PART TWO
—W. G. Runciman 1982: 377
But the fundamental equivalents are there…. There is a combination of intensified land use, improved military organization, and enhanced ideological legitimization, however different the forms which they take. In none of them is the explanation to be found by isolating trade, warfare, religion, population growth, or anything else as the cause of the transition to statehood. It is to be found by ascertaining how there came to be built up a sufficient accumulation of power of all its three separate but mutually reinforcing kinds.
Chapter 5
Small and Equal Farm Size
—Pliny, Natural History 18.4
Anyone for whom seven acres are not enough is a dangerous citizen.
—Statement of the American Farmer’s Union, 1947
The family farm is the final stronghold against oppression, whether economic or political, and no tyranny or “ism” will ever thrive in a country that grounds its agriculture on that base.
In prior chapters we have explored the emergence of a new Greek agricultural technique and the creation of a novel but growing class of farmers who incorporated hillsides, lived on their farms, employed slaves, and planted trees and vines (Chapters 1 and 2): an economic renaissance among the Greek city-states that shifted power from aristocracy to broader-based landed timocracies and constitutional governments (Chapter 3). The success of intensive, homestead farming in Greece made the spread of agrarianism inevitable between the eighth and fifth centuries, producing the rise of the polis and the accompanying political empowerment and control of a novel farming class.
But to ensure the survival of the new Greek geôrgoi there must have existed also something more than phalanxes, institutions besides magistracies, political offices, and the like. Most basic for the early Greek agrarians was something not entirely political or military, but instead a unifying community ideology, well beyond the notion of the Hesiodic concept of hard work, an ideal that could be shared by all citizens of the polis, and enshrined even later among those—merchants, craftsmen, traders—who themselves were not directly tied to the land. So what arose at the beginning of the Greek polis period, then, was a concept that survived in some form to the end of the fourth century and indeed in a sense even into our own times: a belief that there should be no large farm property,no radical inequality in the holding of rural property, and, by extension, no extremely rich or poor citizens in the polis. This constraint against enormous acreages was entirely moral; had there been ethical or political support for latifundia, the advance of Greek agronomy and the presence of large pools of slave labor made the farming of immense estates entirely practicable.
All the farmers of the neighboring community were to hold land roughly similar in size. Among this broad agrarian class of Greek mesoi, land should ideally be passed down through the family without alienation. The ancestral property (klêros) belonged to a family(oikos), not a single (and unpredictable) individual to do with it as he pleased. The few holders of large fortunes, even those nonpropertied rich involved in trade or mining, should be subject to a variety of restrictions and limitations, preventing accumulated capital from being expressed in large landed estates.
In Chapter 3 I presented an account of how the new agrarian mesoi gradually emerged as a distinct class to assume power in the Greek polis. Middling farmers, then, were there first. They were not creations, not the products of Greek politics and government, but rather the necessary prerequisites for constitutional institutions.1 So we must first establish what was the ideology behind the political movement of the early polis period, examine why in early Greece “the outlook for collective actions” was not “bleak.” What did these middling farmers want out of the constitutional framework of their new city-state?
In the fifth century, particularly at Athens, we see considerable cash holding in mining and trading, and instances where some farmers had become dispossessed, whereas others had become undeniably wealthy. Equal farm size in and of itself is not always a guarantee of landed egalitarianism. In agriculture the quality, rather than the quantity, of farmland is the real key to productivity. Ten acres of bottomland near the walls of the polis were more productive than larger farms on more distant upland slopes. In agriculture, it is always preferable to produce the crop on a small but rich farm rather than on a large, poor estate. What is striking here is not merely that some Greek farmers prospered while others failed—that is to be expected given the wide discrepancies in natural agricultural talent and luck once private-property-holding farmers were outside the control of kings and lords. Rather, the question arises, why and how did the exemplar of static property equality—even among those whose ancestral plots were on poorer soils and who had a real need for additional land—endure for nearly four hundred years?*
Even at the end of the fourth century there remained many in the Greek city-state (some of whom were no longer themselves active farmers) who still entertained these notions of equality in landholding. They venerated the old idea that a man was entitled to a piece of ground where he could live and work, from which he could raise a family and fulfill military, social, and political obligations, and which he could pass on improved to his heirs. Quite simply, during the lifetime of the Greek polis there were rarely, if ever,corporate, absentee farms encompassing vast tracts of unbroken farmland. Out of that agricultural reality arose a more general shared notion for the first time in Greece: the farm-owning citizens of a community should all have roughly the same measure of wealth. The agricultural grid of the countryside should resemble something like the even rows and files of a cereal field.2
Even today that ingrained desire for privately owned farms of roughly equal size remains strong, although the old eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notion of a community of agricultural equals has long since disappeared, and the American government has for quite some time given up formal protection of the family farm. Half our nation’s food, after all, is grown on only four percent of our farms, the largest ones, of course (Davidson 35), On the eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley of California, even though the whole notion of family farming and agrarian values is in its final death-throes, among farm families the ideal still remains that farms “should” be between forty and two hundred acres per person.
However sprawling the conglomerate enterprise of 1,000, 10,000, 30,000, 50,000 acres and more becomes, however shiny the fleet of new trucks and tractors, however numerous the array of college-educated agricultural managers, however impressive the corporate logo, the complimentary stationery, pens, hats, and calendars, an intrinsic distrust still resides in the heart of every real farmer. There is an inherent dislike for bigness. Uneasiness arises with conglomeration and absenteeism when applied to the land, despite the general American fascination in recent decades with wealth, financial power, and ostentatious display of riches.* “Speculators” are essentially all who do not live on and work the land they hold title to.
Whence does this suspicion of corporate farming among family farmers and their associates derive? Why does it linger? It is not, as Strange points out, merely the envy of success, the covetousness of the bounty of others, “the parochial jealousies of a backward suspicious people.” It must be a remnant of the ideology of farming that predominated in this California valley in the century between the 1870s and 1970s, of the romantic notion of centuries-old traditions in the West that roughly identical farms—small vineyard or orchard, farmhouse, water tower—ensured a community of equals, of hardworking peers, of a culture intrinsically practical, fair, and stable, the prerequisite for democratic government, the cement that prevented the few from preying on the many.
To those of this agrarian stamp, the conglomeration of land was a perversion of the ideal. It was the work of men who had nonlanded wealth, government connections and wily tax lawyers—men who had not merely bent, but rather abolished altogether, the old unwritten rules. In an ancient context, such landlords were men like the millionaire of second-century A.D. Roman Greece, Heroides Atticus, or even the less ambitious Cicero, and Cato, not like old Laertes, Hesiod, or the nameless growers at Metapontum in southern Italy, Large-scale entrepreneurs who saw the land solely as a business venture, they were men more imperial Roman than polis Greek.
During the raisin crash of 1983, a labor contractor for one of the nearby large farms (about ten thousand acres of trees and vines) lamented to me that the company was forced to cut piece-rate harvest wages by about twenty percent (a reasonable decision given thesixty percent decline in the price of raisins). Despite a general recession and the precariousness of his own managerial job, he said of his employers: “I hope the sonnabitches go belly up.” When the owner of thousands of acres gouged the local Federal Land Bank for nearly thirty million dollars in bad loans, some of the cooperative’s members—we who, remember, ourselves would pay for that disastrous folly through larger assessments and higher interest loans on our own debts—nevertheless were glad to see the would-be magnate’s empire broken up and sold off parcel by parcel.* Similarly, the grandson heir to a squandered corporate enterprise of our locale was generally acknowledged to be better off once his inheritance crumbled and he was forced to sell down to his own forty acres and to peddle his own produce at farmers’ markets.
Quite simply, the widespread distribution of farmland into numerous hands also makes economic as well as social sense. J. L. Davis, for example, in studying the rural archaeology of the Cyclades islands during the Ottoman period in Greece, felt that single-family small farmsteads were crucial to an intensive use of the land: “The way in which agricultural production has been organized seems rather to have reflected changes in the distribution of land ownership: viz. at times when an elite minority has controlled the economy, many factors have operated to constrain the intensification of subsistence agriculture.”3 In other words, absentee magnates do not tolerate a developed countryside peopled by independent yeomen.
Greek literature shows a clear pattern of agrarian legislation and practice (about 700-550 B.C.), ensuring widespread landed equality (by about 550-400 B.C.), followed by worries that the idea of agrarianism was under attack (400-300 B.C.), culminating in the gradual erosion of autonomous communities of independent small farmers altogether (300 B.C. and after).
This Greek desire for equality of landholding and preservation of an independent farming class is expressed throughout the polis period in at least five ways. First and most important, is the evidence of fact: the actual conditions of landowning, the size of farms as expressed in the literary and epigraphical record, oratory for the most part, and leases and sales recorded on stone. These artifacts reveal a consistent pattern. In nearly every instance where land is mentioned in fifth- and fourth-century Greece (there are “precisely five land figures,” wrote M. I. Finley [1981b: 64], “in the whole of Athenian literature”), we hear most often of farms from ten to twenty acres, occasionally larger estates between fifty to seventy acres, but in almost no case until the Hellenistic and Roman Period(300 B.C.—400 A.D.) of anyone’s land extending over one hundred acres.
Consider the three largest farms known at the close of the polis period in Athens of the fourth century, when the size of farm plots slowly began to increase. Although all of these properties were owned by wealthy men, they were, nevertheless, not large in either relative or absolute terms. The so-called estate of Phainippos due east of Athens at Kytheros in Attica was probably less than one hundred acres. The next largest farms known are the approximately seventy-acre ancestral estate of the infamous Alcibiades who helped wreck the Athenian Empire, and land of about the same size bought by one unknown Aristophanes in the 390s B.C. At the end of the fifth century, mention is made of a forty-five-acre plot of Lysimachos on Euboea and a fourteen-acre farm in the Athenian Plain.
