Chapter 3
—Ellen Church Semple 1928: 155-56
Nature gave the ancient farmer the privilege of the struggle. Under the influences of climate and relief was evolved a system of tillage, which produced: (I) Winter grain crops maturing in spring or early summer. (II) Planted crops of olives, figs and grapes ripening in autumn without artificial watering. (III) Widely distributed summer crops of fruits, vegetables and fodder plants raised by irrigation, wherever springs and perennial streams were available. The immediate material gain of this triple system was a larger and more certain total harvest and a more varied food supply than the single seasonal cultivation could have yielded. More important, however, was the economic gain, because it meant improved economic methods. It involved increased application of capital for seed, manures and the construction of irrigation canals; and it demanded an elaborate and sustained system of farm work, in consequence of which the labor power of the community was kept employed all the year-round. The economy of national wealth and the gain in national efficiency were incalculable.
Who Was Hesiod?
In my own remembrance of family dinners long past, grandfathers often extolled—or summarily dismissed—a man simply by the epithets, “he worked hard” or “he never worked at all.” That criterion alone was to explain the appearance of his farm, the condition of his family, and the general reputation of his progeny. Sometimes this blinkered thinking could border on the idiotic, as when new barns or orchards were ascribed to years of patient labor rather than to a lucky inheritance, or when agricultural catastrophe and subsequent monetary ruin were explained as the result of “vacations and holidays,” not the sudden appearance of a malignant tumor or the need to care for a bedridden, paralyzed daughter.
But both of these no-nonsense men were more often right than wrong: constant hard work inevitably was reflected in both the well-kept appearance and economic health of the farm; sloth was clear enough from either the sight of weedy, trashy ground or the more insidious, gradual extinction of the family estate. Xenophon’s Ischomachos is made to say that success in farming is not so much mastery of agricultural practice—straight planted rows, careful sowing, proper fertilization—as simple hard work. “A man has neither olives nor figs,” he states bluntly, “because he has not taken the trouble; he has done nothing to produce them.”*
In farming bounty springs forth not merely from the richness of the soil, favorable weather, or even accumulated capital, expertise, and successful strategy, but also from hard work—and the quality of men who farm. One could also be labeled the son of someone who “worked” or “didn’t work” as if the trait was simply heritable. Similar pejorative, but tellingly accurate, assessments of agrarian failure—“lazy,” “loafer,” “no-good,” “moocher,” “weak,” “bum,” “bad-seed”—until recently were widely shared by society at large. With the rise of the modern social science parlance and the decline of an agrarian outlook, however, the more honest vocabulary so commonly used in agricultural disparagement has nearly vanished from common American usage.
New species of crops, farmhouses, and the use of slaves are only the outward manifestations of Greek agriculture. In themselves these practices cannot entirely explain the rise of Greek agrarianism and the early city-state, nor can they wholly account for its success. An equally important change at the beginning of the polis period was a transformation in the mind, a radical change of attitude, as farmers learned to invest their efforts in the land in an entirely novel way. This alteration in the Greek mentality involved a new ideology of work derived from land ownership, not tenancy. More specifically, it entailed an idea that manual labor, time spent on the soil, was both intrinsically ennobling, moral if you will, and a wise economic investment that would lead (not necessarily in one’s own lifetime) to greater agricultural production and hence more wealth for coming generations.*
This obsession with hard work is entirely at odds with the “peasant” mentality ascribed to the Greeks by many scholars who point to the well-known aristocratic dislike of manual labor and widespread presence of chattel slavery in order to suggest that these two phenomena also help to explain the Greeks’ reluctance to improve their own farmsteads materially.1 But all this is quite wrong. Already at key places in Homer we have seen subtle changes in rural attitudes, primarily the image of Laertes on his hands and knees, weeding his orchard. In the Iliad, in the scene portrayed on the shield of Achilles, men are busy reaping grain, while young girls and boys gather grapes, all under the careful direction of the farm-owner who seems to orchestrate the efforts of his family and laborers(ll. 18.541). Even the arrogant suitor Eurymachos’s challenge to Odysseus to build fences and plant trees, and the hero’s counterchallenge to test him first in a grain cutting and plowing match (and then only later in battle), are indications that agricultural toil was now becoming both a test of manhood and a sign of good character. Eurymachos taunts:
—(Od. 18.357-64)
Stranger, if I were to take you up, would you be willing to work for me on my outer estate—I would give you adequate pay—assembling stones for fences, and growing the tall trees? There I would provide you with an allowance of victuals, and give you shoes to wear on your feet, and clothing to put on. But since all the work you have learned is bad, you will not be willing to go off and work hard; no, you would rather beg where the people are, and so be able to feed that ravenous belly.
Odysseus in his response shows none of the absentee owner’s distaste for hard labor that he will later revert to in Book Twenty-four, Instead, Homer portrays Odysseus almost as if he himself were a hardworking, self-employed farmer, one who can find manly skill in the proper carving of a furrow.
—(Od. 18.366-76)
Eurymachos, I wish there could be a working contest between us, in the spring season when the days are lengthening, out in the meadow, with myself holding a well-curved sickle, and you one like it, so to test our endurance for labor, without food, from dawn till dark, with plenty of grass for our mowing. Or if it were oxen to be driven, those of the best sort, large ones and ruddy, both well fed with grass of an equal age and carrying power, and their strength is not contemptible, and there were four acres to plough, with the glebe giving to the plowshare. There you would see if I could carve a continuous furrow
Despite these valuable glimpses of the new agriculture and ideal of hard work, Homer’s genre was epic; his aim was to glorify the martial deeds of the heroic few, not the humdrum lives of the many. It is not surprising that in Homeric poetry about aristocrats in battle, there is precious little about the growing, contemporary culture of agrarianism, a new creed practiced by those outside the traditional Dark Age ruling elite. Homer composed for a conservative, aristocratic audience, who preferred embroideries upon their own ancestral past to the stark realism of the present. No wonder that it was felt in later antiquity that the two poets represented the two poles of human experience, that Homer gave good advice for fighting, Hesiod for farming (cf. Plut. Mor. 223A).
For a much better presentation of the nascent agrarianism, one can fortunately turn to Hesiod, a near contemporary of Homer, but a poet of a completely different sort, who lived in Boeotia on the slopes of Mt. Helicon. Hesiod also composed orally and at about the same time (i.e., 700-675 B.C.). But fortunately for our purposes, Hesiod wrote not an epic of war centered on aristocratic figures, but an almanac of a rural society at peace. In his brief poem of some eight hundred lines, The Works and Days, which treats exclusively his contemporary age (the early seventh century), Hesiod is in some ways more historical than Homer, for his poem is not merely a treatise on a farmer’s tasks (his Works) and obligations (his Days), but also a tract on the ideology of early Greek agricultural labor.
Keep in mind that Hesiod’s poem is not fiction, at least not entirely. The poet’s advice purports to be based on real farming experience. The Works and Days is a diatribe that springs from an apparently real dispute between the poet and his slothful sibling, Perses, over their inheritance.* The poem’s frame of reference is the Hellenic countryside as seen by a bard who, unlike Homer, was probably himself also a farmer. Given the roughly contemporaneous dates of composition, we would expect in the Works and Daysabout the same picture of agriculture as in the Iliad and Odyssey, but presented in much greater detail, with considerably more empathy and knowledge of agricultural technique. Although both poets could draw on the emergence of intensive farmers in the description of their literary characters, it is much more vital to Hesiod than to Homer.2
Nearly all the structures of intensive farming discussed in the previous chapter are present in the Works and Days, and they explain why in the centuries to follow “the economy of national wealth and the gain in national efficiency were incalculable” (Semple 1926: 156). These practices confirm that Hesiod is describing much more systematically the same agriculture that appeared haphazardly in the Iliad and Odyssey. Although the olive, the so-called “first of all trees,” is almost absent (only mentioned at line 522) from the poem, there is, nevertheless, as in the case of Laertes’ farm, mention of many crops.*
“Cut all your grapes and bring them home, Perses,” Hesiod warns his brother (611). Earlier he advises the farmer to prune the vines before the beginning of spring (570) and finish grape cultivation before the onset of summer (572). In addition, Hesiod frequently mentions livestock (516, 590-592, 606-607, 775, 786, 790, 795; Theog. 22-23) and assumes that farmers grow grain (597-605), figs (680-81), and other fruit trees (22). Each crop, he says (in language remarkably similar to the description of the diversified produce on the estates of Laertes and Alkinoös), “produces a bounty in its own season” (393-94). Harvests are to be processed on the premises by the farmer himself, so Hesiod gives practical advice on the threshing and milling of grain, and the pressing of grapes into wine or, in contrast, their drying into raisins (597-615). Slaves are ubiquitous in the Works and Days. Like the family of Laertes’ Dolios, they are considered essential to the farmer’s varied regimen of tasks, in which both master and servant are expected to toil side by side: “Get to work, your slaves, yourself, everybody all together” (459, cf. 470, 502, 573, 597, 608, 766).
