke if the old man had lived in or commuted to his farm from Ithaca.12 Laertes’ appearance actually moves his son to tears! Odysseus emphasizes the assumed loss of social prestige that accompanies his soli’ tary, work-filled existence,
—(24.244-50)
Old sir, there is in you no lack of expertness in tending your orchard; everything is well cared for and there is never a plant, neither fig tree nor grapevine nor olive nor pear tree nor leek bed uncared for in your garden But l will also teil you this; do not take it as cause for anger. You yourself are ill-cared for; together with dismal old age, which is yours, you are squalid and wear foul clothing upon you.
Much earlier, in Book One of the poem, Athena, disguised as the old Mentes, had said nearly the same thing.
—(1.189-93)
Laertes, who, they say no longer comes to the city now, but away by himself on his own land leads a hard life with an old woman to look after him, who serves him his victuals and drink, at times when weariness has befallen his body from making his toilsome way on the high ground of his vineyard.
Strikingly, though, there are few signs of disillusionment or disenchantment on Laertes’ part toward his own circumstances, and little hint of a longing for city life. Laertes does recognize the problems of old age and the crisis at the palace below. While like Penelope he waits dutifully for the return of Odysseus, he does not share others’ general revulsion for hard farm work and an isolated existence expressed elsewhere in the Odyssey.
Later in our sources—comedy especially—there is ample reference to these physical differences between the city dweller (asteios) and the agrarian (agroikos).* Most scholars suggest that this contrast is largely a product of comic distortion or exaggeration, rooted in the political gulf between rural conservatives and urban progressives at Athens during the fifth century.13 But the contrast is too frequently drawn and too vivid to be anything but a reflection of real differences between those who live permanently out on homestead farms and those of a different stripe who reside and work in town to serve the needs of the largely agrarian population. Aristotle at any rate thought (perhaps wrongly) that the entire genre of Greek comedy arose out of an agrarian practice. Farmers, Aristotle believed, originally had ventured into town (kômê) at night to shout at and ridicule wealthier urban elites whom they felt to be oppressive and threatening. Attic comedy, in this view, was thus a ritualized version of these impromptu outbursts.14
Allusions to rural folk in literature go beyond puns and ridicule of dress, body odor, and the general uncouthness of rustics. From the opposite (and less often heard) agrarian point of view, there is sometimes a substantial hostility to city life and its attendant sophistication. An even sharper attitude arose in fifth-century Greece, which reemphasized the old disdain for the “social desirability” of living in town, suggesting to many farmers that urban life had moved too far beyond the original idea of the polis as a place to determine the economic and political agenda of surrounding property owners, and where the minority of city folk were directly involved in serving the needs of the rural majority.
This attitude is captured in Aristophanes’ lost Geôrgoi, where a farmer—obviously no impoverished cashless peasant, nor a wealthy estate owner eager for political recognition—offers a politician a thousand drachmas if he can escape public service which would require his presence in town. During the brief invasions of the Archidamian War (431-425 B.C.), “back to the farm” becomes almost a cry of agrarian solidarity for Attic farmers cooped up in Athens. Despite agrarians’ belief that those in town were shown preference, Aristotle assumed that farmers even during his own time generally did not attend the assembly unless absolutely necessary—a practice which was even more likely in the seventh through early fifth centuries.15
Elsewhere in Greek literature, we hear also that farmers were too busy to come into town for political gatherings. Some country dwellers rarely, if ever, had any desire to walk into the polis. Indeed, there was a remarkable tradition of sorts that a great many residents of Attica never went into Athens at all.16 Alciphron, whose work is a vast repository of anecdotal scraps from past Greek and Roman literature, knew of a story (of uncertain date) about a young man who tried to convince his mother to venture into Athens to view its wondrous sights before she died: “Mother, leave the country and the rough ground for a little while, and take a look at the fine sights of the city…. Come, do not delay … may it never happen that you should leave this life without having had a taste of the city” (3.39). In another letter, the young rustic is made to say: “I don’t even know what this so-called polis is like. So I’m eager to see this new sight—that is men living inside a wall—and to learn how a polis is different from country life” (Alciphr. 3.31). A near-identical tale is associated with Aesop, who supposedly began one of his allegories with the story of an old farmer who wished to see the city for the first time before he died (Vit. Aesop 1.140.2; 2.140.3).
Polybius, in an extreme case, claimed that the farmers at Elis had not entered town for two to three generations. More plausible was Isocrates’ nostalgic account of traditional agrarian Attica, when fine country residences allowed “many of the residents never to venture into Athens, even for festivals.” Utopian assertions in reactionary fourth-century philosophical literature that citizens maintain residences both in town and out in the country were likewise responses to the growing split between homesteaders and the urban landless.17
I will suggest later (Chapter 9) that the rise of rural chauvinism had critical implications for the future of the Greek city-state. For more than two centuries small farmers had fostered a stable, thriving egalitarianism, but in the process they also added a strong, often strident moral and ethical element to the market thinking of the polis. As fifth- and fourth-century Greece became more involved in the wider life of the Mediterranean, its indigenous “planters of trees” grew even more reactionary, more hostile to capital formation and the growth of commercial wealth in the city, which provided the incomes necessary for the expanding nonagricultural segment of the population. In short, the geôrgoi eventually lost the polis which had been their own creation; and it became not a proud display of agrarian dynamism and agricultural cohesion, but a home to nonagrarian outsiders and a haunt of the elite.
By the fourth century that centuries-old symbiosis—especially at Athens—between the polis and the distinctive homestead farmer was, in the wake of growing urbanization and population growth, becoming more complex. At the end of the polis period, farm living in Greece was clearly on the decline. No wonder a kindred motif in literature is the stock complaint against the corrupting influences of the city, for often we are told that farmers must be careful not to become “hooked” on urban excitement during their brief visits. Young men were especially prone to corruption and could often come home forever ruined for farm work: they were advised to “stay out at work on the farm, for that way your hard work will result in a full grain-bin, wine-jugs overflowing with wine, and the storehouse full of all good things” (Alciphr. 3.14; 3.25, 40).
The stubbornness and self-reliance of rural residents so frequently parodied by Aristophanes is also a direct result of homestead life and a part of the distinctive agrarian character profile. “The true farmer,” Plutarch says, “doesn’t even wish to hear news from the city that has made its own way to the country.” He adds that the “busybody” (polypragmôn), the scourge of Greek literature, “rarely goes out to the farmland, since he can’t take the quiet and solitude of being by himself.” People in town had even begun to talk differently, more effeminately than their masculine counterparts in the countryside.
From isolated residence the very independence of the Greek character itself must have originated. Perhaps the best evidence of the rural pride of these new farmers is found in the right-wing verse of Theognis, an urban poet of the mid-sixth century who complained bitterly about the “leather-wearing men who circle the city like pasturing deer” (frs. 54-57). That image of Laertes’ descendants, the hide-clothed farmers with their leather hats and work capes who set themselves off from the smaller urban populace is commonplace in poetry and prose, cropping up in nearly every genre of Greek literature as men who are deeply suspicious of urban life or a commercial existence on the sea.18
The rise of the intensive-working geôrgoi did not mean a complete end to farmers’ residence in nucleated settlements. Many Greeks still lived in small hamlets, villages, and in more formal small and big poleis. Instead, the steady growth of farmhouses marked the beginning of the end of the Dark Ages, an undeniable break with an earlier time when nearly the entire countryside was empty of homestead farmers.19
Some Greeks, it is true, were still completely divorced from agriculture and without title to land. There were other numerous poor of the city-state who worked extremely small plots, and an old entrenched aristocracy continued to own bottom land near thepoliswalls. All of these could reside in small nucleated clusters, rural towns, or in larger urban centers.* But for a growing group of intensive, prosperous agriculturalists, the geôrgoi, living on the farm itself was now becoming integral to producing food in a new and far more dynamic fashion. Farm residence, therefore, helped to forge both a new rural identity and an interest in preserving the agrarian community at large. The poliswould have been impossible without it.
Skepticism also abounds from modern scholars concerning the frequency of artificial watering. Nevertheless, citations have been compiled from Greek literature that point to available water development outside the city-state, and often to the common practice of irrigation.** These references to water supplies must mean that residence out in the country was not merely practical, but in particular cases even necessary—given the need to maintain the developed rural infrastructure of young vineyards and orchards, as well as gardens. All cultivated trees and vines in a Mediterranean climate require irrigation at planting, and regularly thereafter, until at least their second or third year when they have developed an extensive root system. Even then good production may require some supplementary water, especially for soft-fruit harvests. Quite simply, the idea of ubiquitous irrigation on Greek farms cannot be easily dismissed.