So strong was the egalitarian spirit that even during the erosion of the agricultural polis in fourth century B.C. at Athens when we hear of complaints about the size of farm plots, there were still apparently no large holdings. The strange reference in Plato’sTheaetetusto “a myriad plethra (about 2,225 acres) or still more,” like the much later expression “many-acred” (poluplethrotatos), seems to be entirely in the realm of speculation and fantasy and not to belong to the historical city-state during the polis-period.4
Earlier in the Homeric poems, the estate of Meleagros was probably not much more than fifty acres (e.g., Semple 1928: 152), and the plots of Laertes and Alkinoös, as we have seen, were much smaller still. Four acres sometimes appears in the Homeric poems as an ordinary grain field or orchard (e.g. Horn. Od. 7.113, 18.374). Perhaps the typical impression of the later rural populace is found in a fragment from the comic playwright Anaxilas of the fourth century. In his play, one character asks: “How are you? But how lean you appear.” The agriculturalist replies, “I am coming apart, because I farm a little plot in the country” (Anaxilas fr. 16 Edmonds). Theoretically some wealthy Greek landowners may have had several such “little plots” spread throughout the countryside surrounding the polis. But we have no figures in extant sources for any large property holders who own more than a hundred acres of farmland.
Archaeology tends to confirm the evidence of ancient Greek literature. The arable terrain (encompassed by present-day remnants of a field wall) that surrounds the affluent “Cliff House” estate in southern Attica reveals a farm of about fifty acres. Nearby, Hans Lohmann thought that he detected from rural structures and traces of walls and boundaries the farms of the very wealthy in southern Attica. Predictably, most “wealthy” plots were of about fifty to seventy acres. In similar fashion, on the island of Euboea rural field walls suggest farms a little larger than twenty acres. Even though the more substantial farmhouses are most likely to survive in the archaeological record, the evidence nonetheless suggests that these more impressive “estates” never encompassed large acreages during the polis period. That the ancient Greek farm was typically surrounded by a field wall is another reflection that these plots were designed to be autonomous, clearly delineated, and not easily conglomerated.
Although it is possible, and even probable, that many of the wealthy occasionally owned two or more parcels in different districts of Attica, and that these farms could change in size over generations, it again is significant that no single plot ever reached manorial status, and rarely exceeded one hundred acres. M. I Finley observed: “There is good reason to believe that 45- and 70-acre holdings, though not unusual, were above average.” Those scholars who believe that there were numerous “big” farms in Attica refer largely to acreages between seventy and a hundred acres, not estates in the hundreds, much less thousands of acres.5
There must have been an enforced code of the Greek polis, a social ethic at work that discouraged the accumulation of property. How else can we explain why the inherited rich, the more gifted geôrgoi, the more successful in commerce and mining, all failed to accumulate vast tracts, failed to transfer their off-farm capital into landed estates—phenomena that were commonplace after the demise of the free and autonomous Greek polis?
When the polis had a chance to intervene formally in the distribution and sale of farmland, the community preference for small farm plots is often made explicit. Documents on stone—usually lists of public land sales—confirm the absence of large holdings. In fifth-century Attica at least, there seems to have been some (albeit vague) notion of an “average” size hoplite farm, which the polis at least assumed was the proper size for its landholding citizenry. The Russian scholar V. N. Andreyev reviewed inscribed records of the sale of public lands at Attica. He discovered that forty to sixty plethra (i.e., 8.9-13.3 acres) composed the standard size plot, and that these parcels were sold publicly at about the same price per unit of land. That seems a reasonable-sized estate for hardworking yeomenry. Given the techniques of intensive agriculture, homestead residence, diversified crops, and slave labor, geôrgoi could manage a good enough livelihood on a “normative” hoplite farm of between ten and twenty acres.6
The rare wealthy Athenian landowner probably owned no greater than four to five times more land than the average yeoman. So Attica of the polis-period was an entirely different society from either imperial Rome, the Hellenistic world, or modern America, where farms, both nucleated and scattered parcels, of 50,000-100,000 acres are occasionally known, 5,000-10,000 times larger than the plot of the typical hoplite geôrgos.7
Osha Davidson points out how different is the current American farm-owning pyramid: “5% of American landowners own 75% of our land, and the bottom 78% own just 3%. The figures are even more unbalanced in many regions. For example, the top 5% of landowners own 90% of privately owned land in Hawaii, Florida, Wyoming, Oregon, and New Mexico, and hold 80% of it in Washington, Utah, New York, Nevada, Maine, Louisiana, Idaho, California, and Colorado. In looking at these figures, it is instructive to note that on the eve of the revolution in Cuba, the largest 9% of all landowners held 62% of that country’s land, while 66% owned 7%” (35).
Unlike Greece, these are not percentages of the citizenry as a whole, but only of those Americans who already own farmland. Such a concentration of American property-holding reflects a growing monopoly of the production of food itself. By the late 1980s, for example, 4.1 percent of American farms produced nearly half the food and a third was grown by 1.2 percent. The Department of Agriculture estimates that by the year 2000 half of the nation’s nourishment will come from one percent of existing American operations (Strange 41). If the ancient relationship between landowning, farm size, and the nature of the surrounding community is still of any relevance, then America surely has just about abandoned a polis type of rural social organization.
To return to Greece of the polis period: on the Aegean island of Melos, the hoplite figure of between forty and sixty plethra (about 8.9-13.3 acres) per farm reappears, confirming the ubiquity of the ancient agrarian ethos of property egalitarianism. Thucydides says the Athenians divided the island among five hundred settlers after the conquest of 415 B.C. If there was arable land of about 27 sq. km. (6,671 acres), each new Athenian landowner would have had a farm of a little over twelve acres, the new community mirroring the existing pattern in Attica itself. The size of these farms in Greece during the age of the polis was a world away from imperial Rome or Hellenistic Egypt, where estates of many thousands of acres belonging to an individual owner were common, a trend contemporaneous with growing abandonment and depopulation of the countryside.8
A second manifestation of equality in landowning—that is, same-sized holdings of moderate size (metria ousia; Arist. Pol. 2.1266b28-31)—is reflected in early legislation of the Greek polis and discussed at length in philosophical discourse. This promotion of agrarianism suggests that the appearance of medium-sized Greek farms of roughly the same area in extant literary, archaeological, and epigraphical sources is no accident. We hear of continued—and, at the end of the Greek city-state, beleaguered—efforts to maintain an agrarian system. Although the more drastic agrarian advocates in the early and final stages of the polis may have promoted land confiscations and communistic redistribution schemes, these extreme measures were apparently not comprehensive or well thought out. Indeed, they were rare among the early city-states.*
More frequent between 700 and 300 B.C. were moderate, conservative state efforts—in addition to social pressures—to ensure that the agrarian ideal remained strong. According to Aristotle (Pol. 2.1266b14-20; cf. 5.1307a29-31, 6.1319a6-10), Solon had purportedly passed laws that restricted the size of farms at early Athens: “There is,” Aristotle wrote in his Politics, “Solon’s legislation and that of other states which prevents an individual from acquiring as much land as he might desire (nomos hos kôluei ktasthai gên hoposên an boulêtai tis).” Aristotle goes on to expound on the Greeks’ ideology of agrarianism. He apparently could recall a number of shadowy figures from the nascent era of the polis, all of whom sought first of all to ensure that farms were roughly of equal size—an extraordinary visionary stance not emulated on any large scale since.
Aristotle is not talking about new colonies or poleis sprung ex nihilo. He means city-states that grew slowly out of the Dark Ages, communities where there still must have remained a number of old wealthy estate owners among a larger group of more dynamic small farmers. “Pheidon, the Corinthian,” he says, “who was one of most ancient lawgivers, believed that households and the citizen population ought to remain at the same numbers—even though at the beginning everyone did not own equal-sized allotments”(Pol.2.1265b13).
Early Greek yeomanry was faced with a dilemma. There was preexisting inequity in landowning. Yet because of the natural growth and success of intensive homestead farming, most Greek agrarians naturally became a conservative people, eschewing radical, forced confiscations of the lands of the wealthy. Much less did farmers favor the communalism advocated by the poor.*
Instead, we see a general social ethic at work, backed by state intervention in inheritances and concern with farm size, in order to ensure that gradually the territory around the polis came to be owned by a citizenry of middling farmers. The changeover from Dark-Age pastoralism to a grid of equal-sized hereditary farms was difficult. Even more trying was the effort to preserve that exemplar in the late fifth and fourth centuries when the growth of commerce in the Mediterranean and non-landed wealth from outside Greece severely altered the native agrarian patchwork. Nevertheless, it was just that agrarian ideal of the early polis that persisted in the minds of most Greeks, prompting both Aristotle and Plato to champion farm-owning egalitarianism during their own troubled times of the fourth century. Property legislation must have varied widely by locale in detail and emphasis, depending on the relative success of yeomanry at any given region in Greece.
In this regard Aristotle makes it clear that the accepted notion of agrarianism posed problems of application. It was, after all, easy to found new poleis on egalitarian principles, but a quite different matter to break up the estates of the wealthy in existing communities once a new group of agrarians came on the scene. “Phaleas, the Chalcedonian [late fifth century?],” Aristotle wrote, “was the first one to devise this expedient: he said that the property of the citizens ought to be equal, and he believed that this would not be difficult right away among those city-states in the process of foundation, while among those city-states already settled it would require more effort (ergôdesteron)” (Pol. 2.1266a39-1266b6; cf. Métraux 212-17).