There is no exact description of the location of Hesiod’s farm. But even if the poet exaggerated when he said that the general area of Ascra is “bad in winter, troublesome in summer, good at no time” (640), that description suggests that the farms in that hilly area incorporated some marginal land on elevated and difficult terrain.**
Hesiod reports that his father obtained the land after arriving as an immigrant from Cyme. As with Laertes’ farm in the Odyssey, it appears that the family’s fruit trees and vineyards were recently established on land previously underused or, more probably, not farmed at all. Like Laertes, Hesiod’s father no doubt reclaimed the Ascra farm only after great toil. Francis (291) correctly summarized the farm: “Hesiod’s family had only recently migrated to Ascra, and probably lived under pioneer conditions as settlers on waste land; such conditions, however, seem to be favorable to that ‘rugged individualism’, often attributed to the American pioneer.” At the date of composition of the two poems, both farms were understood to be no more than a generation old, not part of some aristocratic estate dating back to the Dark Ages.
Whether Hesiod actually lived on his property is never stated. But despite recent attempts to deny the existence of a Hesiodic homestead farmhouse* an isolated residence can surely be inferred from the poem. Hesiod, after all, mentions the evils of town, warning against loitering there far from the farm. Likewise, the presence of numerous farm animals (523, 554, 404; cf. 325, 376, 495), slaves, tools, wagons (420-435), and the advice to build “granaries” (503, cf. 411) suggest a rural, rather than an urban, home for an extensive agricultural infrastructure.
Nor can mention of residence “at the miserable village Ascra (oizurê eni kô Askrê)” (640) suggest that his house was in town. All farmers, ancient and modern, identify their locale by association with the nearest town, without any implication that their house is actually inside the city, rather than merely nearby in the countryside. Moreover, Hesiod’s frequent mention of neighbors is usually in an agricultural context (“Not even an ox would be lost, if there was not a bad neighbor,” 348) and assumes the permanent residence of small farmers throughout the countryside. By employing the term “neighbor” in specific ways, he is unlikely to be referring to the occasionally worked ground of a nearby commuting peasant. Modern field surveys of the surrounding area also confirm that in the general vicinity of Ascra there is ample evidence of isolated farm sites. Finally, as in the Laertes passage in the Odyssey, there is no direct reference to the size of Hesiod’s farm, but the assumption is that small agriculturalists like the poet must watch carefully the “bribe-swallowing barons” (basilêas dôrophagous), grandees who apparently favor only the very wealthy (39; 264-65).
Despite the poet’s call for hard work in the pursuit of riches, there also is affirmation that a life spent in honest toil is no disgrace if the farmer must be content with a smaller plot and dine occasionally on simple fare (40-41). At all times in the poem, private ownership and thus the theoretical ability of the farm to expand or contract are assumed,*
In the Works and Days, Hesiod exhorts the farmer to labor for profit, yet at the same time to see his farm as more than a mere livelihood. Crucial to that dual idea is work: Hesiod is obsessed with hard labor, distinguishing his farmers from peasants, who hope for little more than general subsistence.
The moral element in labor sanctions, but does not create the need for farm improvement and the quest for capital. Things are done on the ancestral farm that do not always make strict economic sense. Even today to survive, the family farmer may drive an extremely hard bargain over wages and sales. But his psychological and spiritual survival may also induce him to spend some of that precious hard-won capital in painting posts at the end of vineyard rows or planting ornamental trees along his alleyways.
A Greek idea of competition between agriculturalists emerges here, a common ideology arising from population growth and land scarcity: “Land hunger led to colonial expansion and wars between neighboring cities. For those who remained on the land, Hesiod understands the urgent need for efficient husbandry.”** For Hesiod, farmers must strive against one another to produce the best crops in the most efficient ways possible, ensuring that “you may purchase someone else’s land, and not have another buy yours” (341). He sees the entire world as one where “the potter is at odds with the potter, and the craftsman with craftsman, and the beggar is jealous of the beggar, and the singer of the singer” (25-26).
All this is healthy—and necessary. It is not merely the traditional negative jealousies of peasant cultures. Anthony Galt, who distinguished the small-farming community of Locorotondo in southern Italy from purely peasant societies, notes “small proprietorship and a dispersed settlement pattern”—and most importantly an attitude that “saw work as a value, not as a necessary evil” (Gait 237, 238). This type of ‘Good Strife’ makes the farmer in Hesiod’s poem envy his neighbor and presses him on to work harder to acquire greater wealth (23-24). In a phrase almost reminiscent of Adam Smith, Hesiod sings that the power of competition can “stir up even the lazy to work, for a man wants work once he sees his neighbor, a rich man, eager to plough, to plant and to put his house in good order” (20-22). Labor is now the ethical cargo of intensive agriculture; it is not a hindrance to increasing economic production. Hard work attains a moral dimension prefigured by the image of Laertes on his knees, Dolios and his sons mending terraces, and the countryside teeming with laborers on the shield of Achilles (Il. 18.540ff).
Hesiod believes that even the appearance of the farm is important to the community: weed-free fields, vibrant orchard and vine stock, and healthy animals. Good infrastructure prompts each farmer to want that ideal of agricultural excellence, and through the individual rivalry of landowners, the countryside of the polis as a whole progresses. Similarly, much later in Menander’s Dyscolus (603-5), the successful farmer is described by the simple encomium “he is unmatched as a farmer”; in Menander’s The Farmer, the aged agrarian will take time off from his vine digging only when he cuts his leg open and is forced to bed (Men. Georg. 65-66).
This Hesiodic idea of constant struggle, of work as intrinsically good, even moral, and bringing with it profit, is new to Greece. “Much then of the Works and Days may be seen as a rebuke of past practice,” perceptively writes Thalia Howe. “Men are to give up the plundering and raiding (319ff.) of the past, and instead seek protection under a newer Zeus (1-10, 25-26), who protects the worker in the field (17ff., 398).” This moral and ethical element inherent in hard work, this “newer Zeus” is rooted in economic pragmatism. “Both the gods and men,” Hesiod says, “are angry at those who are idle, living the life of the stingless drones” (303-4) .3
Even today the attentive modern farmer must be up before dawn to ensure survival of his household, regardless of the tasks—or lack of them—at hand. Age-old wisdom, rooted in bitter experience, suggests that the lie-abed agriculturalist will eventually lose his farm. Whether his dawdling is due to drugs, alcohol, illness, or simple indifference, the continual late riser cannot, in my own experience, overcome such liability and stick to a steady regimen.*
This change in Hellenic outlook in the Works and Days largely explains why the agrarian revolution at the beginning of the Greek polis period was so successful. It was a transformation in ideology as well as practice. The occasional (and contemporary) emphases in the Odyssey on the work of Odysseus, Eurymachos, and Laertes reappear in Hesiod’s world. Now the need for manual farmwork is not eccentric advice for rural success, but a tenet: a man should make a living from the soil on his own.
In the Works and Days strenuous labor can also lead to riches and prosperity. Hesiod, born into a changing world of rising population and diminishing arable land, does not see his agricultural experience as a static phenomenon, freezing the farmer into a particular status and class: “When a man adds to what he has, he keeps away bright-eyed hunger; for if you add only a little to a little and do this often enough, soon that little will become big” (361-63). Whether or not agriculture at this early stage actually offered much opportunity for radical advancement, for the “little” surplus (smikron) to become “big” (mega), is less important than the farmers’ belief that eventually it did so: the pursuit of wealth and capital led to greater productivity throughout Greece and kept rural men busy reclaiming marginal land, planting trees and acquiring slaves, shifting to intensive agriculture in order to find rural independence and at times prosperity in supplying food to the growing surrounding community.
The nascent Greek city-state of this period may not have been guided in a formal economic sense—even later it rarely had an overriding conscious economic policy—but Greeks were now well aware of the source of capital and the value of surplus: “If there is desire for wealth in your heart, then do the following: Work with work on top of work (ergon ep’ ergô ergazesthai)” (381-82). Hesiod believes this ethic can lead to ‘surplus’ and thus to profit: “For this is the way wealth piles up in the house.” Even if there are many to feed, the poet says: “Zeus can provide easily the needed abundance for the greater number, for the more there are, the more work there is, and thus the more the surplus (meizôn epithêkê)” (377-79).
Hesiod’s desire for intensive farming and its attendant wealth imply “a limited good,” a prosperity that must come at the expense of others. Nor did he envision an endless stagnation in the productive capacity of the farm.* The Works and Days does not at all reflect the primitive state of agricultural production, an “embedded” way of peasant economic thinking aimed at ensuring self-sufficiency only, rather than family needs and valuable marketable surpluses. While competition between farmers is often—and sometimes exclusively—expressed in naked distrust of one another, in rivalry, envy, in obligated giving and reciprocity, these credos are not incompatible with a concurrent comprehension of market realities. Nor are they at odds with a sophisticated awareness of supply and demand, with a desire to pass on something greater than what one has received, which later became a common aspiration of most Greeks (e.g., Pl.Resp. 1.330B-D).
Envy is instinctual. It wars daily with rationality, reflecting the farmer’s own ground-eye view of the immediate results of his own labor: success for him, failure for the man across the road. Even today, belying the popular image of the sophisticated agribusinessman, I know many farm families who care little for the statistics on the national output of their particular crops, who laugh at their ag-magazine’s report of the county’s yearly receipts, who pay no attention to nightly business reports, and who rarely dwell on the nation’s balance of payments of agricultural trade.