One must not envision the vast communal projects and hydraulic dynasties of the ancient Near East—elaborate dams, ditches, level fields, and watering-lifting devices—in order to establish use of irrigation in the ancient Greek countryside. Predictably, the Greeks had no desire for the complexity of the palace. Instead, they fashioned new irrigation practices to reflect their native terrain, with its absence of enormous rivers running through flat expanses, and their own individualism. For the Greek geôrgoi this meant rudimentary, private efforts—small diversion of streams, wells, retaining basins, springs, dams—on modest plots devoted to gardens and the nourishment of young trees and vines in newly established orchards and vineyards. Theophrastus, for example, advised burying a pot of water next to each small vine to ensure soil moisture during the critical stage after planting.20
Like rural farmhouses, privately, rather than communally, developed sources of water suggest an intensification of agriculture, and therefore a sizable dispersed population of independent Greek farmers. Thus in our passage in the Odyssey, Laertes has a garden on his farm, which surely must have required irrigation during the hot summer months. Alkinoös, the king of Phaeacia, as Homer relates earlier in Book Seven, had developed an elaborate irrigation system.
—(7.112-130)
On the outside of the courtyard and next to the doors is his orchard, a great one, four land measures, with a fence driven all around it, and there is the place where his fruit trees are grown tall and flourishing, pear trees and pomegranate trees and apple trees with their shining fruit, and the sweet fig trees and the flourishing olive. Never is the fruit spoiled on these, never does it give out, neither in winter time nor summer, but always the West Wind blowing on the fruits brings some to ripeness while he starts others. Pear matures on pear in that place, apple upon apple, grape cluster on grape cluster, fig upon fig. There also he has a vineyard planted that gives abundant produce, some of it a warm area on level ground where the grapes are left to dry in the sun, but elsewhere they are gathering others and trampling out yet others, and in front of these are unripe grapes that have cast off their bloom while others are darkening. And there two springs distribute water, one through all the garden space, and one on the other side jets out by the courtyard door.
Likewise in the Iliad Homer displays a detailed knowledge of irrigation techniques, as in this extended simile from Book Twenty-one, where the Scamander river pursues Achilles. Homer envisions Achilles:
as a man running a channel from a spring of dark water [who] guides the run of the water among his plants and his gardens with a mattock in his hand and knocks down the blocks in the channel; in the rush of the water all the pebbles beneath are torn loose from place, and the water that has been dripping suddenly jets on in a steep place and goes too fast even for the man who guides it.21
From later Greek literature, inscriptions, and archaeological evidence, it becomes clear that farmers employed a variety of strategies to grow irrigated crops on their small farms—quite the opposite of the usual scholarly picture of extensive dry-farming by peasants. Sometimes we hear of individual wells in literature or see conduits (of 200 meters or more) running from excavated farmhouses, from which farmers must have carried buckets for individual plants. In confiscation lists there are inventories of water-lifting devices. Occasionally, even the remains of small dams and reservoirs have been spotted in the countryside.22
Theophrastus assumed irrigation to be crucial to certain types of Greek agriculture. Why else would he list species of figs improved by watering, or describe the combined application of manure and water, or warn that “often the water from irrigation ditches brings with it the seeds of weeds”—something any farmer knows from experience is often the price of turning to canal, rather than well water? Throughout his agronomic treatises there are special sections devoted entirely to irrigation.23
In addition to apparent ancient irrigation channels on the Corinthian plain, there were numerous developed natural springs in the area. Thus Corinth was described by Simonides as “well-watered.” On the Aegean island of Chios large water cisterns eight meters in diameter have been uncovered amid ancient stone terraces, designed apparently for irrigation and rural residence.* The wide variety of evidence for water-use during the polis-period clearly makes the old view that irrigation was relatively rare simply implausible. We should imagine that anytime available water might be somehow transported downhill to relatively level fields, the Greeks piped, channeled, or carried it.
Quite simply, the establishment of arboriculture and viticulture at the end of the eighth century would not have been possible without constant care of young stock. That argues for rural residence and a type of rudimentary irrigation system—even if here we mean merely daily, and extremely labor-intensive, transport with clay water jugs on donkeys. These were agricultural practices still almost unknown during the Dark Ages. In a settled Greece laced with bridle paths, publicly maintained roads, parks, and canals, we should include small farmhouses and privately constructed irrigation ditches—ditches whose presence in the Greek countryside Aristotle compared to veins carrying blood in the body.24
We have seen now that the new farmers built homesteads, and dug, damned, and channeled. But as hardworking as these families were, they could not have developed this rural infrastructure alone; their novel vision of a bustling, populated countryside required a vast cadre of slaves—men and women more forgotten in the historical record than the geôrgoi themselves.
I have farmed a single twenty-acre block of ten different species of irrigated fruit trees—apricot, pomegranate, persimmon, fig, plum, peach, nectarine, oriental pear, guava, quince—that required more labor than an adjoining single block of ninety acres of vines for specialized raisin production (even though viticulture itself is labor- and capital-intensive). The several fruit-tree species demand different watering, pruning, cultivating, fertilizing, and harvesting techniques. They are on poor, hilly ground, compounding water, insect, and fertilization problems. All require close supervision of labor, since pruners or thinners cannot simply be turned loose amid the many baffling problems accompanying each species. And more capital investment—sheds, ladders, tree props, boxes, buckets—is needed, which demands constant maintenance and replacement.
Each small plot has different soil challenges (which can vary radically acre by acre), and it takes constant attention (and occasional disaster) to learn which species of tree can be grown in which particular locations—something known immediately under monoculture, but requiring a painful trial-and-error method with so many diverse crops. Lost trees require prompt replacement with new trees that need additional extra care—far more difficult when layering (as in the case of the established vineyard) is impossible. The diversified farmer may have to venture constantly throughout the established orchard, watering and fertilizing individual replants, and the art of grafting becomes critical, given the variety of trees that may perish each year.
Because we have grown these diversified crops organically and sold them directly at farmers’ markets, the fruit is picked ripe for instant consumption. Boxed, trucked, and sold within hours, it is not handled at all through a food broker or produce exchange. As in antiquity (and indeed as was true in this country before World War I and the advent of accessible refrigeration), there is no cushion in the timing of the harvest. Fruit cannot be picked green, put into cold storage, shipped across the country, and eaten two to four weeks later. The strategy for local fresh sale instead is to plant small plots of different species so that harvest dates do not coincide. Four full-time workers do nothing but prune, water, prop, thin, harvest, and box the sequential small harvests and aid in the selling; they move constantly from small plot to plot during all seasons. Any free time is devoted to ladder and bin repair, patching irrigation pipe, and driving to additional markets. On the other 140 acres, which are not farmed as intensively, and which in a strictly farming sense pose far fewer problems, there is a single full-time employee. Yet the small diversified plots are a headache we cannot afford to abandon, for they provide a safety net in times of natural or economic crisis. The entire success of the operation depends on the presence of a small group of skilled, permanent workers.