“More effort” sometimes had involved the earlier struggle (see Chapter 3) between kakoi (“the bad” upstarts) and agathoi (“the good” entrenched aristocracy). The inequity fostered in the pastoral systems of the Dark Ages did not vanish overnight. Aristotle refers elsewhere to earlier agrarian legislation whose primary aim was to fix the number of farms in a perpetual state of equality through either birth control, inheritance, or statutes against selling the ancestral estate.*
Aristotle concludes that since agrarian democracy was felt to be the most stable form of government, “some of the laws established in many communities in early times were completely practical, either outlawing the ownership of a certain amount of land under any conditions, or else forbidding the ownership of a certain area between the citadel and the city,” He adds: “In early times there was also in many city-states even legislation which outlawed the sale of original land allotments, and there is said to be a law established by Oxylos with the same effect, outlawing loans secured on a certain part of a man’s land” (Pol. 6.1319a13). The philosopher was also impressed that at the conservative community of Aphytis on the isthmus of Pallene in Macedonia “everyone was engaged in farming (pautes geôrgousin”) (Pol. 6.1319a15-18)—a region, not surprisingly, known for its practice of viticulture (Theophr. CP 3.15.5).
Besides citing early examples of agrarian legislation in the Greek citystates, both Aristotle (Politics) and Plato (Laws and Republic) discuss ideal aspects of landowning in Greece—inasmuch as farmland is the basis of any theoretical discourse on the Utopian community (e.g., Pl. Leg. 5.736E; Arist. Pol. 2.1266a37; cf. Morrow 74-92). But their theoretical position is often problematic (do they always, often, or never reflect, or react against, contemporary conditions?). Their philosophical thinking is also often colored by their own varying degrees of sympathy for, distrust of, or hostility toward the status of fourth-century Athenian democracy, and, in contrast, toward the presence of tyrannies and monarchies creeping in from the margins of the Greek world at the waning of thepolisperiod.
Although Aristotle and Plato, in their notions of ideal government and the proper class and status of the citizenry, champion equitable property-holding regimes where landowners themselves should not do the actual farmwork, it is clear that the three-century-old Greek notion of egalitarian agrarianism—under attack in their own times—is never challenged.* Both philosophers assume that the accumulation of land by the wealthy is injurious to the polis. Even Plato, who believed strongly that the gifted should be rewarded accordingly, nevertheless advised that no citizen should ever be allowed to acquire land that would result in his farm being five times larger than the smallest in the city-state (Pl. Leg. 10.744 E-745A). In his view, even the best growers should not have all the advantages (cf. Pl. Gorg. 490E). Perhaps Plato based his thinking on the actual pattern of landholding in Attica, where we have see that hundred-acre farms were generally unknown. In fact, the rarer forty-five- to hundred-acre “estate” of the rich Athenian was not much larger than five times the size of the “average” hoplite plot of about ten or so acres.9
In Plato’s view, only with equal lots worked by citizens of roughly similar status can the twin evils of poverty and abundant riches be avoided. He summed up the dêmos, the backbone of his stable polis, as “the third group; they farm their own soil (autourgoi),they own moderate property (ou panu polla kektêmenoi), and they give no offense to anyone. Whenever they come together, however, they are the most numerous and carry the most influence in the assembly” (Resp. 8.565A). This Platonic ideal of agrarianism, based on the actual environment of the traditional Greek polis, never really vanished from the Western philosophical tradition. In late-eighteenth-century England, for example, William Ogilvie, like Aristotle and Plato, advocated an equitable distribution of farmland among the citizenry, including rules concerning inalienability, inheritance, and fragmentation (e.g., Montmarquet 165).
Aristotle is both more explicit and more pragmatic than Plato (or any other thinker in antiquity) in his conception of agrarianism. He criticized the agrarian programs of earlier lawgivers and philosophers such as Plato, not on the basis of their morality (he was largely in agreement with their conservative aims), but rather of their practicality. Aristotle, the supposed author of treatises on 158 constitutions of various Greek city-states, went further than any ancient thinker in pondering the growing problem of inequality in Greek landowning and its effect on the vitality of the polis.
In Aristotle’s view the ideal was not merely make all the plots equal, but rather also to insist on a properly moderate (tou mesou) size, plots that would result neither in excessive luxury nor in abject poverty.* At the core of the problem, Aristotle believed, were the gifted rich and the talentless poor, men whose natural abilities, or lack thereof, needed to be moderated by education to preserve the harmony and balance of the polis. In his view the Greek polis must “teach those that are the respectable by nature that they are not to desire excessive riches, and to prevent the base from having the ability to do so” (Pol. 2.1266a38-1267b19). Aristotle seems to champion the cause of some sort of middle group, which both the wealthy and the poor are to emulate.
Was this class a historical fact in Greece? Apparently it was, for Aristotle makes its presence explicit in Book Six of his Politics. There he states clearly that the best commoners are “the agricultural population,” the ones who own property of moderate size, a community based on an “agrarian democracy” of sorts (Pol. 6.1318b10-12). Although his notion of constitutional government or “polity” is fraught with contradictions (it is often unclear whether it is more oligarchical than democratic), there is no doubt that as Aristotle looked back on nearly four centuries of polis history he believed the “middle constitution” had been the best form of government, in large part precisely because it was the product of a large middle landowning class, the class which farmed and bore hoplite armor (Pol. 2.1265b29).
Furthermore, Aristotle was apparently worried in his own time that agrarian poleis were moribund. That may explain his nostalgic look back to earlier lawgivers and advocates of agrarianism (e.g., Pheidon of Corinth, Phaleas, Philolaus of Corinth, Solon, Charondas, and Oxylos), and the more conservative rural city-states of his own times (e.g., Aphytis, Thebes, Mantineia, Malea), which were committed to maintaining a static landowning pattern among the citizenry.10
A third type of evidence also reflects the Greeks’ interest in property egalitarianism and small farm size. At the beginning of the polis period, and later throughout the seventh to fourth centuries, we see frequent agrarian colonization around the Greek-speaking world. The creation of new city-states ex nihilo was a utopianism far more concrete than any ideal community of Aristotle and Plato. The evidence of colonies can be a valuable indicator of an early Greek agrarian ideology. Surely the formal organization of colonists and their creation of equitable plots and a complex social structure presupposes the prior formation of a polis, and suggests a preexisting, ongoing agrarian ideology.
Predictably in the cases where pristine land overseas was divided up among the colonial populace, there seems to have been a preference for standardized allotments involving rectangles of land of around fifty plethra (about eleven acres). This practice may suggest that farm plots between forty and sixty plethra (8.9 and 13.3 acres), the so-called exemplary hoplite farms we discussed earlier, were being duplicated afresh in early colonies. Is that coincidence further evidence of a preexisting ideal size for citizen farmers throughout Greece?
The entire Greek science of “geometry” or “land measurement” (Ar. Nub. 202-4) no doubt grew out of this need to allot precisely equal parcels in the land of these new communities. Xenophon’s Socrates says that the purpose of “geometry” was to ascertain thesizeof the plot in order to calculate the potential yield (Mem. 4.7.2). Standardized rectangular plots of about the same size appear in the Crimean Chersonesos and at Halieis in the southern Argolid region. In southern Italy at Metapontum, already by the sixth century all new land had been equitably parceled out. Usually a farmhouse and family tombs occupied each plot; farms in Greek Italy, as at Halieis, were of standard square or rectangular shape, ranging from 16.3 to 32.6 acres in size. The supposed Panhellenic colony at Thurii (443 B.C.) under the direction of Pericles of Athens, was in theory a Utopian enterprise (Hippodamos, the father of municipal planning on a grid system, supposedly planned the layout of the settlement), where all Greeks might start out anew with equitable farm plots.11
Because most colonists sought to establish new communities according to traditional “basic principles,” their efforts to parcel and distribute land take on great importance. Were they not in some sense “cloning” the imprint of their mother city? That is, would-begeôrgoi were seeking to reproduce—or given this second chance, to perfect or to improve on—an agrarian ideology they had seen at home. In colonies, there were none of the problems (as Aristotle realized) of Dark-Age holdovers, aristocratic horse-breeders who were resistant to reformulating the land of their ancestors along newer agrarian principles.12
These landowning patterns are more than just the result of the neatness of planned surveying that facilitates real-estate transaction. Instead, they are an effort by the Greek geôrgoi to start afresh with one family per farm of about the same size. They wanted no repetition of the struggles at the end of the Dark Ages between the upstart kakoi and the privileged agathoi. No wonder that early Greek folk wisdom of the seventh-century, collected in the sayings of the so-called Seven Sages, advised: “Measure and proportion should be applied to all things. These precepts not only should be directed to those who are about to embark on other enterprises, but also to those who are to obtain farmland (agrum paraturis): they are not to acquire any more than reason allows (ne maiorem quam ratio calculorum patitur)” (Colum. Rust. 1.3.8).
Besides extant records of Greek farm size, philosophical discussion, and colonization schemes, a fourth sign of the ideology of property egalitarianism and the ubiquity of small farms is the negative example: simply the absence of class conflict over farm property. In the period 600-400 B.C. there are only a few instances among the Greek poleis of any widespread policy to cancel debt and redistribute farmland more equitably. Does this calm not suggest that yeomen were numerous, increasingly satisfied, and influential? The silence about landed revolution implies that agrarianism once established remained prevalent, that most farmers were not falling victim to greedy land-grabbing elites or incurring debt to wealthy urban proprietors.
“The classical age,” Alexander Fuks has written, “was a time of balance and tranquillity. The social polarity was relatively small. In most of the Greek states there existed an agricultural middle class, numerically large and firmly established. The social question, and with it the aspirations for economic-social change, was only a marginal matter in the life of classical Greece.” Even in the aftermath of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), agrarianism was still the glue that held even volatile democratic states together.*
Fifth, there is evidence in Greek literature of a centuries-old distrust of the wealthy, an uneasiness with riches even though the bent of most of our surviving Greek authors is aristocratic and thus should reflect those particular private, rather than public, interests. Even Plato saw that social unrest was caused by strife between the wealthy and the poor, brought on by the accumulation of wealth by the few and loss of land by the many. In a memorable passage in the Laws (5.736C—E; cf. Fuks 172-89), Plato envisions a solution where the wealthy forgive debt and distribute their (excess) land to ensure that moderation takes hold over the polarized commons.