Instead they keep their eyes glued to their neighbor. As Xenophon wrote, “You can tell by looking at the crops and trees of another man’s land what the soil will and will not grow…. You can often get more accurate information from a neighboring plot than you can from a neighbor himself” (Oec. 16.3,4). Warily, farmers watch the land of kindred. Keenly they note a new barn, a vineyard’s fresh stakes, a heavy grape crop, all seen as potential signals of their own demise (“It is not enough that I make it,” a successful family farmer once admitted to me, “the others, you guys, gotta fail”). For selfish reasons, men of this sort borrow thousands and work endlessly in order not to be left behind. This is not necessarily grandiosity or the symptoms of a fragile ego, not evidence either of a finite peasant world of petty men and limited good (though it can clearly be that as well). The overall efficiency and prosperity that result from self-interest have continually improved (in a strictly material sense) the lives of millions in this country, urban dwellers who consume the cheapest and safest food in the world. Envy, selfishness, and parochialism can all be—as any farmer knows—part of a sophisticated market system, rather than the baser traits of a subsistence peasantry.
What besides personal rivalry, as opposed to economic rationalism, can explain the sudden appearance in our vicinity during the late 1970s of thousands of acres of new vineyard trellises, cross-arms now nailed to each wooden stake? Agribusiness dogma would argue that the cost and upkeep of expensive, impressive, and productive trellising systems, replacing the plebeian single wire on a single stake of the past, would not ensure commensurate profit in increased grape tonnage and quality, would argue that the investment of the extra wood and wire depleted savings that families could have spent on leisure or recreation. But the specter of a neighbor’s vineyard now suddenly elevated by a foot, its canopy widened by two, was too much for many Valley farmers to bear. And so field by field, entire vineyards were retrofitted with new crossarms, stakes, and wire—bringing improvement in quality and quantity of raisins to the industry as a whole.
What other than envy or individualism gone mad can account for a neighbor, veteran of two massive coronaries, in the midst of the raisin crash of 1983—when the idea of mutual aid, equipment sharing, grassroots group organizing, and collective lobbying made perfect sense—-announcing instead that it was now simple Darwinism, him versus us? “You’ll buy my place or me yours,” he told me bluntly two years before his third, fatal heart attack. My last memory of him is his hobbling off, muttering a final “So it’s either you or me—and it won’t be me.” For weeks on end we redoubled our efforts at tree and vine pruning, determined not to fall his victim.
Dawn in the new world of Hesiod’s intensive farmer is no longer always the refreshing “rosy-fingered” maiden of a vestigial aristocratic society. In the seventh-century countryside, no longer depopulated but rather forced to question traditional practices of land use, the early morning takes on a different connotation: “Avoid sleeping until dawn” (Hes. Op. 574); now she “takes away a third part from work, and sets a man on his journey and advances him in his work” (579-80; cf. Starr 1977: 158-59). Over two centuries later, in Euripides’ Electra, the small farmer—for all his humility—is at least allowed to boast of the same creed: “At dawn’s light I put the cows to pasture and begin planting the fields” (Elect. 80).
Time in the countryside of the polis is not at all the Dark-Age time of serfs, peasants, and landlords, but instead the cosmos of individual property owners and self-employed farmers alone responsible for their survival or destruction. Thus the AristotelianOeconomica advises matter-of-factly: “Rising before dawn is most useful” (Oec. 1.1345a17). One may rest only during the scorching temperatures of the summer afternoon, well after six to seven hours labor since first light (e.g., Theoc. 10.50-51).
Greek farmers worked “all day long” (e.g., Horn. Od. 13.31-34). In the Homeric hymn to Hermes, Apollo encounters a viticulturalist who has been digging in his small plot of vines “all day long (propan êmar) until the sun went down” (Hymn. Horn. Merc. 205-6). Plato later assumed that the care of wheat, barley, and vines consumed one’s entire effort (epimeleian pasan; Pl. Clit. 408E6). The fourth-century playwright Menander’s Sostratos says to the idle Daos: “Do you intend to stand around while we’re working?” He adds that if the old farmer Knemon saw idleness, “right away he’d throw clods at you, and call you a lazy good-for-nothing” (Dys. 364-67). Although there was a romantic tradition in classical poetry that winter “was the time of laziness for the farmer” (e.g., Virg. Georg.1.299), even then—as modern viticulturalists will attest—we should picture a busy season of fertilization, terrace repair, pruning, staking, trellising, and other maintenance operations vital to an intensive, diversified farm. To Hesiod it is simple: work at every season is the only, the necessary solution; each man builds for his future, giving his all until his health or youth is gone, his ethic absorbed by those who farm his plot in his aftermath.
There is a Greek notion of self-responsibility quite foreign to both the aristocratic and the peasant mind. To Xenophon, if a man knows no trade, he had better farm—or resort to the criminal life of stealing, robbing, or begging (Oec. 20.15). In Hesiod’s new world there is no salvation granted by a wealthy patron or divine intervention, his belief in the justice of a “newer Zeus” not withstanding. Each farmer is on his own. Excuses and complaints are but the baggage of the perpetual victim, the whiner who seeks outside explanation of reason, or rescue from his own demise. Plagued with self-doubt, men such as these “turn their greedy thoughts toward the possessions of some other” (Od. 316), and thus become farmers who cannot and will not take care of their own livelihood (317). In Hesiod’s stern code, these are men like his no-good brother Perses, who continually solicits aid to escape his own (inner) failure: “Perses, you fool, work for it; twice you may find help, and even perhaps three times, but if you bother them more, your begging will be in vain; your word-play will bring no profit” (401-3). In Hesiod’s agrarian world a man cannot count on anything but himself. To seek outside support, to rely on another, invariably results in cruel disappointment. Such salvation is illusory—in the words of the old Greek agrarian proverb, “The vine-stake betraying the vine” (Arist. Vesp. 1291).
Euripides confirms this ethos was prevalent well into the fifth century: “A lazy man never makes a living if he is not willing to work” (Elect. 81). Labor on one’s own plot confers dignity, sloth earns shame for weakness. “Work is no disgrace,” Hesiod warns his brother. “The disgrace lies in not working” (311). Shame, Hesiod adds, “goes with poverty, but confidence with prosperity” (19). The agrarian chauvinism fostered in this early era became enshrined throughout later Greek literature: the commandment in the later Palantine Anthology is the stark: “Love the shovel and the life of a farmer” (Anth. Pal. 9.23).
Hesiod’s credo is not one man’s idiosyncratic upbraiding of an angry heir, but a reflection of the growing collective voice of the countryside, the universal religion of embattled men desperately working to grow enough food to supply the burgeoning population of Greece. Thus arose notions of an agrarian ideology quite apart from those minority voices springing up in nascent Greek city life (ironically, the very ones we usually hear in Greek literature). In Hesiod’s poem there is superiority of the country over the city, where the “bribe-swallowing barons” hold sway—despite the mutual dependence of the one on the other. Hesiod advises the farmer to “pass by the blacksmith’s shop and its crowded lounge” (493), and to marry a woman “who lives nearby” (700). Here we see amplified the implicit suggestion in the Laertes passage of the Odyssey that there was now a difference between life on the farm and life engaged in petty trade, day labor, or craftsmanship within the walls of the city-state. Competition between Greek farmers is designed to promote their common good (even when they themselves cannot always see it), and to set them apart from men who do not work their own ground.
Greek farmers appearing in the eighth century were neither subsistence peasants nor wealthy aristocrats, but rather something in between: the new polis agriculture created a new “class,” a middling breed rare in agricultural history. Alert to evolution of class and status throughout this book, we must ask the same question in different guises: “Who was Laertes?” “Who was Hesiod?” And later: “Who were the geôrgoi?” “Who were the hoplites?”
At each stage of this study it is crucial to reemphasize the uniqueness of intensive agriculture in the long history of Greece and of the men who created that agrarianism. It is impossible accurately to gauge their numbers, possible only to approximate theirrelative position between a smaller entrenched elite and a slightly larger group below of landless poor, and some less successful subsistence “peasants.” It is also difficult to postulate a neat, uniform agrarianism in all of the more than one thousand Greek-speaking poleis,city-states of all sizes of adjacent countrysides and urban centers. But we can distinguish a rough similarity in agricultural practice and farm life quite at odds with what preceded and succeeded the polis, or what was practiced in Sparta, Thessaly, Crete, and other atypical regions.4
It is easier to distinguish the farmers in the Works and Days from the wealthy, for clearly Hesiod feels a distinct antipathy for those who hold political power and have no need of manual labor. His vocabulary for the elites includes words such as “bribe-swallowers,” “drones,” and “fools,” who do not know the inherent nobility of the just and honorable smaller portion (Op. 189, 264, 195, 207, 248), hawks that gloat over their seizure of a helpless nightingale (38, cf. 221, 264). Neither “have they ever learned how much better the half is than the whole,” Hesiod says, nor “how much good there is in mallow and asphodel”—the working man’s diet of the ancient Greek world (40-41). That proverb is not much different from that of the modern middling farmers of southern Italy, who likewise resent the rich: “All people,” they insist, “are picked from the same plant.” This uneasiness with affluence is not simply the traditional agrarian dislike for those in authority, but rather real disgust for the privileged who do not work hard on their own land.5
Much later Euripides’ farmer in his Electra says something similar about the modest nobility of the agrarian life: once a man has eaten his daily bread, he announces, “you cannot really tell the rich and poor apart” (Elect. 431). Although the playwright Menander’s farmers are not at all poor, his character Gorgias is still made to say: “It is not a pleasurable thing for me to enjoy wealth won by the labor of others, but only that which I’ve earned myself” (Dys. 830-31). At the beginning of the polis period, Hesiod sets the tone when he mouths none of the aristocratic mockery toward the less fortunate found in Homeric epic: “Never dare,” he warns, “to ridicule a man for hateful, heart-eating poverty” (717).