During the shift from Dark-Age pastoralism and cereal-based agriculture to intensive farming and the rise of the polis, slave labor—like homestead farmhouses and irrigation—became common in the Greek countryside. Unfree workers were known throughout the Mycenean period and no doubt during the later Dark Ages as well. Yet with the appearance of the polis, Greece began to import increasing numbers of servile adult male laborers. Understandably, Greek authors believed that commonplace chattel slavery was a phenomenon of recent history, one contemporaneous with the establishment of their own polis institutions. The preponderant agrarian nature of the Greek population, the need for extra labor under intensive farming practices, the absence of legal restraints to slave ownership, the rising social disdain among independent yeomanry for manual wage labor, the growing wealth of the Greek economy, the extension of the Greek presence overseas and to the north as well, and the absolute absence of moral stricture in owning other human beings—all explain why during the polis period slaves in growing numbers entered Greece. It was an area that must have had an appetite for workers quite out of proportion in the Eastern Mediterranean to its small size and scant natural resources. Sponge-like, Greece at the end of the Dark Ages began absorbing manpower for its farms from around the Mediterranean, drawing laborers apparently not in demand in their native (and often superior) agricultural environments. Plainly, the Greeks were farming in ways far different from their northern, eastern, and southern neighbors—and in ways that clearly required much more labor.25
Not surprisingly, Homer shows us that Laertes closely supervises his own agricultural slaves, who live in a barracks right beside his own home. An elderly Sicilian slave woman, kept free from field work, apparently cooks and presides over the indoor tasks, while the aged Dolios and the other slaves under the direct orders of Laertes himself gather stones from the fields to build a retaining or terrace wall. As they work on the farm’s terraces, Odysseus approaches and discovers his father, bent down and weeding around a tree. Laertes is clearly not portrayed as an absentee or even a large landowner, a country gentleman like Ischomachos, who appears in the philosopher-historian Xenophon’s fourth-century treatise, the Oeconomicus, and who sees his servile help more as capital to be exploited for profit than as a means to ensure income and a way of life. Instead, old Laertes apparently is intimate with his slaves, living and working among them at similar tasks. At the end of the Odyssey, Laertes fights right at their side against the families of the suitors.26
Dolios and his sons are not a temporary harvest gang, men needed in the crush of the season and then dismissed to avoid idling once the crops are picked. Nor do they appear as helot-like indentured serfs. At this particular place in the Odyssey, Laertes’ servile help is not mentioned as engaged in harvesting, but rather in soil reclamation and food preparation, “the old man guiding them on their errand.” Apparently Laertes needs slaves year-round for a variety of farm improvement and more mundane daily tasks; he can keep the men busy even outside the harvest periods. Steady employment allows the workers to obtain an expertise otherwise not possible through temporary wage labor; slave farmhands now have achieved a skill in all aspects of farm work.27
Interestingly enough, the slaves’ labor does not free Laertes from work for fulfillment of social or political obligations. Nor is it designed to. Not only does there seem to be a real need for Laertes to engage in manual activity himself, but the old man apparently enjoys his hard work—despite the supposed aristocratic dislike for stoop labor—and seems to feel that it is also somehow critical in ensuring the productivity of his own workers. In other words, Laertes leads by example.
These references to servile workers are striking in light of the traditional scholarly denial of the presence of slaves in ancient Greek agriculture. Only for the Marxist historian, is it axiomatic that slaves were found at every level of Greek society: the slave mode of production offered up bodies to be exploited for their masters’ pleasure, part and parcel of the brutal process of extracting the critical surplus in agricultural productivity and creating the free time that their owners’ more “leisured” lifestyle required.
Others bristled at the notion that the Greeks should have had to rely on an institution so intrinsically brutish and “undemocratic” as agricultural slavery in order to find time to engage in the niceties of this new idea of “politics.” Thus champions of Athenian democracy—and a great many other Greek historians—rejected the presence of farm slaves on any wide scale—at least, and especially, at Athens.28
Most citizens of Attica were in some way connected to farming: if it was argued that only a few farmers used slaves, Athens became a citystate of “peasants,” of truly free men who did not base their democratic institutions on the backs of an exploited class. In this view, Athenians practiced a low-input type of agriculture, extensive farming that not only did not require servile help, but also allowed the farmers themselves ample free time. As evidence, critics of agricultural slavery in the Greek polis maintain there is a lack of clear-cut, unambiguous literary evidence for agricultural slavery. They also cite the impracticality of keeping extra mouths to feed on small “subsistence” plots whose workers were constantly underemployed. They note the exorbitant expense involved for a small farmer in purchasing slaves, and point to mechanisms other than chattel slavery to explain why Greek citizenry of the polis did not engage in class struggle until Hellenistic and Roman times. Yet it is evident that Laertes owns a few slaves. He himself does not seem to have much leisure. Nor is he underemployed.
In truth, the references in literature to chattel slaves who work on Greek farms in the seventh through fourth centuries throughout the Greek-speaking world are unambiguous and they have been collated by a number of ancient historians.29 These passages occur in nearly every genre of Greek literature. Although there could in some cases be exaggeration, distortion, or confusion, the sheer diversity of authors, places, and contexts suggests that servile workers were commonplace in the Greek countryside throughout thepolisperiod, essential to the success of intensive agriculture itself. The literary references further imply that not merely the wealthy few, but also the many middling farmers, like Laertes, employed slaves. They appear not as large gangs of unattended workers, but rather as close, intimate, fellow manual laborers.30
Just because Greek farms were small need not suggest underemployment or the absence of either sustenance or work for a permanent servile laborer. Most farms, like Laertes’, were diversified, with harvests occurring throughout the year. Many crops were planted or grown on reclaimed land. Like Laertes’ plot, they needed constant attention to both terrace and fence upkeep. Also, trees and vines can require more labor than cereals and can produce dramatically higher yields when pruned, fertilized, cultivated, planted densely, and watered methodically.31
The picking of olives from large trees, as anyone can attest who has attempted it, is a nightmarish task. It is the agronomic situation that the modern agricultural advisor implores the farmer to avoid: large trees, small, unevenly ripening fruit, no chance for mechanization—a process extending over not days, not weeks, but rather months on end. On Greek vases the olive harvest appears as a confused affair: pickers are simultaneously kneeling on the ground, perched on limbs of the tree, and standing beating the leaves with sticks. The introduction of vine stakes and trellises—typical in the polis period—although requiring far more labor and capital, could also enhance grape production and quality. Cereals, too, produce higher yields when fertilized, weeded, and cultivated.32
The degree of labor required on any farm, ancient or modern, depends on the level of intensification, the frequency of true fallowing, and the particular crops farmed, not merely on the size of the plot in question. Ten acres of vines and trees could easily require more labor than a thirty-acre grain field. Xenophon remarked that land “unfarmed and not planted in trees and vines” (argos kai aphuteutos) became “many times more valuable” once an orchard or vineyard was propagated (Oec. 20.23-24). The Greeks of thepoliswere aware that intensive farming often could take a toll on trees and vines, that the efforts to force maximum production sometimes led to decreased life expectancy of vineyards and orchards—a realization that must suggest Greek farmers normally invested capital and labor in their land to produce as much as possible. Intensification and diversification also invite a whole host of related tasks in addition to the cultivation of the soil: time spent marketing and exchanging produce, additional equipment and infrastructure, and renewed worries over storage.33
Anywhere diverse crops are grown intensively, fertilization, planting, cultivation, plowing, grafting, and harvesting allow for little slack time in the agricultural calendar. Xenophon knew well that on a diversified farm on any given day men were planting orchards and vineyards (phuteuontes), clearing new land (neiopoiountes), sowing grain (speirontes), or harvesting fruit (karpon proskomizontes). “Produce,” advises the Aristotelian Oeconomica, “should be so used that we do not risk all our possessions at the same time.” Although there are references to specialized harvest-time wage laborers who could come in handy at peak demand in the agricultural year, their employment was less common and more often confined to cereal culture during harvests. Hired free and landless agricultural workers were always despised in Greece as engaging in “brutish” work. The impression we receive from Greek literature is that the successful middling farmer usually sought to acquire one or two slaves, and then often relied on the unfortunate poorer grower or the landless to augment his permanent help during the few weeks of cereal harvesting or fruit picking.34
The need at the end of the eighth century to acquire permanent agricultural workers must have led to the development of skilled field laborers, since farmers, like Laertes, were able themselves to train slaves in particular tasks year-round on the farm. Thucydides much later during the Peloponnesian War refers to Attic slaves who fled their farms during the enemy invasions of 413-404 B.C. as cheirotechnai (skilled workers), a denotation that probably reflected their accumulated agricultural expertise. At any rate, despite occasional complaints in literature that the agricultural slave could become fat and lazy, workers of this sort seem a far cry from harvest-time gangs, who were known to be undependable and occasionally slackers.35
Nor is there evidence that agricultural slaves were inordinately expensive. They were not beyond the reach of most Greek farmers. If bought on the open market, servile workers in general might cost between 150 and 200 drachmas at Athens by the end of the fifth century—about the price of a pair of oxen or the small farmer’s own arms and armor.36
There is good evidence to suggest that most agricultural slaves were not purchased through traditional peacetime markets, but rather were cheap byproducts of war as booty and plunder, and thus often sold sporadically in mass auctions at depressed prices. A traditional tale attested that the sudden acquisition of slaves in mass at Locris disrupted the market for free labor in general. In a more precise agricultural context, the anonymous Oxyrhynchus Historian of the early fourth century says that the Thebans bought slaves from the countryside of Athens at a “cheap” price in the closing years of the Peloponnesian War. In explanation, he adds that the Athenians themselves habitually “brought into their own fields whatever they took from other Greeks when fighting.” This passage suggests that the slaves on the farms of Attica were themselves originally acquired cheaply by the Athenians through conquest and wartime raiding, not merely in small numbers at private sales.*
Most farmers in Greece were landed infantrymen, usually (as at Athens) drawn from the zeugitai, the census class usually associated exclusively until the latter fifth century with independent moderate property owners. As hoplite soldiers, Greek farmers were accompanied on campaign by a servile attendants, charged with carrying the hoplite’s seventy pounds of armor and weaponry. In nearly every case, we hear that such helpers were not relatives nor hired hands, but rather slaves.37
If hoplite soldiers owned land, and took their own servants into war, it makes sense to conclude that in peacetime the slaves were employed on the soldiers’ farms. Though this direct relationship during the latter polis period between middling farmer and citizen militiaman was finally modified and even ended at various locales, it remains a valid generalization for the first three centuries of the city-state: the hoplite’s armor carrier proved the existence of his servile agricultural laborer. Thus Greek agrarianism itself was predicated on chattel slavery, the unknown mass of now-forgotten men like—Manes, Syra, Thratta, Sosias, Sikon, and countless others—who dug vines, terraced hillsides, picked fruit, cooked food, carried armor, prepared rations, and helped the battlewearygeôrgostrudge back to his farm. They made possible both Greek farming and fighting throughout the lifetime of the city-state.