The idea that those with larger holdings (still small by the standards of the later Hellenistic Age) should share their property and forgive debt was deeply ingrained in Greek culture (e.g., Democr. fr. B.255 D-K; cf. Cole 120-22). According to Aelian (VH 14.24), sometime in the growing tension of the mid-fourth century one Theokles and one Thrasonides of Corinth voluntarily remitted debts of the less fortunate and so escaped the wrath of the dêmos.
There has also been research by historians of ancient Greece into “reciprocity and obligation,” a social ideology where the well-off could be seen as legitimate only if they put their wealth at the disposal of the community and in particular the poor. In the nostalgic literature of the fourth century, Isocrates felt that the noblesse oblige of the wealthy had been a key to past Athenian success, circulating private accumulated capital to serve the greater needs of the state. He believed that in past times farms had been rented out on moderate terms or given to those less fortunate. Whether such beneficence was historical or not, it at least suggests that by the fourth century, when there was a growing polarization between rich and poor, a perception existed that there had once been a social contract of sorts among the citizens of the polis.13
Greek sumptuary legislation that discouraged ostentatious displays of wealth, and general public censure of the manifestation of riches also derived from the countryside. These laws extended the fundamental belief of the Greek polis that all lands were to be about the same size in perpetuity. Guy Métraux correctly saw that landholding had an enormous effect even on the parsimony of private Greek building practice: “Architecture and land use went hand-in-hand with politics in the earliest periods of Greek history” (97; emphasis added). Agrarian thinking fostered an egalitarianism manifested in the vast difference between individual and communal structures: “The Greeks were at pains to give state projects a splendid character and this could only be achieved by encouraging architectural simplicity in the private sector” (Métraux 97).
Important here is to recognize that this uneasiness with wealth in the private sector, this social pressure against large estates, is not merely the clamor of the landless poor who demand redistribution of land and cancellation of debt. That scenario is reserved for the more frequent class struggles of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, when the number of the propertyless grew enormously. Suspicion and dislike of landed riches naturally emanate from the middling farmers themselves, a vigilance on their part toward any who would attempt to consolidate land at others’ expense (cf. Men. Dys. 284-88). Leases of farmland owned by temple estates, while in later times sometimes let out to wealthy landowners, rarely were extended for more than ten years. This prudence on the part of religious authorities gave little chance or incentive for the tenant to make permanent improvements or to assemble various plots into vast tracts (e.g., Kent 243-338). “It became clear,” V. N. Andreyev has written about the tradition of farm ownership (even at Athens, the most innovative, liberal, and in some sense anti-agrarian of the Greek city-states during the polis period), “that under normal conditions the concentration of land ran into a strong barrier” (23).
Even more important than this “strong barrier,” we rarely hear of a property tax in Greece, at least not a permanent, institutionalized fee on the holding of farmland, one that might transfer capital from the countryside to the city. When at Athens an emergency war tax (eisphora) was levied in the late fifth and fourth centuries, it was most often on the capital of the largest properties, usually burdening few other than the rich liturgical class. In contrast, Dionysius, tyrant of fourth-century Syracuse, was infamous for funding his massive mercenary armies by looting temples and taxing property up to twenty percent of its value per annum. Within five years the citizenry had paid out to the state its entire net worth.
The huge armies, public works, and royal courts of the Hellenistic age (far in excess of anything present at Athens) required tribute and taxes on the countryside and the presence of serfs on royal and sacred lands—all relatively unknown earlier in the polisperiod, at a time when the hoplite farmers themselves were architects of their own financial policy. There is no evidence that many farmers of the city-state had direct, normal tax obligations through assessments either on the value of farmland or on annual revenues from crop production. Greek thinkers of the polis correctly saw that taxes would not spur productivity (as is sometimes wrongly argued), but rather tend to depress production and impoverish the agrarian population.14
In a general portrait quite relevant to Hellenistic, Roman, and even modern times (but clearly not applicable to the Greek polis), Joseph Tainter points out (quite frighteningly to my mind):
Organizational solutions tend to be cumulative. Once developed, complex social features are rarely dropped. Tax rates go up more often than they go down. Information processing needs tend to move in only one direction. Numbers of specialists ordinarily don’t decline. Standing armies rarely get smaller. Welfare and legitimatizing costs are not likely to drop. An ever increasing stock of monumental architecture requires maintenance. Compensation of elites rarely goes down. What this means is that when there is a growth in complexity it tends to be exponential, always increasing by some fraction of an already inflated size (Tainter 116).
There was almost no military parasitism during the lifetime of the autonomous Greek polis. The phenomenon is common in the later Greek and Roman world, when farmers were conscripted for long periods of military service to fight in distant wars, which often left them little defense or security for their own small plots. Liturgies, private patronage, group meals, public sacrifices, public pay, ostracism, exile—in addition to the standard agrarian legislation about farm size and inheritance—were all in their original, and often exaggerated, form polis devices to circulate wealth among the greater citizen population, to prevent, in other words, “certain forms of dependency.”15
Both political and religious authority in most Greek city-states was colored by agrarianism. Political leadership and cult figures were careful not to infringe the economic and social position of the small farmer. Public properties, for example, at least at Athens during the life of the polis never grew beyond more than five to ten percent of the total arable land available. Land for religious sanctuaries was always dubbed “a slice” (temenos), never the “whole”; the gods’ property, not that of individual farmers, was to be “cut out” of the grid.
It would be odd if other Greek city-states had publicly owned a greater degree of land than at Athens, given the preponderant nature of Athenian bureaucracy and governmental infrastructure. Even rents to farmers from temple estates under the polis were relatively cheap, and the money often recycled back to the rural population in the form of public sacrifices and banquets. Sometimes the gods’ lands in time of need might be rented out to the less fortunate, or even informally farmed by the poorer usurper without immediate penalty. In general, the sacred properties required much of the same agricultural regime common to the yeomanry of the agrarian community: diversified crops, on-the-farm buildings, intensive labor and capital investment.
No religious cult could develop an elaborate priestly caste, which needed to be subsidized through tithes, taxes, or mandatory donations. No sizable body of polis land was needed to support unproductive religious grandees, as was the case with Hellenistic monarchs and later Christian dignitaries. When Greek religious sanction of the free polis did intrude into the life of the farmer, it was not in the form of land confiscation or mandatory tithes, as in the parasitism on agriculture characteristic of later religious bodies in the West. The polis gods and the servants of the gods (e.g., Theophr. CP 2.7.5) were usually conciliatory and concerned with practical agriculture and the well-being of those who actually farmed.16
Agrarian city-states of free farmers were reluctant to engage in massive temple construction or other public works projects that diverted capital into nonproductive enterprises, activities that would have forced agrarians to pay taxes and cough up scarce capital from their farms. Most grandiose religious building in Greece occurred at maritime states such as Athens and Corinth, whose commerce allowed the expenditure. Even there little option existed for landed assemblies to siphon off monies from the countryside. Aristotle felt that the pyramids in Egypt and the massive erection of the early grand temples in Greece were the devices of tyrannical regimes, which desired to keep the populace both busy and impoverished (Pol 5.1313b 19-28)—in implicit contrast to agrarian city-states of the polis period, where farmers were protected from oppressive taxation and forced labor.
This general idea of equality of farm size soon permeated the entire fabric of the city-state well beyond the notion of landholding. R. A. Padgug, despite his often doctrinaire Marxist orthodoxy (e.g., his use of “commune” for the early agrarian polis), saw clearly that later egalitarian Greek institutions had grown out of the original interest in equitable landholding.
A strong emphasis on equality therefore re-emerged, both as the memory of an earlier institution as well as a method of preserving the restored commune itself by preserving its members as members. The political aspect of this equality was its clearest expression. The development of the assembly as the chief governing body of the territorial state, the use of the lot as the means of fulfilling offices, as well as related political institutions, were not in themselves new. Rather they were rivals of older communal institutions, reworded and given new meaning in the democratic polis (Padgug 101).
As an example of agrarian equality, of “older communal institutions” transplanted throughout the citizenry, Herodotus relates that the citizens of the Aegean island of Siphnos divided equally the revenue from their mines (Hdt. 3.57). Conversely, only with difficulty did Themistocles convince the Athenians to build a fleet from the public wealth of the silver mines at Laurion. It was naturally assumed in the early Greek city-state that the equitable and more traditional practice was to give every full-grown citizen ten drachmas from the bullion mined out (Hdt. 7.144), to allot monies on an egalitarian basis identical to the grand tradition of dividing up the countryside into equal-sized properties.
Small and equitable farm size inculcated a number of values in the citizenry and created a shared vision of what a Greek city-state might be. In the early agrarian polis, modest, equal-sized plots ensured that all Greek citizens would have to work with their own hands. All would look at the ensuing (mostly natural) challenges pragmatically, rarely theoretically. All would acquire capital largely through their own sacrifice and toil. All would rely on their own resolve and bodily strength to reclaim land or ward off invasion. All would be secure in the thought that a whole cadre of like citizens was presented with about the same challenges, with about the same opportunities to succeed or to fail.