The actual material circumstances of Hesiod’s farmers confirm the poet’s political and social outlook. Under his regime, agrarians must work, and work constantly. Surely that need for continual hard labor is why Aristotle in his Politics discounted farming as an occupation for his ideal, contemplative citizenry. Yeoman agriculture, noble as it might be in the philosopher’s view, required too much work and provided not enough leisure for the development of virtue and participation in political life (Pol. 7.1329a2; cf. Eur.Supp. 420-23). Nevertheless, in the real world of the Greek polis, the middle group of agrarian citizenry usually, even on Aristotle’s own admission, produced the most stable society (e.g., Pol.7.1319a21-22).
Hesiod’s farmers are not at all similar to the aristocratic Pindar’s “noble souls,” who have a life “free from toil and who do not torment the earth with the strength of their arms” (Olymp. 2.59-70), not at all similar to the aristocratic sixth-century Cretan landowner, Hybrias, who bragged that in his culture of lords, all serfs “fall down and kiss my knee, calling me master and great lord” (Athen. 15.695F-696A; cf. Willets 1963: 260-61). In the Works and Days that aristocratic snub of physical work is inimical to a people for whom famine is ever a worry (302-3).6
Hesiod is no aristocratic horse breeder. Although there are plenty of livestock on Hesiod’s farm, all the animals are utilitarian. He tells the farmer to cut his timber in order to make his own plows and wagon (420-30), to manufacture almost anything he needs. Hesiod advises him to dress in sheepskin, a cape, and a felt hat, and, like Laertes, to strap leather hides on his feet (517-18; 539-46). (In contrast, at Sparta the absentee overlords forced the indentured helots to wear leather to brand them as inferior farm laborers, not possessors of rank and privilege [cf. Athen. 14.657C-D]). That image of a sunburned, leather-clad manual laborer (e.g., Theog. 54-57; Men. Dys. 416) portrays Greek farmers far better than finely clothed absentee lords, the wealthy upper crust who, Thucydides said, at one time in Ionia wore linen underwear and tied a knot of their hair with golden grasshoppers (Thuc. 1.6.2).
From now on throughout Greek literature, the farmer is to be a man of leather and hides, and one proud of his distinct weather-beaten look. In the Dyscolus of Menander, the status of the sunburned man can be surmised by the question: “Is he a farmer?” (754). Nor, as in the case of Laertes, is there any reason to believe that Hesiod’s estate is large and bountiful. The evidence in the poem instead suggests that the farm is on less than prized bottomland and, given the few tools named, probably not much larger than five to fifteen acres.
On the other hand, it is also hard to agree with recent scholars’ attempts to make Hesiod into a “peasant,” unless one changes the popular conception of a peasant to our notion of an intensive small farmer, or a “better off” peasant. In regard to traditional definitions of peasantry, I have found no evidence that the geôrgoi of the Greek countryside by the fifth century (1) were frequently under debt obligation to the rich, (2) were without disposable cash, (3) were subject to an array of high rents and taxes, (4) were growers of food largely for subsistence without much regard for the market, (5) were lacking a strong and equal voice in political affairs, (6) were subject to military conscription without consent, (7) were liable to have their social status frozen indefinitely, (8) were without slaves, (9) were sharply divided from those higher up on the social scale by the size and nature of their farm holdings, (10) were without clear title to their farms, stock, slaves, and arms, or (11) were bereft of any chance for improvement and change in agricultural technique. Every one of these eleven characteristics was absent from the polis countryside. Instead, “independent,” “intensive,” “yeoman,” or “middling” farmer much better fits the evidence.7 Although Hesiod’s farm is not large, it apparently can support at least six people: the owner, his wife (695-701), at least one child (376-77), two or more male slaves (469-71, 502, 607-8), and a female servant (602-3). His farmer also owns oxen (404-5), mules, and slaves (459, 470, 502, 573, 608, 766), as well as his own farm equipment and house (405)—a sizable capital investment beyond the resources of the very poor (e.g., Will 1965: 547-48). Hesiod can conceive of his farmer freely buying the land of others (ophr’ allôn ônê klêron, mê ton teon allos,341). In fact, at no time in the culture of thepolis were the majority of farmers legally trapped on their small holdings without recourse to buying, selling, renting, or leasing. Although there was strong social and familial pressure to retain the family plot (one of the chief tenets of agrarianism), the evidence still suggests that at all eras of polis history one could buy or sell farmland. It is nearly impossible to envision Greek homestead farmers as systematically being exploited by outsiders, or in possession of a distinct cultural tradition of victimization.8
Hesiod also contemplates maritime trade excursions as a way of profiting from occasional agricultural surpluses (618-35), and his farmers can even enjoy imported wine (589). Finally, he advises having only a single son, a probable reflection of worries over fragmenting the ancestral estate, thus reducing his heirs to the ranks of the poor—an idea quite at odds with the practice of the impoverished, who seek needed agricultural labor not in slaves or hired men, but in large families. This limiting of the farm family is different than the traditional notions of peasantry, but the preference for fewer offspring must also illustrate Hesiod’s assumption that slaves are plentiful, affordable, and vital to the homesteader’s operation. Clearly, the poet is addressing those who are not on the bottom of the social scale. His Works and Days is “a manual for the newly created economy of the tillers of the soil who were beginning to practice independent agriculture full-time and in great number.”9
The Rise of the Agrarians
—Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, Letters of an American Farmer (Letter 3)
The rich and the poor are not so removed from each other as they are in Europe. Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida. If he [the European] travels throughout rural districts he views not the hostile castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and the miserable cabin, where men and cattle help to keep each other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke and indigence. A pleasing uniformity of decent competence appears throughout our habitations.
Various later literary sources confirm Hesiod’s initial picture of the emergence of small farmers who were neither wealthy aristocrats nor impoverished peasants tied to subsistence agriculture. Their vigorous presence is not a romantic abstraction, but a reality in the life of the later Greek city-state that explains much of the absence of class conflict between the rich and the poor throughout the ensuing four centuries of this study. The deterioration of just this group of middling farmers, in turn, accounts for the polarization in Greek society from the third century on, when the small and independent landowner was unable to survive, and the size of Hellenistic farms became much larger—even as the total arability of a city’s surrounding lands (predictably) often declined. Throughout Greek literature of the polis period the challenge to the new farmer comes not mainly from the poor, with their litany of “redistribution of lands and cancellation of debts”—that agenda is usually characteristic of the fourth century and later—but from the entrenched wealthy, who resent the ambitious nonaristocratic landowner and “his pleasing uniformity of decent competence.”
Right at the beginning of Greek agrarianism we see two phenomena in the agrarian sociology of the incipient polis. First, there is intense dislike on the part of the landed and wealthy elite for these upstart farmers, the geôrgoi who early in aristocratic literature are predictably dubbed the kakoi, the “bad,” (in opposition to the agathoi, the “good” traditional aristocrats by birth), and second, recognition appears among more enlightened Greeks that the presence of an agrarian class of small farmers (properly called hoi mesoi,“the middle ones”) was responsible for both the creation and preservation of the Greek city-state, and that their political agenda was both reasonable and proper.
In early Greek literature the kakoi (the “bad”) and the mesoi (the “middle”) are often one and the same group. The former is merely the pejorative label used by the wealthy to demean the once impoverished who are now in ascendancy.10 The latter is either the self-nomenclature of the farmers themselves, or the label used by the few aristocrats and later philosophers sympathetic to their cause. At the most cynical extreme would be the (sixth-century?) reactionary poet Theognis (54ff), who felt the agrarians had so successfully infringed the aristocratic domain, so completely replaced birth by material success in the growing polis, that they no longer were kakoi, or even mesoi. Now they wandered outside the walls of the polis with pretensions to actually being agathoi (the “good”)!
The actual emergence of middling farmers explains in large part the Greek philosophical construct of moderation and “the golden mean,” not vice versa. Aristotle recognized first the crucial role of the mesoi in the early polis, and second their relation to the birth of a more abstract philosophical and ethical notion of moderation: “In all city-states, then, there are three divisions of the polis: the very rich, the very poor, and those who are in the middle (hoi mesoi) of the two. Because it is agreed that the moderate way (to metrion)or middle (to meson) is best, it is clear then that it is most preferable to have the middle amount (hê mesê) of all fortunate things” (Pol. 4. 1295b2-6).11
A landscape of small family farmers, ancient and modern, usually resuits in a rural world of three, not two, classes. Greek agrarianism—the success and social stability offered by the creation of a large group of middling farmers—antedated the rise of conscious, written philosophical speculation. So it should be expected that an agrarian tradition informs a number of early Greek philosophers, men who drew on the emerging egalitarian landscape for their own views on natural harmony. Passages in Greek literature that connect farming to philosophy and early philosophers illustrate the original link between philosophical speculation and both agrarian ideology and the pragmatics of agriculture itself (e.g., Thales [Arist. Pol. 1.1259a10-12]; Empedocles [Theophr. CP 1.7.1]; “The Seven Sages” [Colum. Rust. 1.3.8]; Democritus [Diog. Laert. 9.48])—a very early tradition that antedated the later more systematic investigations of Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus.