Slaves were critical to the success of a rising breed of new agriculturalists, men whose freedom was now defined as owning land and not living or working under constraint to another. The clear distinction between those who worked under compulsion and those who managed that labor clearly went hand in hand with the farmers’ own middling but chauvinistic identity as a group neither aristocrat nor serf. From this point on, the ubiquitous presence of chattel slaves on the farms of the geôrgoi was—like the pairing of hoplite and hoplite attendant—a constant reminder of the farmers’ own freedom, of the fact they were not indentured, but rather free men who employed slaves of unambiguously inferior social status. Even modern rural sociologists tell us that nothing undermines a rural community so quickly as a large body of farm wage-laborers, with a concurrent small group of independently employed farmers. In Greece, however, only a slave or two was attached to each farm, ensuring that neither wage nor servile laborers outnumbered thegeôrgoi themselves.
Paradoxically, the unambiguously unfree status of Greek farmer-workers attached to the plots of the geôrgoi ensured that there would not be a shiftless population of wage earners disrupting local agrarian communities. Nor under such a system would there be a few despots on top to siphon off the work of thousands as was typical in the East.38
As we will see, Laertes’ wide choice of crops, his reclamation of new land, and his personal control of food processing and storage were additional pieces in the new agricultural mosaic. As with the rise of homestead residence, irrigation, and slave labor, these other revolutionary elements explain when, why, and how agrarianism and the agrarian polis appeared on the Greek landscape.
From Homer’s description it is clear that Laertes not only possessed a farmhouse and slaves, but also had a wide variety of tree fruit in his orchard. In addition, he grew vines of differing varieties. Odysseus says to his father: “And you also named the fifty vines you would give. Each of them bore regularly, for there were grapes at every stage upon them, whenever the seasons of Zeus came down from the sky upon them, to make them heavy” (24.341-44). Besides this varied assortment of trees and vines, Laertes also produced vegetables, assorted livestock, and apparently cereals as well.39
At nearly every locale, and in nearly every period of the four centuries between 700 and 300 B.C., the Greeks grew a wide selection of crops on their small farms, both for their own use and that of the local community. A sign of a completely uninhabitable place for a Greek would be one “unfit for grain, vines, or trees.”* That need for diversification explains why in the earliest references in Homer’s Iliad, we hear of both cereal and orchard or vineyard cultivation. Thus the hero Meleagros was “to choose out a piece of land, an entirely good one, of fifty acres, the half of it to be vineyard and the half of it unworked plough-land of the plain to be furrowed.” Bellerophontes received “a piece of land, surpassing all others, fine plough-land and orchard for him to administer.” Tydeus’s farm at Argos likewise had “plenty of wheat-grown acres” with “many orchards of fruit trees circled about him, and many herds were his.” These plots were not small gardens, but real farms owned and worked by private citizens.40
Whether our evidence comes from land-leases or sales, oaths of the Athenian ephebes, or the advice found in agronomic handbooks, diversity of crops—grain, olives, vines, fruit trees, legumes, garden produce—was the desirable pattern on most Greek farms during the polis period. In an early poem attributed to Hesiod workers are portrayed ploughing the soil, reaping and threshing the grain, picking both white and black grapes, and treading the vintage. Xenophon says of his farm near Skillous, in Triphylia not far from Olympia, that “every fruit good to eat” was cultivated there. There were, in fact, sound agronomic reasons why diversification spread through the Greek agrarian world.41
First, diversity of crop species allows the farmer to select particular varieties of fresh fruits and vegetables that he knows will be profitable at precise times in nearby urban centers. In the seventh and sixth centuries, the early part of the polis period, trade and markets were no doubt less developed. But the absence of widespread, sophisticated long-distance transport of foodstuffs by land does not mean that Greek farmers failed to supply nearby communities with a variety of produce throughout the year, freeing a substantial minority of the population from work in the fields. In the Odyssey, the people of Ithaca and the suitors in particular had their food brought to the village from the countryside, thus making Laertes’ fresh produce highly prized by those who lived a distance from his farm.
One should imagine now small farmers themselves venturing into villages and peddling fresh fruit whenever possible. Like the farmer and his donkey laden with figs in a letter of Alciphron, or like Aristophanes’ agrarian who walks into Athens to exchange his grapes, agriculturalists gradually were able to feed a nonfarm urban group, as well as to produce food surpluses for trade and the subsequent acquisition of capital.42
Crop diversification, along with farm residence, irrigation, and slave labor, reflects an overall attempt to maximize agricultural production in any way possible. Raising different crops on the same farm allows the farmer to minimize risks from all sources: drought, hail, frosts, unseasonable rain, gusting winds, fungal, viral, and bacterial pathogens, insect outbreaks, animal and human attack, infestations of noxious, perennial weeds, idiopathic crop failure, human error, alternate bearing of crops, and, of course, market surplus.43 Vines, cereals, and tree fruit (not to mention different varieties within those species) all germinate, pollinate, produce fruit, and enter dormancy at different times, ensuring that a minute, an hour, a day, or a week of climatic misfortune—a March hail, an April frost, an August rain, an October spate of unusual heat or galeforce winds—will likely catch only a portion of the farmer’s total produce at a stage of vulnerability.
Disheartening it is to see an entire plum orchard’s bloom wiped out by five minutes of unseasonable hail, and then to look over at a neighbor’s peach and nectarine grove (not yet in flower) and see it unharmed. For the farmer with a single variety of plums, now shredded, those unfortunate minutes can end the crop year—and for the cash-poor sometimes the farm itself. Similarly, I have seen entire acreages of plums whose blossoms did not “set,” thousands of trees producing no fruit at all. Only the diversified arboriculturalist who has nectarines, peaches, pears, and apricots can survive a year like that. On the other hand, a sudden May rain causes soft fruit to rot, such as peaches and apricots. But thicker-skinned and hardier plums suffer no damage at all from unseasonsable moisture. In some years, entire varieties of delicious tree fruit—peaches, nectarines, apricots, pears, and plums—rot on the tree from want of consumers, while oddly-shaped, sour green plums are in hot demand for overseas sale to an exclusively Asian market.
It was the same in antiquity with outbreaks of disease, mildew, or bacterial fire blight; all can affect only particular crops at certain times. In themselves these challenges cannot ruin a diversified farm’s entire arsenal, as there is no chance that each variety will suffer its own particular lethal disease or natural disaster in any given year. Deer may consume ripe, soft fruit on young fruit trees, but will not seriously injure olive production by occasional browsing. Thieves can steal garden produce, but have difficulty harvesting cereal crops. Enemy invasions in late May occasionally catch ripe grain—barley and to a lesser extent wheat—at its brief, vulnerable combustible state, and thus may torch entire fields, but have more trouble in uprooting or chopping down trees or vines. Although the cultivation of numerous crop varieties requires greater attention and expertise on the part of the farmer (and unfortunately assures more frequent error in agricultural practice), diversity also guarantees that few mistakes will be lethal for the farm itself. In contrast, on a monocropped cereal parcel, natural disaster, not to mention farmer error, destroys an entire agricultural year, not merely one crop of many.