The Nature of “Agricultural Government”
—Aristotle, Politics 6.1319a
The best people is the agricultural population
Besides the social protocols and occasional legal sanctions against the accumulation of land, early farmers quite soon sought more formal political power to ensure that the owners of small plots, the klêroi of the polis, could set the policies and direction of their agrarian communities. The ideology of and social pressure for small, equal-sized farms were transformed into formal law. As we have seen in Chapter 3, throughout seventh and sixth century Greece, there was a gradual retrenchment on the part of the old landed aristocracies, themselves anachronisms from the pastoral baronies of the Dark Ages. In their place, broad-based timocracies, governments of property owners, based on wealth rather than absolutely on blood, gradually appeared. We must remember that the birth of constitutional government in the West was not an Athenian invention of the fifth century. It was a much earlier outgrowth of agrarianism, a prior effort to formalize and protect a landed egalitarianism.
Sometimes this transition to constitutional government was through the agency of intermediary tyrannies. Much more often it occurred through more or less peaceful evolution. In any case, by the sixth century, Greece as a whole—Athens, Elis, Corinth, Thebes, Argos, and throughout the Greek islands—was a region of city-states where the farmers of the surrounding countryside chose their leaders by popular acclaim. “Almost all states by 500 B.C. were oligarchical in structure and remained so. Very few were still aristocratic in the full sense of that term.”* It was these middling communities (tois mesois) “of equals and peers (ex isôn kai homoiôn)” (e.g., Arist. Pol. 4-1295b26) that Phocylides, the sixth-century Milesian poet, had in mind when he wrote that in contrast to the Near Eastern palace, “the law-abiding polis, though small and set on a high rock, outranks senseless Nineveh” (fr. 4).
At the end of the seventh century in Athens, the career of Solon and his so-called legislation, as we have seen earlier, reflects a society in the midst of transition. It is difficult to generalize about the totality of agrarian reform attributed to Solon—laws regulating the export of olive oil, the planting of olive trees, the distribution of landed inheritance, and the like. But the traditional stories of his program do reveal comprehensive shifts in the Athenian economy, the planting of diversified crops, the plight of small farmers, the creation of nonaristocratic wealth, along with the necessary and concurrent efforts to broaden the political basis of an evolving society along nonaristocratic lines. To Solon, the “dêmos” was now to be the large group of citizens, quite distinct from the aristocratic elite. This new agrarian majority was to form the backbone of the polis.*
It may be that the rise of an agrarian constituency in Attica, as elsewhere in Greece, began even much earlier than Solon (i.e., about 600 B.C.), for Solon’s agenda seems more reactive than visionary. The so called Draconian constitution at Athens (i.e., 620 B.C.), for example, if historical, apparently provided citizenship to “those who could provide arms” (Arist. Ath. Pol 4.2), a catch phrase throughout Greek, and especially Athenian, history to signify representative government by hoplite landholders (as opposed toeitherearlier narrow aristocracy or later radical democracy [e.g., Thuc. 8.92-3; 8.97.1; Arist. Ath. Pol. 33.1; Xen. Hell. 2.3.48]).
What should we call early agrarian governments of the seventh, sixth and early fifth centuries? Oligarchies? Timocracies? Democracies? Hoplite constitutions? Agrarian governments? Ancestral constitutions? Aristotle, writing late in the fourth century, was also perplexed by this admittedly gray (and changing) area between broad-based farm-owning “polities” and the later more radical democracies of his own time. After correlating the rise of hoplite infantry with the development of early Greek representative government, he writes: “Therefore, what we now label constitutional governments (politeias), the men of the past called democracies, but the early constitutional governments were of course oligarchical and royal, for, since populations were small, the middle class was not large” (Pol. 4.1297b24-7).
Even though Aristotle thought Solon had founded Athenian democracy (kai dêmokratian katastêsai[Pol. 2.1237-8]), these original evolving polities, based on the expansion of a rural middle group (to meson), were never in truth democracies in the fifth-century Athenian sense. At least they were not popular constitutions where rule was by the entire dêmos, propertied and propertyless citizens alike. Instead, the native-born under “constitutional government” (politeia) who held no land were without much right to political participation.
It was quite easy in the later Greek world to distinguish advocates of extreme oligarchy, rule by only the few, from proponents of extreme democracy, rule by any and all whose parents were native-born free adult males (cf. Plato’s “two cities” of rich and poor [Pl.Resp. 8. 1D, 8.552B-D, 8.544C]). But this frequent notion of a binary opposition between rich and poor is usually the stuff of political polarization and crisis. Then it is natural to describe all the citizenry split into two opposed camps, the mesoi joining one of the two sides as the critical player in an alliance of the moment. Outside of stasis and revolution (e.g., Thuc. 3.82), recognition of a middling group is, as we have seen earlier (see Chapter 3), apparent in Greek literature, even if there was genuine confusion about how to label precisely such agrarian and moderate representative governments.
A great number of factors entered into the equation: the number of people who participated in government, the economic class of those enfranchised, the intent of the governing constitution, and the type and nature of civic courts and institutions (i.e., use of lot, pay for service, voluntary contributions). David Asheri, at least, thinks most broad-based oligarchies of middling farmers in the Greek world were known formally as “moderate constitutions.” They could be best distinguished by their original legal agenda, an array of agrarian laws attempting to preserve land egalitarianism: (1) limiting sale or leasing of land to prevent land concentration; (2) single heirs to prevent division of ancestral lots; (3) limitation on dowries and heiresses. These legislative acts were “characteristic of moderate constitutions directly interested in the maintenance of a large and fixed number of citizens on their respective estates.”17
For some flavor of the politics of the Greek agrarian movement, we can return briefly to Aristotle, who, as we have seen, took up the question at length in his Politics. Although his purposes were philosophical, rather than historical or even ideological, his is nevertheless a gifted analysis of three centuries of earlier Greek political development. At least at one point Aristotle felt there had been among the city-states four different spectra of democracies, and also four distinguishable forms of oligarchy. From his lengthy discussion, it seems clear that when middling farmers were in control of a Greek polis, government was broad-based: it was representative of the economic interests of most of the citizenry; it was designed to follow the dictates of law; its legislation was primarily concerned with preservation of static, fixed plots among the landholding population. That was the entire principle behind agrarian constitutions.
Aristotle must hedge in defining precisely the differences between the inexact rubrics, “oligarchy” and “democracy.” Either word could at times describe the agrarian government that he called “polity” (Pol. 4.1292b11-12; cf. Busolt and Swoboda 310-16; Whibley 107-11). In reality, before the fifth century there was probably little, if any, difference in the use of the Greek words dêmos (literally “the people”) and oligoi (literally “the few,” but in actuality the middling landowning citizens of the polis ([Plut. Per.11]), simply because the gulf between a landless urban mob and a reactionary, wealthy few was not yet manifest. “Oligarchies,” for all their ostensibly antidemocratic property qualifications, in the Greek early polis were still the “rule of the people,” and “the people” was the broad base of hoplite yeomanry.
So the very concept of “oligarchy” would have been foreign to a member of the agrarian polis before the fifth century. Even as late as the fifth-century at Athens, a polis that enfranchised its large group of landless thêtes, the word “dêmos” could still include the middle class of hoplites.* These considerations led the constitutional historian J. A. O. Larsen to call landed Greek constitutions with a property qualification not “oligarchies,” but rather “timocracies,” governments by those who owned some land (Larsen 32-33). In many city-states that could mean a substantial group of native-born residents. Aristotle himself said that “timocracy desires to be government by the mass, and all within its property qualification are equal” (Eth. Nic. 8.1160M6-20).
So under the original notion of agrarian oligarchy/timocracy/democracy/polity, the term dêmos actually meant the native-born resident citizenry who owned land and formed the popular government. Dêmos was in some contexts nearly the same term as polisitself. The “people” and the “city-state” at this earlier time both meant the landowning citizenry, not necessarily including its native-born free, but disenfranchised, poorer residents. The later reinterpretation of dêmos as everyone born into the polis, landed and landless alike, was the creation of fifth-century Athenian democracy, which even then often tended to see the term as inclusive of the hoplite middle.
Keep in mind also that the “new” Greek oligarchists of the late fifth and fourth centuries—and the novel creation of the word “oligarchy” itself—were quite different from the old agrarian, moderate lawgivers. Dangerous men like Critias (460-403 B.C.) at Athens were not of the same temper as the earlier Solon or Philolaus of Corinth. Although tyrants of Critias’s ilk might later call themselves “oligarchs,” they were, in fact, bent on a more aristocratic, narrow, and patently antidemocratic regime (e.g., Dawson 26-29; Ostwald 475-90). They usually had nothing in common with the yeomanry, present or past, who had built the polis and created broad-based agrarian governments. Just as dêmos became in the fifth century a more expansive term to mean those who supported the new concept “dêmokratia” so at that same period the rubric oligoi regressed to signify a narrow aristocracy, which was now likewise given the novel rubric “oligarchia” (cf. Donlan 1970 382-83). Neither dêmokratia nor oligarchia was an apt description of agrarian governments, which were broad-based timocracies/polities with a low property qualification.
No wonder that Aristotle’s review of some three centuries of changing political nomenclature is confused.* Nevertheless, in his sometimes contradictory scheme of political analysis, the notion of agrarian democracy fits best somewhere in his first category of democracy and his corresponding first type of oligarchy: “There is one kind of democracy where office holding is based on property-qualifications, but these requirements are low” (Pol 4.1291b38-41). Later, he elaborates that “when the farmer class and the group which possesses moderate property are in control, the society functions according to law” (4.1292b25-29; cf. Busolt and Swoboda 354-59). He finally (Pol. 6.1318bl0-1319al9) concludes that the first type of democracy is “the best” and “the oldest(archaiotatê pasôn)”—and one reflective of “an agricultural population” (dêmos ho geôrgikos). I do not think that Aristotle could call agrarian government the “oldest” if the notion of a middle class of small farming, arms-owning citizenry was a mere philosophical “construct.”
We also know of a variety of words in a sixth-century Greek context denoting “equality” of some sort (e.g., isonomia, isêgoria, isos damos, and isokratia). Such nomenclature probably suggests that the formal concept of civic egalitarianism was taken for granted among those of the landed classes well before the appearance of Athenian democracy in the fifth century.