Wealthier Greeks had no affinity for the emergence of geôrgoi. Anecdotes abound demonstrating the aristocratic dislike for the new type of agriculture that required hard work by the owner, leaving no leisure or time to engage in traditionally preferred hunting and athletic pursuits. Timaeus relates the disparaging jokes two wealthy Sybarites exchanged when watching farmers hoe the fields. Just watching them work makes the two wealthy men ill.
In contrast, Phocylides, an elegiac poet of the mid-sixth century, advises that his readers can find wealth in homestead agriculture: “See that you have a fertile farm, for a farm, they say, is a horn of plenty” (fr. 7.1-2). He was probably not talking about the estates of the landed aristocrats, for in another fragment he reminds his readers, “Much good is there to the middle-ones (mesoisin); I would wish to be midmost (mesos) in a city” (cf. Arist. Pol. 4.1295b30-35).
Around the same time at Athens we also see further reference to a rural group that was neither extremely wealthy nor reduced to abject slavery. In Attica there was an old tradition (going back perhaps to the end of the Greek Dark Ages?) that the officers of the citizenry were selected from the eupatridai (the nobles), the geôrgoi or agroikoi (the farmers), and the dêmiourgoi (the landless craftsmen) (Arist. Ath. Pol. 13.2-3; cf. Plut. Thes. 25.2). The terminology may be inexact. It may be too strict a tripartite social division for eighth-century Attica. Nevertheless, these categories echo a long-held belief that early in the history of the Greek polis, there were farmers who had carved themselves out a middle ground, neither wealthy nor poor.
The agrarian transformation was not uniform throughout Greece either geographically or chronologically. There were always (even in the late polis period) backwaters of reactionary horse raising and Dark-Age aristocracy. Yet it seems clear enough that Athens, at least by the early sixth century, while undergoing “a more or less anarchic system of individual transactions,”12 was not in a period of agricultural retrenchment. Like hundreds of other poleis, Athens was struggling toward the formal political recognition of a true class of yeomanry, who owned their own plots and sought political representation equal to their economic success.
The lawgiver Solon appreciated the new realities when, at the beginning of the sixth century in Attica, he supposedly organized the Athenians into four census “classes” to divide political power and assess wealth according to the citizens’ agrarian (and military?) status. The producers of 500 wet or dry measures of agricultural produce (the wealthiest so-called pentakosiomedimnoi), those who could show income of 300 medimnoi (the hippeis who composed the cavalry), and the 200-measure zeugitai, most likely our hoplite-farmers who “yoked” themselves side by side in battle, were all now allowed their respective magistracies and formally constituted the political body of the city-state.* They formed the ancestral constitution recalled so nostalgically throughout later Athenian literature. The fourth and last Solonian group of thêtes, mostly landless poor or impoverished subsistence farmers who could not rate 200 measures of annual produce (and perhaps originally were thereby incapable of buying armor), were still excluded from most formal political representation. Controversy surrounds the exact implications of these early census rubrics for economics, the military, and politics, but for our agrarian purposes the picture is clear enough: early Athenian society was denned exclusively according to agricultural production, not birth, and farming success was apparently the key to all political and military privilege.*
There now at Athens was formal recognition of a class of farmers quite apart from the poor below and the wealthy above. This middle grouping, this zeugite rubric of the 200-300-measure men who “yoked” oxen (or were “yoked” together in hoplite infantry service), suggests by 600 B.C. in Attica at least the entrenched existence of a militia of yeoman farmers.***
Quite naturally Solon (“a middle citizen” [Arist. Ath. Pol. 5.2-3; Plut. Sol. 14-15.1]) felt that he had deliberately positioned himself with his shield as a hoplite of sorts between the abject poor and the aristocratic rich. He writes (Sol. 4.5-8): “I provided the people as much privilege as they have a right to. I neither degraded them from rank nor gave them a free hand. And for those who already held the power and were envied for riches, I worked it out that they also should have no cause for complaint. I stood there holding my sturdy shield over both the parties.”
At their root, these original social differentiations in early Athenian history may have been a product of locale as well. A little later, about the time of the tyrant Peisistratus (mid-sixth century), we are told that rural interests in Attica were still known by their residence at the “Plain,” “Shore,” or “Hill” (e.g., Arist. Ath. Pol. 13.4; Hdt. 159.3). Even if such rubrics were not entirely historical, the conventional nomenclature at least reflected popular belief that the wealthier agathoi (“the good”) had long been associated with the richest land of the “Plain” (the pedion probably nearest Athens). The “Shore” (the paralia or coastal area from Phaleron to Sunion) and the “Hill” (huperakrioi or diakrioi) distinguished poorer traders and farmers on less prized ground or even on rough terrain.13
Mere labels probably do not suppose strict historical distinctions in occupation or economic class. But they are at least another sign of a group of agrarians at odds with the wealthy holders of the old prized land near Athens itself. The geographical distinctions point to three, not two, social groups. Aristotle believed that Peisistratus “had made himself tyrant by raising a party against the men of the plain” (Pol. 5.1305a 23-24; 1310b 30-1).
There had long been strife between established estate holders on bottom land (perhaps owners of large herds and wealthy specialist growers of grain) and those who were becoming established as intensive farmers of diverse crops, often on land that could include rugged terrain. When Aristotle recalled the original creation of ten ruling archons at Athens (about 580 B.C.), he posited the presence of a middling group of agrarians between the aristocratic rich and landless poor. The ten officers, he wrote, were to be composed of five eupatridai, or nobles, three farmers (agroikoi), and two dêmiourgoi, or landless craftsmen and day laborers (Ath. Pol. 13.2).
Rarely in early Greek history was there anything like the “range wars” of the American West, but early on, large livestock owners were probably seen as a distinct group (e.g., Athen. 12.540d). It is reasonable to suppose that their interests often collided with the homesteaders—even though most farmers could own some livestock and most wealthy herdsmen could own some farmland. After all, the old-guard, livestock-owning elite descended from the decentralized and depopulated Greece of past centuries. They would wish to perpetuate their concentration on animals, and so would resent homestead farmers who opted for more efficient use of land and the curtailment of horse raising and cavalry. Aristotle, in his encomium of rural people, generally saw pastoralists and agriculturalists as different social entities (e.g., Pol. 6.1319a20-24). By the fifth and fourth centuries, animal-raising was a cash enterprise dominated by the rich who produced animals for specialized markets, for sacrifice and cavalry, and for the sporting tastes of an urban elite.14
The days of aristocratic horse rearing, for mounted raiding, and military cadres were numbered. Such practices were based on an underutilization of increasingly valuable farm ground. In turn, farming and rural infrastructure often precluded the unrestricted passage of large herds to and from mountain pasture, and intensive agriculture gave Greek farmers a modicum of social prestige entirely divorced from the mere possession of animals. Aristotle recounts in his Politics (5.1305a24-25) the curious story of Theagenes of Megara (625 B.C.?), the tyrant who slaughtered the cattle of the well-off (hoi euporoi), perhaps because they were wandering onto the property of others. Later, it is no surprise that in most literature of the polis the old hierarchy of pastoralism and cavalry was viewed as uncivilized, and compared unfavorably with agriculture and infantry service.15 Some writers suggest that within these early poleis only five percent of the population may have held enough land to be called “aristocratic,” whereas nearly half the citizen population qualified as hoplites. An enormous social transformation had obviously taken place in Greece, nothing less than the creation of an entire class, which through sheer preponderance of numbers overwhelmed the aristocratic culture of Dark-Age Greece.
Aristote’s anecdote concerning Theagenes is part of a digression on early tyrants who championed the cause of the people—the people who, Aristotle tells us, “in those times lived on their farms (epi tôn agrôn oikein ton démon) busily engaged in their work(ascholon onta pros tois ergois)” (Pol. 5. 1305a18-20). The Athenian tyrant Peisistratus (mid-sixth century) especially was said to have deliberately encouraged rural residence and the farming of olives, going so far as to provide loans for trees and vines to broaden his support among rural farmers (Dio. Chrys. 7.107-8; 1.75.3; Arist. Ath. Pol. 16.3). From these random, but frequent, anecdotes about early Athenian history, a common theme emerges: a growing group of small farmers assumes political power and enjoys military status, quite distinct from either the poor or the wealthy elite. Small plots, not large herds or rich estates; infantry, not horsemen or skirmishers, agricultural competence, not birth, become the backbone of the Athenian polis.16
The Athenian leader Pericles at the outset of the Peloponnesian War remarked that most of the peoples of the Peloponnese were self-employed farmers (autourgoi), an indication they were neither absentee landlords or rich barons, nor peasants dependent on wealthy households or urban interests (Thuc. 1.139.2). In his report to his own people about prospective Athenian military strength at the dawn of the first Peloponnesian invasion (431 B.C.), Pericles (e.g., Thuc. 2.14) reviewed the forces in three categories: (1) cavalry (i.e., the wealthy), (2) infantry (i.e., the mostly farming middle), and (3) light-armed skirmishers and rowers (i.e., those without much property). Thucydides himself, when he lists the Athenian losses to the plague, catalogs the dead according to a three-part hierarchy: (1) 300 cavalry, (2) more than 4,400 hoplites, (3) significant numbers of the poor below (3.87).