The diversity of numerous crops can also on occasion result in a positive synergy all its own. Orchards can be planted as windbreaks for vineyards. Beneficial insects on one crop can feed on pests from another. I suppose that Pliny had some reason to believe that placing barberry bush branches on grain fields might disrupt grain rust. Blackberries, in my own experience, harbor a species of leaf-hopper-devouring wasp that finds easier prey on nearby vines, and will actually move into the vineyard to devour grape pests, returning only infrequently to its natural habitat in the berry vine. It is thus rare that insect damage can spread onto a variety of crops. Crop diversity tends to be a biological check against insect populations becoming, like biblical locusts, fatal to the fields of the farmer. The relative absence of monoculture during the polis period may thus have reduced the entire scale of plant and animal pathogens in Greece as a whole, and partly explains the remarkable growth of intensive agriculture itself at this time.44
The presence of livestock also can be symbiotic on the farm. Animals can feed on post-harvest grain stubble, manuring the field at the same time. Even more delicate vineyards might be “sheeped,” allowing animals to prune summer grape foliage as they browsed in the vineyard. Most scholars usually assume transhumance—the annual migration of domesticated livestock from plains to mountains in the summer—and accompanying bare-fallowing of ground in ancient Greece. In actuality, there must also have been an even more direct relationship between agriculture and livestock of a rather different sort, which eventually implied integration, not antithesis, between farming and livestock. Many stall-fed animals would not have been led out to distant pasturages, but rather kept nearby in corrals and fed on increasingly plentiful agricultural residues. Animals also were crucial for grain threshing on larger farms.45
What transpired with the advent of polis agriculture was not an end to livestock raising, but a transformation of it. Farming, not pastoralism, was now the key. Large animal herds, heretofore at odds with the spread of small-scale, labor-intensive farming, gradually shrank to become the property not merely of elites, but of yeomen themselves, as the ideology of animal raising itself was appropriated and changed by a new rural class.*
Diversity, as indicated, also can alleviate the potential problems inherent in the alternate bearing tendencies of many crop species. Vines and trees both often produce heavily in alternate years, olives more than grapes. In the case of the former, an “off” year can often result in essentially no crop at all. Because of each crop species’ differing response to climate, their cycles are offset. This variety ensures that a diversified farmer is not ruined in a single year, as a result of either a complete absence of produce or a surplus of fruit that cannot possibly be all harvested, processed, stored, or sold. That is, a vineyard can develop a cycle of production quite out of synchronization with an olive grove, allowing the diversified farmer alone to have at least one adequate crop every year.46
The annual cycle of surplus to scarcity in tree fruit production continues to plague growers and to bewilder agronomists of the present age. Despite various strategies of fertilization, pruning, irrigation, and thinning, alternate bearing in many species appears to be an instinctual response to past cycles of production, where a year’s rest protects certain varieties of trees from future stress. I myself have seen the same vineyard consistently produce about 180 tons of raisins one year and 140 tons the next, despite nearly identical farming practices and weather conditions, and despite deliberate changes in our pruning and fertilization strategy just to ward off such an anticipated cycle. Similarly, I have harvested four thousand flats off a three-acre persimmon grove, followed—despite more fertilizer, an absence of pruning or thinning, and heavier watering—by three hundred flats the next season (less than a tenth of the prior year’s production!), without changes in the weather pattern. Nor is the problem confined to individual farms. Given one species’ identical response to climatic stimuli, large areas usually follow light/heavy production cycles, as even newly planted orchards and vineyards eventually adjust to a more or less regional cycle of uniformity. So predictable is the expectation of short crops after heavy production (and vice versa) that contemporary price and marketing strategies are usually developed well in advance of harvest. So the move toward diversification of crops by the geôrgoi of the polis must have had enormous—and quite positive—ramifications in the agrarian economy of early Greece as a whole. The economy—itself nearly exclusively agricultural even as late as the fifth century—rarely experienced a boom or bust cycle, even when natural disaster struck. The adage that diversification “sacrifices output per crop for output reliability for all crops” is completely accurate.
A diversified agricultural scheme also allows harvests—the periods requiring the greatest labor—to be spread throughout the spring, summer, and fall. The farmer need not harvest all his acreage within a brief window of vulnerability. This plan—and we should use such a term to denote intention rather than accident—of small, successive harvests had important implications for the economical use of labor. For example, Laertes’ small force of workers can move from wheat and barley reaping and threshing (late May to June), to soft-fruit picking (June, July, and August), to the vintage (August to September), finishing with olive harvesting and oil pressing (October to November), picking garden produce on occasional slack days in between. His labor force of Dolios and his sons hence remains small, skilled, and permanent (i.e. servile). Laertes has no need of supplemental workers. On the other hand, he does not lose productivity through wasteful idling—the farmer’s constant, near-neurotic worry. Between harvests and during the winter, slaves can be busy with trenching, milling, fencing, weeding, pressing, curing, ploughing, staking, fencing—all the myriad tasks that the intensified farming of diversified, permanent crops requires.
Sequential harvest dates also help to eliminate the specter of wasted produce—food rotting in the field for the lack of available manpower—or the related, equally injurious need to begin a premature, low-quality harvest with a “short” work crew in order to bring in all the crop before the onset of unseasonable weather. Farmers universally tend to hedge on quality if that decreases the risks of crop loss, in general desiring the greatest quantity that can be harvested and become at least marketable. California state fruit regulations, like the ancient wine laws of Thasos of the late fifth century, in practice tend to concentrate more on unripe rather than overripe fruit, as a result of long experience with the farmers’ eagerness to pick prematurely. To cover the entire orchard or vineyard, to market the whole crop successfully, to take advantage of good weather, to do all that, I have rarely picked a crop that was not somewhat immature on the first day or so of harvest.47
Even small farms—whether composed of a single contiguous parcel, or perhaps more infrequently of separate, fragmented plots—present a mosaic of soil and water challenges. The rich variety of micro-climates and their accompanying idiosyncrasies warrant lengthy treatment in Theophrastus’s late fourth-century agronomic handbooks. Naturally occurring nitrogen levels, ground textures and moisture-carrying capacities, soil pH, terrain, and elevation can all deviate widely even within small acreages. With expertise and long, accumulated experience, the intensive farmer learns to adapt particular crops to the many differing individual environments of his farm. Cereals, gardens, and soft-fruit trees can be planted on bottomland where soils are richer, plowable and more water retentive. Vines, though they produce more heavily on good ground, can nevertheless thrive on hillsides where soils are thinner. Higher elevations, which reduce daytime temperatures and ensure cooling nights, can actually improve wine quality because of lower nitrogen and moisture levels. Olives, like vines, often can thrive on rich plains, but they tolerate even less moisture and nitrogen, and thus grow on barren soils where little else is viable. Some vineyards planted on rich soils are deep green, almost blue in their lushness, and look enormously productive; on examination, their impressive growth is often nothing more than canes and leaves.
In farming it is not a question of finding the ideal growing conditions for each crop variety. That concurrence is only the utopia every farmer dreams of, but none achieves. Rather it is the lengthy trial—often spanning generations—of discovering the right crop that can at least be grown on the farm under less than optimum circumstances. Rough compatibility between plant and soil ensures that nearly all of the farmer’s land is cultivable. Theophrastus knew that olives, figs, and vines grew best on particular soils; nevertheless, he saw that pragmatically such permanent stock would be more likely planted “on the second best” ground, places where other crops, such as wheat, would be less practical.48
A similar portrait of complete agricultural utilization is, incidentally, exactly the situation glamorized in Virgil’s ideal portrait of an old man of Corycus, who owned a few acres of land unsuitable for ploughing, viticulture, or grazing. Through hard work the farmer learns to grow flowers and fruit trees and to raise bees—thereby using all his acreage productively. Aelian’s misanthropic Knemon, a traditional stock character in Athenian comedy and satire, apparently feels obliged to explain why a small portion of his farm near a roadside is surprisingly uncultivated: only that way can he throw rocks uninterrupted at passersby.*
So the intensive grower’s goal in a Mediterranean climate is nearly obsessive: to find some method that allows his entire acreage on his small plot to be used. When one considers the landscape of Greece as a whole, with its diverse soils and lengthy growing season, the emergence of diverse species would have allowed more land to be brought into production in a way not possible under either pastoralism or specialized cereal production. That, of course, ultimately resulted in more food, and hence wealth, for the growing population as a whole.
Last, the diverse production of cereals, fruits, olives, vines, and livestock virtually ensures the grower self-sufficiency—autarkeia, the Greeks’ cherished economic and social sense of independence—both for the immediate needs of the family and the wider requirements of the farm itself. Bread and gruel from barley and wheat; fresh, dried, and juiced products from deciduous fruit trees; cooking oil, soap, and cured fruit from olives; raisins, grapes, and wine from the vine; vegetables and greens out of the garden; meat, cheese, milk, hides, and wool from livestock—having all these allows Laertes to exist quite apart from the palace below. Similarly, most lubricants and lighting oil (olives), fertilizer (manure, legumes), cooking fuel, and even farming implements (local woods), are also obtainable without need for outside barter, much less purchase. Everything from grape stakes to stove wood to building materials could be fabricated from trees, reeds, mud bricks, and clays available in the countryside.49
As in the case of homestead residence and agricultural slavery, there is little evidence that the early Greeks of the Dark Ages were skilled in crop diversification, the cultivation of trees and vines, and the associated arts of grafting and budding, before the eighth century and the appearance of the polis. Wheat species,likewise, may have been relatively restricted and not so numerous.