So Aristotle knew that the “first” type of early agrarian democracy was not radical democracy along the Athenian model of the late fifth and fourth centuries. He acknowledges that in one sense it had been essentially a benign “first” type of oligarchy: “In the cases where more men own property, but less of it and of not a great extent, then this is the first type of oligarchy.” The chief difference between oligarchy and democracy in Aristotle’s view is the extent of a property qualification (cf. Eth. Nic. 8.1160b5-21): the stiffer it became, the more oligarchic the polis, the less restrictive the property requirement, the more democratic the city-state. Aristotle confesses that he does not know the precise standard that might ideally result in the largest body of hoplite landowners running the government (Pol. 4.1297b 1-5).18
Aristotle’s agrarian government is clearly to be distinguished from his other three types of more restrictive and repressive oligarchies, where property qualifications are high and birth comes in to play. Those constitutions were not agrarian. They resulted in rule of the rich alone. In contrast, Aristotle says that his favored first oligarchical type, like the first brand of democracy, allows law to be supreme “since there is a great number of men who participate in the government” (Pol. 4-1293al4-20). This broad-based body was a type of government that he later (Pol. 6.1320b22-26) seems to feel is nearest to real constitutional government (“polity”).
In sum, Aristotle’s review of Greek constitutional history suggests an affinity for representative government based on a low property qualification. He champions constitutions that enfranchise a near majority of the male adult (hoplite-armed) population. In his view that was something possible only when there was a vibrant agrarianism and thus a preponderance of small farmers. This was a populace which in turn legislated to ensure continued property egalitarianism. It was the rural population in short that made thepolis“great” (megalê, Arist. Pol. 7.1326a23-25), and that had been there from the beginning of the city-state (Pol. 7.1318b8; cf. Whibley 22-24).
During the first two centuries of the polis, when broad-based agrarian constitutions were normative, in Greek literature appears a strong anti-aristocratic flavor. Attacks on the wealthy elite show the rise of yeoman ideology and imply “that the basis for social change was deeply rooted in a firm sense of identity and self-esteem of the peasant class, and, further, that a feeling for justice, equality and common dignity formed a stratum of democratic orientation which found constant public expression during the seventh and sixth centuries.”*
Perhaps to the modern mind, especially in the 1990s when the triumph of democracy appears to be widespread and enduring, agricultural government, agrarian “timocracy” with a property qualification, seems illiberal in its restrictiveness and discrimination against the landless poor. This exclusionary nature of agrarian government is quite undeniable. It is entirely in line with our portrait so far of the rise of intensive agriculture and the accompanying creation of a new chauvinistic class of agriculturalists. These were farmers neither extremely wealthy nor poor, who often composed only a third to half the citizen population (cf. Ps. Her. Att. Peri Pol. 30-31).
But envision agrarian “democracy” within the context of the times. If representative government is defined merely by the requirements of voting and participation in officeholding—forgetting for the moment such legislative rights as free and unlimited speech, an absence of censorship, juries, fiscal accountability, subsidies for governmental participation, and the use of lots in magistracy selection—then the only form of government more representative of the people seems to be radical democracy of the type that emerged at Athens in the late fifth and fourth centuries. There every Athenian born to citizen parents who were Athenians (regardless of wealth or property holding) was entitled to participate in the assembly. But herein also rises a paradox in our discussion of the comparative equality of ancient governments. Under Athenian democracy, as under agrarian democracy, slaves, resident aliens, and women were also disenfranchised.
In the case of Athens, discrimination was very, very widespread indeed. Given the nature of the Athenian economy, restrictions may have affected three-fourths of the adult resident population. Citizens at Athens numbered between 40,000 and 50,000 persons during the fifth century, whereas adult resident aliens (about 10,000?), slaves (about 80,000-150,000?), and adult women born to two Athenian parents (about 40,000-50,000) totaled well over 150,000 persons. No more than 40,000-50,000 adult citizens directed affairs out of a total of perhaps nearly 200,000 adult residents of Attica.*
On the other hand, it is conceivable that in many agrarian city-states (see, e.g., Arist. Pol. 6.1318b23-1319al4; cf. Thuc. 1.141.3) where there were few, if any, resident aliens engaged in commerce, where manufacturing was rare, where slaves were primarily agricultural (i.e., not more than 15,000 chattels in all of Boeotia; cf. Buck 160), and thus not needed for manufacture or mining, as great a proportion of the adult resident population participated in government as under so-called radical democracy at Athens. Could agrarian government be as democratic as “radical” Athenian democracy?
The example of the conservative Boeotian regime at Thebes offers an illustration. It was a confederation of surrounding poleis in the fifth century traditionally considered backward, conservative, and oligarchical, with a strong agrarian heritage (e.g., Arist.Pol.2.1274a32-1274bl0; cf. Thuc. 4.76.2, 5.31.6). The government in Boeotia was apparently careful to discriminate against its landless residents, who were not allowed full rights (e.g., Hell. Oxy. 11.2). The presence of a property qualification at first glance seems to have produced a far less egalitarian society in Theban-controlled Boeotia than the democracy across the southern border at Athens. Aristotle says that at Thebes anyone who was active in trade or menial labor (Pol. 3.1278a25-26, 6.1321a29-30) within the last ten years was barred from participation in political life. That policy would have disenfranchised thousands at Attica. No wonder Euripides in his play the Supplices presents the Theban viewpoint as largely unsympathetic to the political acumen and capability of the working poor (Eur. Suppl. 420-22).
Thucydides (4-93.3) wrote that at the battle of Delium between Athens and Boeotia (424 B.C.), the more than 10,000 Boeotian light-armed troops present there (mostly poor or landless?) outnumbered their fellow 7,000 hoplite infantry and 1,000 cavalry—those fighters engaged in farming who enjoyed full citizenship. These numbers probably mean that in the fifth century on any given day a muster of the various contingents of Boeotian military manpower (perhaps two-thirds of all available troops) reflected the oligarchical restrictions of participation in government. The make-up of the Boeotian army reveals that about half the male inhabitants were denied full citizenship rights. That is, about 12,000 adult residents were full citizens qualifying for hoplite service, but more than 15,000 adult males fought outside the landed phalanx (cf. Busolt and Swoboda 564-65). The latter group presumably did not meet the property qualification for full citizenship privileges.
Yet appearances can be deceiving.* The property requirement for those to serve as hoplites nearby at the Boeotian town of Orchomenos was apparently quite low, about forty-five measures (medimnoi) of yearly agricultural produce (e.g., Poll. On. 10.165). If that census figure is at all reflective of Boeotia as a whole, the Theban confederacy was again a broad-based “oligarchy.” All but the smallest farmers had a say. Curiously, the forty-five medimnoi of annual agricultural produce is about a fourth of the old Solonian agrarian zeugitai qualification at Athens (two to three hundred medimnoi), a much steeper census which traditionally marked the cut-off point for enjoyment of full political rights, even under the democracy.
Ostensibly it may have been easier to qualify for hoplite military service in Boeotia than at Athens. And there is no reason to believe these census rubrics were always static. Aristotle believed that successful agricultural years allowed more small farmers to meet property and wealth qualifications and so enter the political framework of some agrarian poleis. That implies that the property qualification was low enough in many Greek city-states to allow the less fortunate farmers an opportunity to acquire full privileges. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431 B.C.) the Thebans could make a vigorous defense of their Boeotian confederacy as an oligarchia isonomos (“an oligarchy of political equality”; cf. Thuc. 3.62.3), a broad-based timocracy where all citizens had rights under the law (although not full access to all offices), quite in contrast to the narrower government (dunasteia) that for a time had run things there during the Persian Wars (490-479 B.C.).*
How many did not have full citizenship rights (i.e., eligibility to hold all elected offices and participate in all municipal councils) under the agrarian confederacy led by Thebes? Start with the 15,000 or so light-armed troops who did not fight as hoplites. Add their wives and the spouses of the enfranchised 12,000 hoplite farmers. Finish with (say) between 12,000 and 15,000 agricultural slaves who worked on the citizens’ farms. All these marginalized groups add up to a total of about 50,000 to 60,000 disenfranchised free and slave adult residents. The full-citizen hoplites (about 12,000 hoplite farmers) composed about twenty percent of the total adult resident population of Boeotia (i.e., 60,000-70,000).
So in the total resident adult population, Boeotian citizen-hoplites were no more an exclusive percentage than the combined propertied and propertyless citizens of the radical democracy across the border at Athens. That democratic system went one step (but only one step) further to incorporate the free landless as citizens.
How could a property qualification at Boeotia still result in as egalitarian a society as that at democratic Athens? Clearly, we must look at the actual social and economic conditions under which the Greek agrarian city-states operated before we label them less egalitarian than more radical democracy at Athens. The conservative character of the agrarian economy, its closed, insular nature, must be considered in any discussion of Greek constitutional government. Agrarian “democracy” in theory was not quite democracy as defined by the Athenian model. But because it did not encourage the presence of disenfranchised resident aliens (metics) or slaves engaged in workshops, trade, or mine work, agrarian governments may have been about as representative of its surrounding adult resident population—citizen and noncitizen—as radical democracies. Agrarian economies without large navies and merchant ships simply did not draw in foreign residents and nonfarm slaves in large numbers, populations who by any Greek standard were always shut out from participation in government.
Locale may also have been important. In the typical agrarian-based polis such as Thebes, disenfranchisement from full citizenship was by statute: those who did not produce enough harvests or who did not own land at all were prevented from holding magistracies and in many places from voting. Yet in a radical democracy such as Athens, marginalization of segments of the population might take still place for reasons quite distinct from property holding. Farmers in the unusually large expanse of Attica, who might live fifty miles or more from Athens proper, surely would not need to attend the assembly or serve on law courts as frequently once there was an ever-ready and enfranchised urban poor (cf. Larsen 3; but cf. Markle 161-65). Ironically, a representative or timocratic council such as an elected or allotted Boulê could be more representative of the total Greek citizen body than the radically democratic assembly. The democratic ekklesia purportedly was open to all adult citizens—but in reality only to those with easy physical access to the assembly grounds.