The depiction of an agrarian hoplite group who did their own farm work alongside a few slaves, but who were neither extremely wealthy nor entirely poor, survived in Greek literature well into the fourth century, demonstrating the continued existence of a viable intensive agriculture during nearly the entire lifetime of the polis. In a particularly interesting passage in Euripides’ late fifth-century tragedy, the Supplices, the Athenian hero Theseus is made to say that there exist three types of citizens: the rich are “greedy and of no use,” the landless poor are grasping and easily led astray by evil leaders, but the “ones in the middle” (hoi mesoi) “are the salvation of the city” (238-42; cf. Bisinger 6).
Aristotle displays fewer of the aristocratic prejudices of Plato, and has a far clearer grasp of class distinctions and the role of property in the life of the city-state. He takes up the theme of the “middle ones” throughout his Politics (e.g., 4.1295a36-1296a22). He suggests that this identification and praise of those in between, although related to the more general Greek ideal of the “mean,” also refers to a specific class, the landowning group of the polis.
This “class” is clearly not mercantile or commercial in the modern sense, but rather entirely agrarian, sandwiched between the few wealthy and the most numerous poor. Aristotle writes of middling farmers in realistic, rather than Utopian, terms. He implies that agrarians of the middle had been widespread throughout the early polis history of Greece (although he saw them in decline during his own time at the end of the fourth century). The citizenry was divided into three groups: “the wealthy,” “those without means,” and the “middle ones” (hoi mesoi; cf. Pol. 4.1295b3-5; 1295b30-40), who were not pitted against either of the other two classes, and whose numbers resulted in a proportional stability in the polis. Aristotle earlier had said nearly the same thing: “some in thepolis must be rich, some poor, and some in between” (Pol. 4.1289b33).17
His use of mesoi here refers explicitly to the owners of small farms: “When the farmer class and the class having moderate means are in control of the government, they govern according to laws; the reason is because they have a livelihood, and they are not able to be at leisure, so that they put laws in control of the state and hold only the minimum of assemblies necessary” (Pol. 4.1292b25-29). He is contrasting them with both the leisured, absentee wealthy and the underemployed landless. In a later passage, he concludes that those who hold property in moderation are the most stabilizing influence in the city-state (4.1295b29-31).
Aristotle goes on to reiterate that government of these middle ones is the best, but possible only when they are present in sufficient number to prevent class strife between the very rich and the abject poor (1295b40-1296a22). This observation implies, I think, that in his review of polis history he saw instability at the creation of the polis and then once more during the turmoil of his own time during the late fourth century. He apparently felt then that the mesoi were shrinking, and thus their erosion was leading to either extremely narrow oligarchical or excessively democratic regimes.* Finally, in his sixth book of the Politics, he once more confirms that the “middle ones” were, in fact, those who farmed on their own, and who provided the city-state with the social and political stability that led to the “best” type of government (1318b7-15).
Since there are four types of democracy, the best of all is the first type, which was described in the preceding discourses [e.g., the farmer democracy of sections 1291b-1292b, cf.1295b]. It is also the most ancient of them all, although by the term “first” I mean first as a rubric used to classify the commons. Indeed, the best common people is the agricultural population (geôrgikos dêmos), so that it is possible to introduce democracy wherever the multitude lives by agriculture or by pasturing cattle. Not having a great deal of property, they have no time for frequent attendance at the assembly. Needing the essentials of life, they are always hard at work and do not covet the property of their neighbors.
Aristotle writes that this most stable form of government by small farmers had an ancient pedigree, and was to be associated with the foundation of the polis. He adds that in many states “in early times” an entire array of laws (restrictions on the size of land ownership, prohibition of the sale of farmland, legislation against borrowing against an estate, and rules of inheritance) existed that were “entirely fitting,” and whose purpose was “to establish the agricultural nature of the community (to kataskeuazein geôrgikon ton dêmon)” (Pol. 6.1319a8; cf. Asheri 1963: 20-21). Clearly, Aristotle believed that the hardworking yeomen had formed the best constitutions in the Greek city-states, even though he worried that their farming responsibilities often had led them to be superseded by underworked radicals on both the left and right.
Finally, it should be no surprise that Aristotle (e.g., Pol. 4.1296a18-22) also believed that the best lawgivers—those who helped frame the constitutions of the agrarian city-states in the eighth and seventh centuries—emerged from “the middle group of citizens”(tôn mesôn politôn), men like Solon, Lycurgus, Charondas “and nearly all the great majority of the other lawgivers,” The so-called Seven Sages of the seventh century saw the “mean” and “proportion” as integral in the holding of farmland (Colum.Rust. 1.3.8).18
It is just that rural middle group, the source of and exemplar for an entire society’s “moderate” stance, that is under assault currently in the American agrarian landscape. Completely ignorant of Aristotle’s warning, “we are rapidly heading toward a dual-sector system in which middle-sized family farms are all but eliminated, leaving a small number of huge superfarms and numerous small and economically unimportant, ‘hobby farms.’ The total number of farms is predicted to drop from 2.2. million in 1982 to 1.2. million in 2000, with just 50,000 superfarms accounting for 75% of the country’s total agricultural production by the turn of the century” (Davidson 162). The Hellenistic practice of estate farming coupled with peasantry has taken over American agriculture.
But throughout the seventh century the mesoi proliferated. Inevitably, the farmers’ growing economic power was reflected in their construction of the legal framework of the polis. Their later solid presence in the political life of the city-state proves that. Aristotle summed their importance up well:
The lawgiver must always in his constitution take in the middle class: if he is making the laws of an oligarchy, he must keep the middle in consideration, and if he desires democracy, he must legislate to bring them in. And where the size of the middle class exceeds both of the extreme classes, or even one of them alone, then it is possible for constitutional government to be lasting. (Aristotle Politics 4.1296b35-39)
It is no surprise that modern political theorists have argued that democracy works only when there is a prior group of socially cohesive equals. In the language of the social sciences: “If horizontal networks of civic engagement help participants solve dilemmas of collective action, then the more horizontally ordered an organization, the more it should foster institutional success in the broader community” (Putnam 175). Translated that means representative and constitutional governments best serve the people. But they never emerge unless there is preexisting social and economic egalitarianism among the citizenry. In the ancient Greek world, as Aristotle saw 2,300 years ago, agrarianism provided that prerequisite “horizontally ordered organization.” It made later democracy possible.
The initial appearance of Greek yeomanry drew both resentment and anger from the aristocratic elite, as the geôrgoi campaigned for additional political power to protect their economic advances, for a move from a birth elite to a landed, though broad-based, government. At this time of expanding commerce among the city-states there were also the ambitious engaged in rudimentary commerce and craftsmanship, especially the exchange and fabrication of clays and metals. But we should never overestimate their size or influence in the thousand or so agrarian city-states outside Athens and Corinth. In Greece of the polis period, the real political, social, economic, and military issues were always over land (e.g., Arist. Pol. 2.1266a37; Pl. Leg. 736E), not arising from commercial rivalry among a purported large class of manufacturers and tradesmen. Most of those who did live in town served the geôrgoi outside the walls in some way; farmers marketed their crops in exchange for livestock, slaves, building materials, clays, and metals provided by the more urbanized agricultural service sector. In short: “Ownership of land alone determined a man’s political status and the city became officially subject to the countryside.”*
Trade and business activity in general often revolved around the storage, transport, and exchange of foodstuffs. In the ancient world the great majority of the population always worked the land in some capacity, as free landowner, absentee estate holder, slave or serf, and thus most vague references to social turmoil during the polis period involved the ownership and control of agricultural property. In the Politics, Aristotle writes: “Some think that the proper regulation of property holding is most important, for the issue of property, they say, is universally the cause of class strife” (Pol. 2.1266a37-39). For what it is worth, much of middle and late fourth-century Greek literature has a romantic view of polis stability in the prior centuries (i.e., 700-400 B.C.). Isocrates believed that Greek society in the past had been balanced between wealthy and poor (Aerop. 7.31), a time when “moderation” was the key to social stability. Isocrates’ obsession with the growing polarization in the fourth century between “poverty and wealth” (e.g., Antid.15.142, 251) reflects his assumption that a substantial middle had existed earlier in most of the Greek city-states. Without the mesoz, the polis was not much more than “slaves and masters” (Arist. Pol. 4.1295b20-22).
After the establishment of the middling, stabilizing geôrgoi in the eighth through fifth centuries, there was rarely open hostility between the landless and the very wealthy until Hellenistic and Roman times.** Land redistribution schemes, confiscations, and proscribed gifts of farms to the community were all the (usually failed) efforts of the late fourth-century and Hellenistic Greeks to restore a long-lasting, stable property egalitarianism so characteristic of the earlier, lost culture of the polis.
Hesiod gives the first indication of the nature of this tension through his repeated attacks on “the bribe-swallowing barons” (Op. 38-39) who ostensibly cheat the small farmers like himself out of their legal property. In his Works and Days an apparently stable community of small farmers is envisioned, one with ill-will toward the aristocrats, only beginning to create a political program to ensure its continuance on the land. In much of the literature that follows Hesiod, strife concerning land use and land ownership intensified until it was resolved with the political ascendancy of the mesoi. “Class struggle” at this time was of course not a contest over the rights of slaves or over the interests of the poor, but rather involved the new farmers, men with growing economic clout and land but without noble birth. They were pitted against the old guard estate owners, the “eupatridai” or “agathoi,” well-born aristocrats who felt threatened by a more competent new agrarian class.