Most important, the Greeks of the polis themselves believed that domesticated viticulture and arboriculture were part of their more recent history. Theopompus related that the Chians were the first to excel in grape growing. Thucydides stated flatly that the early Greeks did not plant trees and vines. A number of anecdotes associated with Solon and Peisistratus similarly reveal that special efforts were needed to encourage establishment of capital crops in sixth-century Attica, a hint that Laertes’ diversified scheme, like his farmhouse and slaves, reflected the vigor of the agricultural revolution already by the end of the eighth century.50
The diversification of crop species, like changes in labor practice and residence, must be seen in the wider context of Greek history. Each solitary geôrgos who struggled to carve out an orchard next to his house, to plant a vineyard among stones, to terrace a hillside field for grain was one with a growing number of thousands. Without the aid of palaces or manors, these planters of trees were now to be self-sufficient in food production, protected from famine, eager for more land and larger families—eager soon to apply that agrarian confidence and skill to politics and warfare and thus to change the nature of Greek culture itself.
The idea of agrarianism in a spatial sense spread down from the slopes, rather than upward, just as in the terminology of class, it soon became the property of the middling agrarians, not the upper strata of society. Marginal land in a way became the source, the fountainhead if you will, from which intensive agriculture expanded in many regions of Greece. The georgoi went up to find economic opportunity and soon came down to spread their brand of rural life throughout the community. The men who set out onto such terrain were themselves a novel group of middling yeomen: the very rich would have no need for strenuous land reclamation; the very poor were without the means to carry it out.
Eschatia is the most common Greek word for “marginal” land. It is an apt English translation that captures well the Greeks’ dual notion that such ground was on the “margin” both in location and in quality. Although Laertes’ property is not explicitly termed aneschatia, there is good reason to believe that some portions of his farm were on marginal ground. Homer describes the land as “distant from the city,” apparently ground that Laertes himself had established after “much hard work.” That description suggests that it was not an established piece of inheritable bottom land, but rather acreage on more difficult terrain, open for any with capital and a desire for difficult labor—land also like the nasty suitor Eurymachos’s “outer estate,” which contained terraces, fruit trees, and plenty of hard work.
In our passage of the Odyssey, the slave Dolios and his sons apparently continue the reclamation of Laertes’ land by clearing stones and building terraces. Earlier in the poem, Athena had said that Laertes never came to the city, but stayed on his own land making “his toilsome way on the high ground of his vineyard.” This passage also emphasizes the rugged, isolated, and elevated nature of the plot, an image akin to the later farm in the Dyscolus of Menander, where the old man works “out on the hill” away from the plain. Plato envisioned early Greek state formation taking place after individual residents “turned to farming hillsides (epi geôrgias tas en tais hupôreiais), making fences of rubble and walls to find protection from wild animals and building a single large and common house.” How, though, in the eighth century did this attempt of the Greeks at incorporating marginal land fit into the new strategy of intensive agriculture, one marked by farm residence, irrigation, servile labor, and diversified crops?51
The frequent encroachment of agriculture onto rugged terrain obviously requires greater expenditure of capital and a conviction that land relatively uninhabited and used for forestry and grazing can be in fact potentially far more productive. Initial labor must be allotted to stone removal and terrace construction, to fruit-tree and vineyard planting, and to constant care of permanent stock in the years before fertility is reached. This is all endurable, if it can lead to an increase in food production, if the farmer can survive until new plots come into production, if he has the prerequisite mentality to work his ground as an investment for the future. In farming, all those are big “ifs,” and suggest that the original homesteaders were tough men and women, who developed the prerequisite skill and patience to farm trees and vines on hillsides.
The daily farming of such ground is beset with the constant problems that accrue from cultivating hillsides. The extra effort and difficulty are welcomed if they allow the less than wealthy farmer title to his own unencumbered and increasingly valuable plot of ground. By the fifth century we should imagine that in almost every area of Greece terraces and land reclamation were ongoing. This involved an enormous investment of time, capital, and effort in order to cultivate hillsides that were formerly only marginally valuable as pasture.52 These additional, pragmatic concerns in the farming of newly incorporated land explain in part the presence of Dolios and his sons, and Laertes’ own permanent residence on the farm: the old man cannot afford the hours lost in the lengthy commute into Ithaca, as long as his crop responsibilities require constant supervision and the land demands continual upkeep.
Where plains are found alongside, or in the midst of mountains, there are ubiquitous hillsides of varying slopes. All such terrain offers an array of soil and climatic challenges. These micro-environments, especially at first on lower hillsides, encourage rather than discourage agricultural experimentation and eventually a wide diversification of crops, with definite advantages to the surrounding community. In the case of the olive tree, once the art of grafting was mastered, the Greek geôrgoi might simply walk up into the hills, cut down wild cultivars, and then graft domesticated scions onto the stumps. In some cases virginal, unfarmed hillsides, with ample natural levels of nitrogen, could provide for the early pioneer quite bountiful initial crops without fertilization.
Be careful not to dismiss the geography of Greece simply as rugged and poor. Instead, envision its small but rich plains and unclaimed hills as the perfect laboratory for an agrarianism much different from Near Eastern practice. Agricultural theory often postulates that the incorporation of less fertile or accessible land reduces overall agricultural productivity per acre. But in the case of the ancient Greek diversified landscape, that truism may be mistaken. By the late eighth century, Greek farmers of eschatiaiwere not necessarily forced to invest much more labor and capital to achieve cereal production comparable to that found on better ground. The farming of marginal ground is more commonly to be associated with the gradual introduction of new, improved species of vines, olives, and fruit trees into Greece, and, more important, with new notions of intensive farming. In the Odyssey, the seaward slope around Ismarus in Thrace reputedly produced the best wine, an assessment borne out by the later reputation of vintages from the mountainous and often volcanic islands of the Aegean—Chios, Melos, Lesbos, Thasos, Naxos, and Ikaros—where vineyards dotted the high hillsides. Theophrastus’s agronomic treatises of the fourth century reflect the Greeks’ familiarity with soil types and appropriate crop species. And Xenophon confirms that belief in the potential productive capacity of marginal ground. Even in later Italy the ideal farm was always felt to be close by the mountains.53
If one envisions hillsides and rugged terrain as perfectly suitable for various noncereal agricultural production, then the Greek landscape in the Dark Ages was greatly underused. Plentiful land at that era was simply vacant, even though it could have produced quite good tree and vine crops, given the right species and the proper expertise. Once again, the planting of trees corresponds directly with the farming of land previously considered marginal through pasturage and forestry. The development of eschatiai lies at the heart of the agrarian synergy of homestead residence, slave labor, and diversified crops.
The late eighth-century move toward viticulture and arboriculture probably explains the creation of these new upland establishments.54 Other unproductive swampland below the hills, and the rarer areas where problems of drainage and mountain runoff also made farming marginal, are similar cases. Under the new dynamics of intensive agriculture, this ground too could be developed through ditches and drainage canals. The picture that keeps emerging suggests a unique interdependence between farm residence, servile labor, diversified crops, and the farming of marginal lands. They all represent the efforts of a new brand of sophisticated, intensive farming. But there must have been some motive force to explain the appearance of such novel strategies on Greek farms.
The original catalyst for the change from Dark Age pastoralism and concentration on cereals was, as I have stated earlier, population pressure and the growing scarcity of good bottomland. Equally important for the agricultural development of Greece was the availability of labor and the presence of these unfarmed, vacant hillsides or, in rarer cases, unproductive marshy meadowlands. These areas were routinely in production by the fifth and fourth centuries. This intrusion onto previously distant and unfarmed ground did more than guarantee critical additional food production for an increasing population. It also ensured that the agrarian ethos of Greece was transformed. Greek farming in the past was either despised as mindless manual labor in service to another or, from the opposite perspective, prized as the exclusive privilege of the absent grandee. Soon, however, for many of these new Greek property owners the labor required to clear out privately owned plots for terraced grainland, trees, and vines—Laertes’ “much hard work”—became a thing of honor, a concrete representation of independence and hours invested for one’s own family. It was a reflection that hard toil was sign enough of social and even moral improvement, an endeavor that further accelerated the notion of private, family ownership of farm property.