Although the degree of agrarian participation in Athenian democracy is hotly contested by modern scholars, the ancients at least were aware that farmers were reluctant to undergo time-consuming, bureaucratic governmental responsibilities in Athens proper. Aristotle makes the point that farmers live scattered throughout the countryside “and do not meet or feel so much the need for meeting in the assembly” (Pol. 6.1319a30-36). Apparently “they have more pleasure in their work than in taking part in politics”(Pol.6.1318b 9-27). Once there was established a constantly politically active body of poor at Athens, agrarians’ reluctance to trudge into the polis might explain the feeling in Greek literature that the landed hoplites at Athens had not the same say in assembly decisions as their roughly equal-numbered counterparts, the landless thêtes who rowed in the fleet.
A final consideration concerns logistics. Democracy at Athens was more direct than representative. In the fifth century it required the physical presence of about six thousand citizens in the ekklesia to approve or reject decrees. No more than a fifth (of some forty to fifty thousand citizens at Athens in the fifth century) would vote on any given legislation. Any suggestion in our sources that this minority pool of direct participants was repetitive, static (e.g., more urban and poor than rural and middling), and not entirely representative of Attica as a whole, takes on important significance.19
Agrarian governments were theoretically somewhat more restrictive by insisting on a moderate property qualification, but met less frequently and reflected more the consensus of their smaller and more homogeneous body of farmer-citizens, so the actual number of Greeks who were deciding state policy may have been no smaller, no more exclusive than under democracy. In the ancient Greek world radical democracy apparently functioned by direct vote in town in the open-air assembly. That forum at Athens on any given day thereby eliminated four fifths of the Athenian citizenry from face-to-face legislative deliberation.
Agrarian egalitarianism throughout all the Greek city-states was the foundation of Athens’ innovative step in enfranchising her landless native-born residents. The Athenians were not creating ex nihilo a new democratic ideology as has been argued recently (cf. Arist. Pol. 2.1273b38-39)—the year 1993 was, after all, the 2,500-year anniversary and celebration of Cleisthenes’ democratic reforms of 507 B.C. Instead, democracy in the Athenian sense was a modification of prior broad-based, agricultural timocracy. It was a moderate extension of a long tradition of agrarian values to an additional group who did not hold land—a move itself not nearly revolutionary enough to transform the polis to meet the complex economic and social challenges of the fourth-century Mediterranean. No wonder Aristotle writes that “democracy is only a small deviation from polity (hê dêmokratia epi mikron gar parekbainei to tês politeias eidos),” and that often landed “timocracies pass into democracy (timokratias eis dêmokratian)” because “they are very similar (sunhoroi gar eisin hautai)” (Arist. Eth. Nic. 8.1160bl8-22; cf. Larsen 40).
The general democratic nature of all the agrarian Greek city-states—agrarian polities and radical democracies alike—is what led W. G. Runciman quite correctly to see a general, uniform polis ideology of egalitarianism, one which for so long prevented power in Greece from accumulating in specialized and entrepreneurial hands:
Poleis were all, without exception, far too democratic. Some, of course, were more oligarchic than others. But this meant only that their government was in the hands of a relatively smaller number of relatively richer citizens, rather than a relatively larger number of relatively poorer ones. In terms of a close concentration of economic, ideological, and coercive power in the hands of a compact, self-reproducing elite, no Greek polis ever came anywhere near the degree of oligarchy which characterized the institutions of both Rome and Venice during the period of their achievement of world-power status. In no Greek polis did there ever form a nobility or patriciate with an effective monopoly of the means of production, persuasion, and coercion and the capacity to transmit that monopoly to its chosen successors (1990:364-65).
The Idealization of Yeomanry
—Abbot Emo of Wittewierum (Gronigen, Netherlands, A.D. 1221 (in. Slicher van Bath 1963:194)
There are many sorts of profession. The practice of medicine is good for a man of suitable station. Petty trading is contemptible. Nothing is better, nothing provides such good living, nothing is more worthy of a free man, than farming.
“Agriculture is a humane (philanthrôpos) and gentle art (praeia technê)” as Xenophon’s Ischomachos puts it (Oec. 19.17). These commonly espoused sentiments, from both wealthy and poor Greeks of the city-state, cavalrymen and hoplites, suggest that agrarianism was also preserved in the culture of the polis by a moral force, one in addition to the establishment of agriculture-based political institutions or social, legal, and ideological pressures to ensure equality of landholding. There was an ethos of the land, a near-religious feeling among the Greeks that yeoman agriculture, manual work on one’s own farm, was morally uplifting and essential to one’s character. After all, the common word for landed property, ousia, also came to mean “being” or “essence” (cf. Arist.Pol.2.1266b19). To the Greeks the two were inseparably linked.
At the beginning of Greek literature, Homer, as we have seen, makes the shade of Achilles reflect this growing ethical notion of property holding. To the hero’s mind the only thing worse than being landless was to work as a hired hand for a landless man: “I would rather follow the plough as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead” (Hom. Od. 11.489-91). Oddly enough, by the fifth century all members of the city-state—the landless poor, the urban craftsman, and the occasional wealthy horse-breeder—accepted the agrarian ideology that those who owned and worked their own ground held the moral high ground and were the glue that held the polis together. At Athens the audience who enjoyed Aristophanes’ rustic agrarian plays, Peace, Acharnians, Ecclesiazusiae, and Thesmophoriazusae—drama that often was anti-urban, anti-elite, anti-intellectual—must have been in some part nonagrarian!
For the life of the free polis, this affinity for the land was a powerful force. Although more subtle than political representation or military power, it tended to check corporate and absentee agriculture, while championing the yeomanry of the middling farmers. Agrarian themes in Greek literature from the seventh to the end of the fourth century are clear. Agriculture was a “natural” occupation (cf. Pl. Leg. 10.889D). It required exploitation of the earth—not of other citizens. Simplicity and honesty were instinctively inculcated through hard work. People engaged in politics out of real need, not to create careers or accumulate riches. Farming outdoors contributed to a healthy physique. It curbed sloth, resulting in a population that wished peace, but was formidable in war, in contrast to the lazy, cowardly urban mob.
Even those few very rich who had no intention of working their ground themselves, and whose practice of landholding was antithetical to small farming, praised yeomanry. The author of the Oeconomica, wrongly attributed to Aristotle (Oec. 1343a25-b2), believed agriculture was “the best occupation” because it was “just,” an occupation “not at the expense of others.” Aristotle himself, despite his obvious awareness that farming demanded technology and could be at times quite lucrative, nevertheless still maintained that agriculture was the most natural of tasks (Pol. 1.1256b10-22). It was inherently noble work aimed at meeting essential needs, not at obtaining superfluous profits. In his Rhetoric Aristotle says explicitly that people honor those who are gallant, free, and just. In that group of the best citizens the farmers are the most conspicuous, “those who work on their own farms” (Rhet. 2.1381a21-24).
Similarly, Xenophon goes on at length that “the best life” is farming, which gives the body “the greatest degree of strength and beauty (kallista te kai eurôstotata).” The entire farming community was the backbone of the state, since farming made “those who work the soil brave, the best citizens, most loyal to the polis” (Oec. 6.9-10), an occupation that seemed to make its adherents “the most noble in their habits (ta êthê gennaiotatous)” (Oec. 15.12).
Plato says nearly the same thing. In his view, the ownership of the family plot was the only mechanism by which the citizen could fulfill his political obligations and thus practice virtue (Leg. 5.741B). Menander writes likewise: “For all humans the farm is a teacher of virtue and of the life devoted to freedom” (fr. 408 Kock), a sentiment echoed by a contemporary comic poet, Philemon: “A farm is the best gift a man could have” (fr. 105 Kock).20
Aristophanes makes this idealization even more explicit throughout his fifth-century Athenian plays. His comic farmers are peace-loving, independent, and completely self-reliant. “Looking out at the countryside,” sighs Dicaiopolis, the farmer of theAcharnianswho is cooped up in Athens during the initial evacuations of the Peloponnesian War, “loving peace, hating the town, desiring my country village which never ever cried out ‘Buy charcoal’ or ‘Buy vinegar’ or ‘Buy oil’; it knew not at all ‘Buy,’ but instead produced everything itself” (Ar. Ach. 32-36). In Aristophanes’ view, the farmers of Attica represented a pristine life-style that was inherently ennobling, one derived from the early days of the Greek polis, now under assault at Athens from growing urbanization, overseas imperialism, and welfare radical democracy. In his play the Peace, “peace is most welcome to the farmers,” who walk back to the countryside, phalanx-like, their mattocks and pitchforks on their shoulders, like hoplite arms gleaming in the sun (Pax 549, 556-57, 564-67).
This heartfelt love of farming was not just a romantic notion, unlike the much later genre of pastoralism—that artificial, rosy picture of the countryside drawn by a bored and urban elite. Farmers in fifth- and fourth-century Athenian drama symbolize and embody the inherent dignity of the entire (vanishing) agrarian polis. “The farmers do the work,” wrote Aristophanes bluntly (Pax 511), “no one else.” These same geôrgoi, he says later in the same play, “are most wise” (603), hardworking men sometimes known elsewhere in literature as the “good farmers” (agathoi geôrgoi; Lys. 20.33). The comic poet Philemon makes his farmer say: “Out on my farm digging the earth I have found the answer—peace” (Philemon fr. 71.6-8 Kock). So it is in Greek tragedy; the noble farmer of Euripides’ Electra is made to declare: “The yeomen alone preserve the land” (Eur. Orest. 920). Zethos in Euripides’ lost play Antiope claims that only in cultivation of the earth can a man find true wisdom (fr. 188 Nauck).