This tension is exhibited in a variety of ways in Greek literature, depending on the polis involved, the chronological period, and the political views of the author. Hostile thinkers refer to the homesteaders as “the bad (kakoi).” These are the disdained ill-bred upstarts, who, in the poet Theognis’s words, “wore goatskins about their flanks and pasture like deer outside the city, and now they become ‘good.’ Who can bear it?” (frs. 54-57; cf. Starr 1977: 234 n.16; Figueira 1985: 128-29). Perhaps here Theognis is really objecting to the new farmers who, dressed like Laertes and Hesiod, rarely come into town, but “pasture like deer” on their isolated farms. The poet’s attack on rustics and his natural affinity for the urban wealthy is a fine example of the anthropological observation that the wealthy of a society cluster in cities. In antiquity, the Greeks seemed to assume that the most prestigious land was contiguous to the polis proper*; at least initially the rural poorer residents were measured by their distance from the polisproper.
The real “good,” Theognis goes on to say, are the well-born, adding “never yet have the ‘good’ ruined a city” (fr. 43). The implication is that the leather-clad farmers, who reside outside the city wall, are now no longer threatened by the “bribe swallowers,” but rather have themselves nearly displaced the very wealthy from absolute control of Greek economic, social, and political life: “Many kakoi are rich, many agathoi are poor” (Theog. 315-17). Birth itself is no longer a guarantee of political power. “The noble marry the base,” Theognis laments, “the base the noble. Wealth has confounded birth” (189-90). But it was not wealth, but work, that had confounded Theognis’s ordered aristocratic world.
What has happened in the century and a half between Hesiod (700 B.C.), the budding voice of agrarianism, and Theognis (about 550 B.C.), the grouchy, besieged and hysterical reactionary? The small farmers have obtained political representation to match their economic clout. They have begun to fashion the city-state in the image of their own agrarian interests: “In most states the power of wealth could not be resisted: the economic revolution led first to social, then to political changes” (Whibley 78-79; emphasis added).
Sometimes the early mesoi accomplished this transformation through the so-called lawgivers, the legendary statesmen who Greeks of the polis believed had formed the constitutions of the nascent city-state to reflect its majority constituency. Too often scholars have seen these shadowy figures as constitutional philosophers, not primarily as pragmatic agrarian reformers. But Aristotle believed the early lawgivers had shaped their governments to ensure that the polis reflected the preexisting agrarian culture.
Most of these men remain hazy, near-mythical figures. Yet their laws have such a nearly uniform agrarian flavor that we can be sure they reflect real aspirations on the part of the early independent farmers. Philolaus of Corinth (about 730 B.C.?) had supposedly enacted regulations ensuring that the farms at Thebes might remain the same number in perpetuity (hopôs ho arithmos sôzêtai tôn klêrôn; Pol. 2.1274b1-6). The Corinthian Pheidon, “one of the most ancient of the lawgivers,” purportedly argued that the population and the number of plots ought always to remain roughly equal (Pol. 2.1265b13-16).
An even more shadowy figure, Phaleas the Chalcedonian, advanced the concept that all the citizens of the polis ought to hold equal amounts of property (Pol. 2.1266a40-1266b6; cf. 2.1274a23-30). These early advocates of agrarianism are lost to the historical record as individual personalities, and we have no idea how their laws were passed, or the degree to which farmers themselves participated in the actual crafting of legislation. But their prominence and the advocacy of their programs do reflect two trends: the growing number of independent small farmers in Greece, and the concerted need to protect their economic gains from aristocratic backlash, especially any effort to separate farmer from farm.
The best-known figure between Hesiod and Theognis is Solon of Athens (about 600 B.C.), and his reforms need to be examined in detail. From a variety of literary evidence we can sketch a general picture of a group of farmers, “the sixth-partners” (hektêmoroi),who around 600 B.C. were under severe debt obligation to the wealthy, ostensibly owing five-sixths (rather than one-sixth) of their produce.19
The impoverished were no doubt failing new agriculturalists, who were either pledging their own newly acquired plots for capital, or working land in some type of sharecropping agreement with established aristocrats (see [Arist.] Oec. 2.1349a3-8, for the farmer’s need for capital before planting). In any case, a century after the Works and Days, at Attica many of the geôrgoi seem not yet entirely successful and independent. In somewhat of an exaggeration, Plutarch tells us that Solôn was presented with a situation where “all of the less well-off were in debt to the rich.” Those struggling farmers must have been either farming land for the wealthy or paying up to five of six parts of their proceeds as rent (Plut. Sol. 13.1).
Aristotle appears to agree. He concludes in his Constitution of Athens that there was strife among the residents of Attica, that the existing constitution gave little heed to any but the rich, and that the whole countryside was under the control of a few wealthy men(Ath. Pol. 2.1; 4.5). This specter of a few nobles owning all of Attica is obviously an incorrect generalization: Solon never redistributed lands and yet later at least two thirds of Attica constituted small farms; few, if any, estates exceeded a hundred acres. The landscape before Solon must have already been populated by a great number of yeoman farmers.
Aristotle may have meant that some small farmers had not been able to make a living. To obtain necessary capital (for trees and vines, land reclamation, rural infrastructure), geôrgoi must have pledged any property they owned—even their own bodies—as security to the old landed nobles (e.g., Plut. Sol. 13.2). Ironically, in many Greek city-states there were rules prohibiting confiscation of weapons and farm equipment for agricultural debt, but the seizure of the debtor himself was apparently still allowable (e.g., Diod. 1.79.3-5), suggesting that debt bondage was sometimes the result of scarce capital and more plentiful labor. Solon’s limiting of exports of grain while encouraging olive trading exemplified the populist checking of aristocratic landowners on richer bottomland while encouraging yeomen who were investing in trees and vines (e.g., Plut. Sol. 13; Arist. Ath. Pol. 2.2; Bravo 1983: 23-24)
Noteworthy is the limited program of relief for the abject poor, a debt-reduction scheme Solon, “in wealth and by occupation a member of the middle class” (e.g., Arist. Ath. Pol 5.3; Plut. Sol. 14-15), supposedly advocated. Nowhere do we hear that Solon sought a redistribution of property or a general cancellation of debts. Wholesale confiscations took place rarely in the Greek poleis for nearly the next two and a half centuries. Solon himself was thus proud that “the wealthy suffered no harm” (fr. 5). Using the appropriate imagery of yeoman infantry, he says that he protected both sides of the quarrel with “a strong shield” (fr. 5).
His agrarian legislation outlawed debt slavery (the servile term “sixth-partners” [hektêmoroi] thereafter became obsolete), reconstituted census rubrics to allow smaller landowners to have a greater role in politics, and allowed the restoration of some small farms to their former owners (Arist. Ath. Pol. 6; Plut. Sol. 15.2-16.4), thus creating in one sense “the beginning of Athenian democracy” (Arist. Ath. Pol. 41.2). “The dark earth,” Solon wrote, “whose mortgage stones fixed in so many places I removed. Once a slave, now she is free” (fr. 24). Solon’s program was political recognition (1) of aristocratic excess and arrogance, (2) of a large number of poor whom he could not or would not help, and (3) of a sizable body of successful mesoi, who were now formally brought into the apparatus of Athenian government. Solonian legislation confirmed on-going agrarian success: middling farmers’ skills, not their birth, now brought political dividends.*
An enormous modern bibliography is devoted to the so-called Solonian Question, efforts to find out exactly what the Attic economic problem was, and how effective were the solutions. But the majority of independent geôrgoi of early sixth-century Attica were not necessarily affected, nor was the soil exhausted or the newly cultivated hillsides eroded from deforestation. The main beneficiaries may well have been those who already had carved out an independent stance from the wealthy. The crisis that arose was anaturalevolutionary process of success and failure, a subtle transformation that occurs when there are fundamental changes in land use and a growing population. Political representation must make a correction and so catch up with economic influence; wealth must replace birth as a prerequisite for polis participation.
As small farmers rose out of the Dark Ages, a great number over some two centuries of intensified and diversified farming no doubt failed. (Later, Xenophon remarks: “Some farmers are so successful that agriculture provides them all they need, while others are so indifferent that farming is unprofitable” [Oec. 6.11]). Their land then came under the control of the more successful (not in every case the old, entrenched elite). Or, alternatively, the more desperate resorted to extreme measures—paying exorbitant rents, pledging their persons as security for debts—to continue farming. (In my own experience, once things go bad, farmers become increasingly frantic and look to all sorts of unrealistic mechanisms, hoping for one more year that may bring salvation; hence the modern farming proverb “never throw good money into a bad operation.”) Some land may have been too poor to have been reclaimed and farmed in the first place (Plut. Sol. 22.3; cf. Plut. Mor. 147D) and, on the collapse of its owners, it simply reverted back to wild ground. Those failed geôrgoi, instead of being sent abroad as indentured servants, may have migrated abroad as experienced free agrarian settlers, as a part of a growing Athenian interest in overseas expropriation and conquest of lands (e.g., Plut. Sol. 8-9; Hdt. 5.54; 6.136). Although Solon probably accomplished little in alleviating the plight of the impoverished, he did codify the gains won by the majority of small hoplite-landowners, the zeugitai (“the yoked together”), by allowing them to hold office at Athens, by legislation protecting the family plot, and by ensuring those surviving, though encumbered, farmers that they could continue to work their parcels.20
Athens would not place agriculture under centralized government control to modulate the farming practice of its citizens. Nor would property primarily be owned by only the very rich. For the great duration of the polis period we do not hear of ongoing agrarian legislation in Greece, or of a series of controversial reform laws (such as at Rome during the early republic [e.g., Frayn 73-87]), to ensure agricultural egalitarianism and general equity in landholding.