A variety of sources imply that at the first onset of increased population, Greek farmers like Laertes were at work in some type of rugged terrain. Recall, once again, the boastful suitor Eurymachos. In Book Eighteen he had tried to goad the disguised Odysseus by challenging him to work on his outlying estate, gathering stones to make fences and terraces, and also to plant “tall” trees,” on a farm probably not much different from Laertes’ own. Hesiod, as we will learn, about the same time (e.g., about 700-680B.C.),complained of the conditions on his farm at Ascra in central Greece, “bad in winter, bothersome in summer, good at no time,” a site now identified as lying on the upland slopes of Mount Helicon at about fifteen hundred feet. Solon’s legislation (about 600-580 B.C.)that dictated olives and figs not be planted closer than nine feet to one another (apparently to prevent shading of, and growth onto, a neighbor’s property) perhaps also reflects the increasing practice of arboriculture on newly created farms. In a famous passage in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus (about the mid-sixth century) spotted a farmer on the slopes of Mount Hymettus who was cultivating “rocks.” When asked what he was growing, the homesteader supposedly remarked dryly “aches and pains”—an understandable response if those conditions were anything like the stony environment of ancient farmhouses and terraces that excavators have found on the mountains of the Aegean island of Chios.55
The percentage of land farmed in Attica was greater even than that of present-day California, a state renowned for vast expanses of irrigated flatland. Nevertheless, only about thirty-four percent of the state’s acreage is now used for food and fiber production. Clearly, Attica had experienced a veritable agrarian revolution in the seventh and sixth centuries. It had turned Athens’ sparse countryside into a highly populated, terraced land of trees, vines, and yeomen homesteaders.56
By the fourth century eschatia was well-known in Greek literature. The references to established, long-settled agrarian communities on stony ground suggest that the development of slopes—for example in Megara and Attica—was not recent, but a practice that went back many generations.* When Isocrates acknowledged that the Megarians were able to build the finest houses in Greece despite the fact that they “farmed rocks,” he surely was not denoting homes in the plain of Megara proper, but rather emphasizing the natural agricultural connection between hard work and material prosperity out in their more rugged countryside. The Megarians were a people with a reputation in antiquity for improving soils and preventing erosion.57
Finally, land is never entirely a fluid commodity. It does not always expand and contract freely and spontaneously in direct relationship to population. Humankind—unpredictable and foolish as it is—does make a difference. Its pattern of land use is no mere organism that reacts predictably to outside stimuli. Some choice holdings can be tied up by families and not made accessible to agriculture, but used instead (unwisely and uneconomically) for livestock growing by conservative wealthy mossbacks—men of privilege who initially cared more for the social rather than economic, advantage of traditional land use. For example, a field of deep white-ash soil, table-top level, with excellent water rights, sits idle and unplanted near our own farm, its owner a widow who for nearly half a century has inexplicably refused to plant its natural crop of trees and vines. How else other than social conservatism or personal idiosyncrasy can I explain the use of horses and wagons by another neighbor in the 1950s to transport raisins to the local cooperative—a transportation anachronism costly, time-consuming, and forty years out of date?
We should not imagine, then, that all marginal estates were immediately put into production at once at the end of the eighth century, nor that all such land need be considered especially substandard. Ground deemed an eschatia may originally have been in some cases gently rolling land quite near more prized aristocratic flatland.* Later in the fifth and fourth centuries, however, “marginal” might have taken on a different meaning and have referred to much poorer, scarcer land, higher up the slope. Many farmers must have tried, failed, and finally succeeded in these less favorable circumstances, through a long process (the centuries between, say, 800 and 500 B.C.?) of experimentation and adaptation in incorporating new land.
The early development of some eschatiai (accessible to anyone and for the most part unowned) by the more ambitious who had access to some capital—if we can use such a term for the elderly Laertes—created the example, and thus the momentum for new approaches to farming. Farm residence, irrigation, servile labor, and crop variety could all work even more successfully once farmers employed these practices on productive, traditional bottomland. However, had Laertes farmed initially near to the palace at Ithaca itself on cereal ground, there would have been little reason for him to live apart from others, to employ slaves, or even to experiment with a wide diversity of trees and vines. Marginal land, in other words, worked as a sort of internal colonization in the late eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries. It introduced the Greeks at large to the advantages of new agricultural techniques learned from farming in challenging environments. Much later Plato believed that a hilly countryside (tracheia) was the ideal backdrop for the polis,ostensibly because it demanded independence and hard work among the farming population. Surely, his notion derived from the actual experience of the Greek city-state, not from some utopian fantasy.58
It was one of the great ironies of Greek history that the rich substantial plains of Thessaly, Macedonia, Messenia, and Crete probably fostered agricultural stagnation. Good land hindered rural development and the accompanying agrarian culture of the polis—due to the absence of large tracts of unwanted, unowned eschatia. Marginal ground was the initial springboard (in a social, economic, agronomic—and moral—sense) of opportunity for Greek farmers. In that way, it was the laboratory for all subsequent Greek history.
Control of food storage and processing in the ancient Greek world brought with it political power and social status, as the exalted position of the palatial overlords of Mycenean Greece attests. The Mediterranean triad of bread, wine, and oil shares one striking characteristic, one necessary requirement. Unlike fresh fruit, vegetables, meats, and nuts, these foods must be milled or pressed into flour, juice, and oil from the raw products of grains, grapes, and olives. Processing required labor, capital, and time. But it also gaveopportunity: The ancient Greek diversified farmer could be both a food producer and processor, and a controller or broker as well.
This dual responsibility of cereal grower/flour miller, viticulturist/wine maker, and olive farmer/oil producer had important economic implications. Frequent on-the-farm processing often eliminated the “middle man”—so disliked in Greek literature, the rogue “weakest in body and useless for any other job.” It allowed geôrgoi of the polis themselves, unlike Mycenean workers or Dark-Age serfs, to control their final product. If the produce was to be sold as oil, wine, or flour, rather than as the raw yield of olives, grapes, and grains, all “expenses” involved in the cultivation, harvest, and processing were controlled (i.e., passed on) solely by the farmer himself. Although Homer does not explicitly portray Laertes and his helpers as involved in threshing and pressing, the farm seems, nevertheless, to be an exporter of refined produce to Ithaca below, rather than an importer of wine, oil, and flour. The existence of sufficient servile labor, the isolation of Laertes’ estate, and permanent residence on the land all suggest that pressing and milling were done right on the farm itself.59
Both later literary evidence and archaeological excavation of Greek homestead farmhouses suggest on-the-farm threshing floors and presses throughout the rural community. These references and artifacts argue that the homestead farmer, not the absentee landowner, not the commuting peasant, not the urban handworker, was a regional nexus for food processing throughout the Greek countryside.60
Equally important for the homestead farmer would have been sufficient storage capacity. Once raw products were processed into flour, wine, oil, and dried and pickled fruits, it was critical that the farmer not only laid away his own supplies for home consumption, but also had the ability to keep his produce off the immediate post-harvest market.61 The possession of food processing and storage infrastructure on the farm, like the other elements of intensive agriculture in the polis period, stands in sharp contrast to both the centralized bureaucracy of the Myceneans and the later rural underdevelopment of the Hellenistic age.
Yeoman Laertes
The Homeric poems imply that these new Greek farmers are not the impoverished and landless poor. They appear as hardworking men with access to capital. All the Homeric references to such early farms—be they the property of Laertes, Bellerophontes, Meleagros, or Tydeus—assume owners who are clearly not peasants, but rather men of substance. Some capital, after all, must have been necessary for slave ownership, terrace building, land reclamation, house construction, and well digging or other small-scale water projects. Capital crops, such as trees and vines, demand that the farmer have other means of support during the three to seven years before substantial crops are produced.
On the other hand, Laertes as he is portrayed in Book Twenty-four of the Odyssey is no aristocrat either. He works hard on his hands and knees. Horses are absent from his farm. His dress reflects pragmatism and is designed to prevent cuts and abrasions. His sorry circumstances draw rebuke from his son Odysseus. Moreover, the farm appears not to be large. In the orchard, Odysseus can at least count the number of trees, which would be impossible on a larger holding.
That knowledge of individual trees or vines on a farm—their unique size, shape, number, and productive capacity—has always seemed to me a rough, but accurate, gauge in determining the nature of the agricultural operation. Corporate, absentee, large-scale farmers never distinguish individual plants among expansive groves. How could they do so, when they themselves do not live by nor work within the vineyard or orchard, and thus never come to know firsthand, season after season, summer and winter, particular trees and vines? To these overseers all the farm’s trees and vines are essentially identical and uniform, mere dots in a vast, unbroken matrix.