Informal and ad hoc as these idealized sentiments were, the exaltation of agriculture reveals a fascinating distrust for just those activities—specialization, bureaucratization, social stratification, and taxation—that usually create (and topple) complex societies (e.g., Tainter 193-216). So there is a gut-instinct characteristic of agrarian sentiment in Greek literature that residence on the farm, simple comportment in dress and behavior, intensive small-sized cultivation, yeoman control of warfare, and brusqueness and rapidity in government are all essential to the survival of Greek polis culture.
The effect that agrarianism had on the economy at large, in preventing specialization and complexity, has not gone unnoticed by scholars. Historians have been quick to detect a “primitiveness” in the nature of Greek economic thinking, a society based more on a desire for equality and stability than for real productive growth. As I stated earlier, this “backward” interpretation of the Greek economy has been greatly exaggerated. Farmers did know profit and loss, supply and demand, prices dependent on scarcity and surfeit. But this knowledge is not incompatible with the Greeks’ simultaneous notion that agriculture, like war, was not a mere profession, but an opportunity to prove moral excellence as well.*
The ethical element inherent in farming did create a moral economy of sorts in which the possession of equal-sized plots, not capital formation alone, was given social and cultural prominence. Agrarianism was an ethical force in the polis from which business and profit as ends in themselves took on “unnatural” connotations, explaining why nakedly commercial activity was shunned until the late fourth century, and even then considered “deviant.” Profit seeking was largely the work of foreigners and resident aliens (e.g., Gernet 1981: 318)—men properly to be denied the right by the agrarian polis to own land, fight in the phalanx, or vote in the assembly. That creed explains why the destruction of Greek agrarian thinking in the Hellenistic Period, the end of yeomanry in the late third and second centuries in Greece, may for all of its inequality and widespread impoverishment have created much greater wealth in the economy overall. The dismantling of polis egalitarianism allowed more selfish and unblinkered bright minds to seek out and to create capital—albeit to be enjoyed by an increasingly smaller privileged elite.
This emphasis throughout classical literature on the moral superiority of agriculture is not only based on the observation that farming is an activity closer to nature than trading or commerce. At times the working of the soil, as the Greeks knew, could be seen as unnatural and dependent on man-made, not natural, forces. I think, in the context of the Greek polis, the purely philosophical idealization of agrarianism prominent in the Greek literature of the fourth century also derives from three historical facts: (1) the realization by all Greeks of the polis that their collective and cherished institutions of the city-state arose as part of the early movement toward small, private, and equitable ownership of farm plots; (2) the fact that the majority of polis dwellers were directly connected to the growing of food, and felt that local self-sufficiency in food production (autarkeia) was essential, even when in some cases it no longer made strict economic sense; and (3), the fear that in the fourth century some communities, most notably Athens, had developed social and political practices inimical to traditional polis agrarianism.
Agrarianism was not merely an ethos confined to the country chauvinism of the polis, but the ethos from which most other Greek values can be traced. Because both Aristotle and Plato (and most all Greek political thinkers) believed, unlike modern theorists, that government’s real role was to improve the nature of mankind, the occupation and life-style of the citizenry became of utmost importance. As long as a large segment of the population worked and owned their own farms, agrarianism, the polis, and Greek culture itself, were all in good hands. Patience, frugality, practicality, and communality among the citizenry were the natural harvests of the rural creed. That explains why the philosophers saw that anything that undermined agrarianism—large farms, city life, hired labor, mercenary service, sea power, and participation of all citizens in politics regardless of property ownership—soon eroded the original concept of a polis. Such anti-agrarianism may have led to capital formation, greater democratization, and rapid urban growth, but it also changed the Greek character in ways we moderns might uniquely appreciate. Critics of Plato and Aristotle find their thinking illiberal, reactionary, and backward. But they have not refuted the philosophers’ basic connection between agrarianism and the stable Greek state. And they have not shown that the Hellenic character and ethos were the unique products of an urban, democratic, and imperialistic Athens, rather than the earlier bounty of the ten-acre farmer, hoplite, and council member. So if we now object to the view of Plato and Aristotle, it may be because we have lost empathy with the horny-handed farmer himself and his cargo of self-reliance, hard work, and a peculiar distrust of rich and poor alike.
*Differences in farmers’ wealth and farm quality: Xen. Oec. 6.11; Xen. Oec. 16.3-5; cf. Eur. frs. 195, 742 Nauck. Cf. Pl. Leg. 5.745D-E.
*“The natural aversion agrarian communities everywhere seem to have for absentee ownership of land,” Marty Strange has written, “is therefore more than the parochial jealousies of a backward, suspicious people. It is based on their heritage of experience that when land accumulates in the hands of speculators, people who depend on working the land for their living are sure to suffer” (Strange 171). “The family’Size farm,” wrote Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, nearly a half century ago, “owned by the man who operated it, was the ideal of our land-settlement policy. But we failed to safeguard the ownership of the land which was homesteaded to such an extent that a large proportion of our best farm land fell into the hands of speculators and absentee landlords” (cf. Griswold 165)
*That 1987 bailout of the American farm credit system cost taxpayers nationwide four billion dollars, see Davidson 183 n. 13.
*See Lacey 333-35; cf. Arist. Ath. Pol. 12.3; Theogn. 345-47, 1199-1202.
**On the reluctance for confiscation and shared ownership, see Pl. Leg. 3.684D, 5.736C; Arist. Pol. 5.1305a2; Isocr. 12.259; cf. Figueira 1984b: 198-200.
*E.g., Pol. 2.1266a-1274b; cf. Asheri 1966: 16-21; Woodhouse 74-87; Starr 1977: 150-52; Burford 1993: 16-17.
*See Morrow 103-12; Isager and Skydsgaard 123: “In the ideal state envisioned by Aristotle, all citizens, as mentioned above, were to start with equal plots of private land”.
*“Aristotle recognizes,” wrote L. B. Carter, “that the possessor of property has a calming and sobering effect, conducive to a state of apragmosunê (quietism), which in turn brings a quieter, more stable society, and there does not appear to be any historical evidence for extreme poverty among farmers in Attica in the Classical Period” (95).
*See Fuks 12-17, who counted about seventy cases of social-economic conflict in the Hellenistic age as compared with about six such cases in the classical period. See also Asheri 1966: 21-24; Andrewes 1971: 229: “Less radical reformers, like those who were vocal at Athens and elsewhere at the end of the fifth century, saw the mass of hoplites as a foundation on which to build a stable constitution.”
*Starr: 1986: 93; cf. Salmon 1984: 233-37; Ehrenberg 1937 149-53; Larsen 28-29. “By the fifth century B.C.”, wrote G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, “when rule by hereditary aristocracies had become rare in the Greek world, the members of the governing class who alone possessed full political rights in a Greek oligarchy would be defined by a property qualification” (1972: 35; 98-99). On the presence of egalitariaism and equality prior to democracy, see Spahn 174-82.
*“The clear and definite impression of Solon’s usage of the term dêmios [the adjective] is that for him it signified neither the total community (polis) nor the ‘the commons’ or ‘the masses,’ as the term was used later, but the citizenry exclusive of the minority that was in a position of power and control. Dêmos [the noun] in Solon has no undercurrent of contempt or sense of innate inferiority and it includes more than the poorest citizens” (Donlan 1970: 391).
*Patterson 76; A. M. Jones 1957: 90; Andrewes 1971: 210. For what it is worth, before the fifth century the word oligarchia did not even exist in the Greek vocabulary (Donlan 1970: 381-82). For the rough equivalency of dêmos and polis, cf. Meiggs and Lewis 8; Donlan 1970: 386-87; Lewis 1990: 261-62.
*“Aristotle himself found the two-regime (democracy/oligarchy) scheme inadequate and potentially misleading” (Ober 1990: 123).
*Donlan 1973: 154; for anti-aristocratic passages, see Tyrt. 9.1-12; 9.13-22; 9.23; Callinus 1.6-21; Archil, fr. 22, 94, 97; Xenophanes 3; Hipponax 16, 17, 24A, 24B, 25, 29, 39, 42D.
*See Gomme, Comm. 2:34-39; 1933: 25-26; A. M. Jones 1957: 165; B. Strauss 78; cf. M. H. Hansen 53-54; 90-94; Guiraud 156-59; Busolt and Swoboda 187-89; 764-66. For those eligible and ineligible to participate in democracy at Athens, see A. M. Jones 1957: 75-96; M. H. Hansen 61-64; 94-96 Harrison 187-99; 165-76.
*Larsen notes that “even the simple fact that the Boeotians possessed representative government has been noted only by very few” (40), and adds that the confederacy was “one of the best illustrations we have of Greek moderate oligarchy” (Larsen 32). “A little under half the population would have had full rights” under the constitution (Moore 129; emphasis added).
*That interim rule was an aristocratic deviation from the normal “ancestral constitution” that had championed the cause of middling Boeotian farmers (e.g., Paus. 9.6.2). Except for a brief period during the Persian Wars and later during Athenian intervention (e.g., Thuc. 1.108; cf. Busolt and Swoboda 358), the constitution of Boeotia seems to have been unusually stable and broad-based throughout the fifth century. For flexibility in the property assessment, see Pol. 5.1306b11-16; Ath. Pol. 7.4; Rhet. 1387a21-26; cf. [Dem.] 42.4; Pl. Leg. 5.744C; 745D; Rhodes 145-46.
*See Detienne 1963: 54; Isager and Skydsgaard 200: “a curious mix of gift-giving and a market economy”; cf. Engels 24-27.