Solonian census classification and economic and political reforms were not very beneficial to the landless or subsistence farmers (“the fourth class, the thêtes, had no share in any office” [Arist. Pol. 2.1274a22]). Failed poor were later described by Xenophon’s Socrates: “Often when men farm the same type of ground, some become impoverished and say they were ruined by farming, while others prosper from agriculture and have everything they need” (Xen. Oec. 3.5). These successful agriculturalists were now formally incorporated by Solon into the Athenian political system and protected from aristocratic reaction. Later Athenians believed that Solon had established the tradition that orphans of those who fell in battle were to be provided with state support, another indication that the early lawgiver aimed the majority of his reforms at the hoplite-landowner (e.g., Diog. Laert. 1.55; Thuc. 2.46.1; Pl. Menex. 248e6-8; Arist. Pol. 2.1268a8-11).
It was now agricultural expertise, not mere birth, that brought one social prestige and political representation. For the first time in Attic history there was under Solon to be formal reckoning and clarification of the previously chaotic agrarian environment (a need “to define more precisely the user’s rights, duties, and privilege” [Rihll 115]): farmers who proved themselves were now a protected species; marginal farmers who failed could never again seek government intervention to ensure their success, at least until the appearance of a much more radical democracy in the fifth century.
Solon provided a political framework to deal with new economic realities: a large group of nonaristocrats was to make up the governing council of Athens, a body that once granted representation was not radical but soon rather reactionary. It was not sympathetic to the landless and the failed, but rather protective of the newly successful. In the later history of Athens, the Solonian achievement—the “ancestral constitution” (patrios politeia) of hoplite landowners—was nostalgically recalled as the great property of yeomanry, contrasted at every opportunity with landless radical democracy. By the fifth and fourth century Solon was remembered as a broad-based timocrat by later hoplites and as the founder of democracy by more radical Athenians, but looked upon not at all favorably by aristocratic elites. In the fifth century the wealthy much preferred the earlier and harsher (and mostly mythical) constitution of Draco.21
After the emergence of independent landowners and their new ideology of hard work, any notion of landed titles was extinct. Vanished was the snobbery of horse rearing, gentry, chivalry, and pretentious manors, so common elsewhere across the Mediterranean and in Asia. In the early Greek community of southern Italy, “the picture of the rural society of Metapontum that begins to emerge does not support the theory of landed aristocracy. The surface distribution of the farmhouses with their related burial grounds leaves little possibilities for vast estates. It seems to have been a well-to-do, but also a remarkably egalitarian society” (J. Carter 1990: 430; cf. 409-10). Polis values were firmly established during the eighth and seventh centuries in many areas of Greece—primarily to serve agrarian “well-to-do, but also remarkably egalitarian” interests, that is, the interests of the hoplite geôrgoi. Save for a few reactionary states, serfdom and other forms of Dark-Age helotage vanished, superseded (ironically, or rather logically) by chattel slaves working alongside the owners of small farms.
I do not mean to imply that all Greek city-states followed identical patterns of agrarian development or that daily life was uniform throughout more than a thousand Greek-speaking communities. My point rather is that agrarianism is the one unifying institutionthat gave the early Greeks common ground, a shared ideology, an agreed-on notion of government, values, and war. Agrarianism defined the nascent polis, its beginning (and end), a community that from the outset “was not an agglomeration of traders and artisans parasitic on backward peasants” (Starr 1977: 100), but a community of cultivators and those who served agrarians. Thus the Greek city-state was born as a rural institution and as an agrarian ideology, not as religion, not as fortification, not as literature or philosophy or art, and not as an exact blueprint of the cultural life of the Greeks. The polis, in short, “was the creation of society; it was the servant of society, and not its master” (Engels 130), a necessary emporium and an assembly for its largely agrarian citizenry.
To understand fully this remarkable relationship between the manner in which Greek landowners farmed and the culture they created, it is necessary now to change radically our angle of vision. Our discussion must turn far from both agricultural technique and the politics of agrarian ideologies. We must learn something of the conditions under which Greek farmers of the polis actually worked.
*Oec. 20.3-6. Not surprisingly, a modern anthropologist’s examination of a farming community in southern Italy, consisting of homestead residences and intensive cultivation practices, concluded: “The hope to ‘eat a piece of bread’ far from the church bells depended also upon a local middle class of only middling wealth, and for the most part, mild entrepreneurial ambitions at least in comparison to the agribusiness of the more northern regions of Apulia. But above all, it depended upon, and fed, their extraordinary motivation to work until bones ached so as to make a step ahead for their children” (Gait 242; cf. Pl. Resp. 1.330B-C).
*There was a tradition that the Greek polis itself often intervened against the lazy and the unproductive, passing legislation that mandated employment, prosecuting any who were idle or unwilling to cultivate their plots, or who squandered their paternal estate. See, e.g., Plut. Sol 31.5; Demosth. 57.32; cf. Isager and Skydsgaard 145-46, and the similar Roman yeoman statutes at Aul. Gell. NA 4.12.
*See Will 1965: 551-55; Osborne 1987: 17.
*See Colum. Rust. 5.8.1 on the olive’s importance. Its absence in the Works and Days results, I think, either from the higher altitudes of the poet’s immediate environs on Mt. Helicon (i.e., about 1,500 feet in elevation), the fragmentary state of the text, or the embryonic condition of arboriculture in early seventh-century Boeotia.
**Modern scholars have, in fact, located the ancient site of Ascra (Snodgrass 1985: 88-95; 1987: 125; 1990: 132-33), the general vicinity of Hesiod’s farm, on the slopes of Mount Helicon. Although the area is picturesque and fertile—near lies the legendary “Valley of the Muses”—the entire setting on a mountain is one easily reminiscent of Laertes’ lower hillside estate on Ithaca.
*See Osborne 1985: 15-16, but cf. the more realistic assumptions of Detienne 1963: 20, 27, and Snodgrass 1990: 132-33.
*Op. 37, 341; cf. Trever 158-59. For isolated farm sites in the environs of Ascra, see Snodgrass 1991: 132, 36; 1985: 88-95.
**Coldstream 1977: 368. For the ethic of hard work, cf. Detienne 1963: 55.
*Cf. the old Roman Cato (Rust. 5.8): “For this is the way farming is: if you do one thing late, you will do everything late (Nam res rustica sic est, si unam rem sero feceris, omia opera sero facies)”; and Columella (Rust. 11.2.80): “All things ought to be done on time, especially sowing. The old farming proverb says that early sowing can often deceive the farmer, the late sowing never—for it always turns out bad.”
*On the limited good, see Millet 1984: 95. For a belief in the stagnant nature of Greek agriculture, see Finley 1973: 71; Starr 1977: 156-68; Jardé 194; Isager and Skydsgaard 191-98. But cf. Amouretti 1986: 239-55.
*FGrH 566 fr.48. In Thessaly, which never really evolved from its status of Dark-Age aristocracy, farmers were not even allowed to use the marketplace, but were relegated to an inferior status, along with the landless and craftsmen (e.g., Arist. Pol. 7.1331a33-35). Surely the successful exclusion of such men reflects the absence of real agrarianism there and a disdain for the entire culture of small farming.
*E.g., Arist. Ath. Pol. 7.3-5; Plut. Sol. 18.1-2; Pollux On. 8.129; cf. Busolt and Swoboda 820-24.
**“It should always be remembered,” wrote Louis Gernet, “that in principle, laws governing land ownership exist only for citizens, and inversely in some constitutions, it is almost a philosophical principle (as well as a condition in certain constitutions) that ownership of property be a prerequisite for citizenship. One should add that agriculture, valued more highly than other and more directly urban factors, is more closely connected with the nature of citizenship. In sum, the citydweller as such has no real place in thepoliteia” (Gernet 1981: 314). See, too, Rhodes 137-46; cf. Patterson 180-82.
***On the general connection between farming and fighting, see also Arist. Pol. 4. 1297b 15-28, 4.1291a31-33; Xen. Oec. 5.12-18; IG I31.8-10; Starr 1977: 177-87; Finley 1981b: 124-25; O. Murray 120-152; Andrewes 1956: 31-42.
*Pol. 4. 1296a24-26. See Lintott 1992: 126-67; Dawson 99-102, on declining mesoi.
*Weber 1976: 174. See Morris 1991: 34-35; Salmon 1984: 404-6; and Finley 1973: 48-49, for the relative importance of agriculture and crafts in the early Greek economy. On the nature of those occupations in town which serviced the needs of farmers, see Engels 41-65.
**“The fifth, and first decades of the fourth, century were,” the social historian Alexander Fuks wrote (41), “a time of balance. In this period there existed in most states of Greece a large and established rural middle class.” Cf. Asheri 1966: 30-74.
*Arist. Pol. 6.1319a10; Xen. Vect. 4.50; Diod. 12.11.1; cf. Audring 1989: 100-10.
Of this group of hoplites James Holladay has correctly remarked: “Except for those at the very bottom of the census qualification, whose status might be precarious, the hoplites by definition possessed adequate land to support themselves and leave a little bit over. They were not economically depressed and they had shared the general political benefits arising from Solon’s reforms” (51). See Starr 1977: 182-83; Spahn 139-60, Gernet 1981: 280-81, on the formal recognition of hoplite mesoi.