But to the family farmer, individual stock has its own life and identity, some strong and productive, others sickly and weak. Particular trees and vines even in large orchards and vineyards become familiar, as distinct and well known to the farmer as members of his own family—which, in some sense, of course, they are. In this regard, recall also that even Alkinoös’ “estate,” whose size we would expect to be much more extensive than Laertes’, apparently extends only “four land measures”—about four acres (Od.7.113).
Land is well developed and intensively worked in the Odyssey, but it is not accumulated into large tracts. There are no latifundia. The image from the farm of Laertes is that the Greek agrarian revolution, at least in its initial phase in the late eighth and early seventh centuries, was inaugurated by men of some substance, farmers neither poor nor yet at the very top of the social scale. The new Greek geôrgoi will need to work themselves, but may own slaves. They will often live out in the country. But the homestead complex will not be lavish, instead geared toward storage, processing, and utilitarian considerations. There will be numerous crops, but not large mono-cropped acreages. Agrarians will have the means to carve out marginal land, but not the accumulated capital and substance to obtain large tracts of fertile bottomland.
Some farmers were wealthier than others. Some geôrgoi could not afford slaves; others owned several. We should expect differences to appear once individual initiative and private ownership came into play. There were always pastoral holdovers in the Greek countryside, commuting wealthy and poorer farmers: both those upscale growers who specialized in single crops, who often employed servile overseers and lived in town, and the less fortunates who worked an acre or two and hired themselves out as day laborers.*Nevertheless, despite the existence of larger estates and tiny plots, of wealthy and very poor folk, and of differences among the middling geôrgoi themselves, the general lines are clear enough to identify a novel type of polis agriculture: a new “class” of man was appearing on the Greek landscape with quite different notions of farming—and, as we will see, radically different ideas of social, military, and political structures as well.
There was a tradition among the Greeks that the inhabitants of Chios were among the first to introduce chattel slavery. A similar legend attests to their early success in intensive agriculture, especially their skill at viticulture. The difficult terrain of the island is well known and modern archaeological work has suggested the long presence there of isolated farmhouses on marginal land. Most important, however, Chios is one of the first Greek city-states where we have direct evidence, through an inscription of the early sixth century, of some type of constitutional government (e.g., “public officials” [dêmarchoi]; a “council of the people” [bolê hê dêmosiê]; “legal enactments” [rhêtrai]) most likely a broad-based oligarchy or timocracy of landowning farmers.62 It is my belief that all those phenomena are not coincidental, but rather the natural economic, social, and political coalescence of early Greek agrarianism. Only in early Greece, did independent agriculturalists have free title to their plots, own slaves, and have absolute control of their communities.
This conjecture of the appearance of a “new man,” in addition to a novel type of farming and the creation of private ownership of property, is confirmed when we look in the next chapter at another piece of literature, the Works and Days—an oral poem of Hesiod’s composed about the same time as the Odyssey, but one drawn from a completely different social environment, where farmers are essential to the narrative of the poem itself, not incidental.
*Ferriolo 86-88; numbers in parentheses in the text in this chapter refer to book number and line of Homer’s Odyssey.
**This conventional view in large part explains why agriculture was rarely seen as the catalyst for the Greek renaissance; see Audring 1974b: 495-96; Wood 51-63; Ehrenberg 1951: 78-91; Bolkestein 19-21. Cf. Richter 12 for a discussion of labor required on Laertes’ farm. “Homer’s Laertes,” as Gustave Glotz saw long ago (1927: 64), “was a forerunner of things to come.”
*Mycenean (1600-1150 B.C.), Dark Age (1000-750 B.C.), and early “Archaic” (750-700 B.C.) historians at different times all draw on the poems (about 700 B.C.) for their own particular historical needs. Material from all three different ages does reside in Homeric epic. Nevertheless, recent attempts to ground much of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the second half of the eighth century seem reasonable, as long as one acknowledges the common presence of epic inflation, anachronism, and distortion over some four or five centuries of oral transmission, and as long as one keeps in mind that to an audience of epic poems, especially one composed of aristocrats, exaggeration of past elite custom is more entertaining than the stark reality of the more pedestrian present.
*Thompson concluded: “As long as his farm is fragmented, an individual farmer will only rarely be able to select a substantially more convenient house-site from the components of his divided holdings than the present village site offers. Regret at the inability to build a house on the family property was, it might be noted, frequently voiced” (210).
**“The rigid organization … of Greece today, where everyone lives in a village, in an otherwise empty countryside,” Oliver Rackman (1990: 102-3) has correctly observed, “would have been unusual. More typically there would have been tracts of villages, tracts of hamlets, single farms, and occasional small towns”; see Hanson 1983: 40-42.
*The country bumpkin is usually poorly groomed, smelly, and without decorum, oblivious to fashion and propriety, e.g., Alciphr. 3.29; Theophr Char. 4; Ar. Pax 1127-1210; Nub. 41 ff.; cf. Val. Max. 7.5.2; Sappho 57.
**For varieties of ancient rural habitation, see Hanson 1983: 41; Yoshiyuki 13.
**Gallant 1991: 56-57 sums up the traditional view: “Irrigation seems not to have been used on any scale in ancient Greek agriculture”; Osborne 1992b: 382; Isager and Skydsgaard 112. See instead the neglected work of Knapp 73-74; Guiraud 191-95; Glotz 1927: 40; cf. Cooper 1993: 116, 136, 157.
*On Corinth, see Salmon 1984: 8; for Chios, Lambrinoudakis 297. On Melos, too, cisterns alone can store enough rain to support households of four to five persons year-round (Renfrew and Wagstaff 100-107).
*On Locris, see Timaeus FGrH 566 fr. 11. On the Theban purchase of Attic slaves, see Hell. Oxy. 12.4-5; cf. Hanson 1992b: 217-18. Recently W. K. Pritchett assembled the enormous evidence of the nature and amount of ancient Greek wartime profits. His data make clear that thousands of slaves were sold off cheaply (sometimes for far less than a hundred drachmas apiece) after conquest. Servile prices must have remained low, since often booty traffickers attempted to integrate slaves in mass into the local Greek economy (Pritchett War 5.170-73, 223-45). Frequently in a wartime context, slaves and livestock are mentioned together as part of property in the countryside, making it clear that potential plunder must have been used commonly on farms as servile labor (e.g., Dem. 18.213; cf. Arist. Pol. 2.1267b11-12; Rhet. 1.1361aI3; cf. Hell Oxy. 12.3-5).
*Plut. Mor. 602C. Crop diversification, which soon spread throughout the Mediterranean and became the staple of agrarian culture, is what led the historian Fernand Braudel to remark: “All agricultural life, the best part of Mediterranean life, is commanded by the need for haste,” where there occur “the rapid successions of harvests, reaping in June, figs in August, grapes in September, and olives in autumn” (Braudel 1. 256).
*“With dispersed settlement and closer plots,” Paul Halstead has written of the Greek rural economy during the age of the polis, “herding at the household level would be more practicable, and more complex rotation schemes might be a substantial obstacle to large consolidated herds. Transhumance would then be less likely and the consequent integration of crop and livestock husbandry would in turn make manure more freely available and so reinforce the viability of intensive arable farming. Viewed in this light, discussion by ancient agricultural writers of the benefits of extensive practices like manuring and cereal/pulse rotations should perhaps be interpolated not as exploring the boundaries of contemporary agronomic theory, but rather as advocating the application to extensively farmed estates of techniques used on small farms since time immemorial” (1987: 79; but cf. Isager and Skydsgaard 99-103).
*Virg. Georg. 4.125-46; Ael. Ep. 14; cf. Men. Dys. 160-67. Excavation of the complex of farms in the Russian Chersonesos revealed a clear pattern of tree/vine/cereal diversification. One larger (about sixty acres) farm revealed fifty-one percent of the ground devoted to cereals, nineteen percent planted in vines, seventeen percent in orchards, and nearly seven percent apparently vineyard that had been recently removed. The remaining area was devoted to the farm residence and nearly two miles of terrace walls. Scarcely any ground at all was unused (Pecírka and Dufkova 153).
*“Phyle,” Menander wrote in his play the Dyscolus (93-95), “belongs to the residents there who are able to farm rocks.” Any modern hiker to the nearby cave of Pan mentioned in the play can confirm the difficult topography.
*“There are,” Theophrastus reminds us, “wide variations in foothills” (CP 3.6.7).
*Such farms constituted “several different agricultural systems, depending on local conditions” (Isager and Skydsgaard 112). Yet uniformity, not regionalism, is more characteristic of Greece’s agrarian regime during the polis period.