Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (57 page)

Even more telling are the opening lines of the almanac of auspicious days: “You must announce to your slaves the days given by Zeus, observing them duly; the thirtieth of the month is the best to supervise work [
erga epopteuein
] and to distribute rations, when people judge truly in celebrating it” (765–67). The rest of the days then follow in more or less chronological order, starting with the first. The poet here evidently envisages a situation in which the farmer visits his land only once a month, to deliver provisions for his slaves and issue instructions about what work is to be done on which days. Even if the last day of the month was merely the “best,” not the only, day on which to visit the farm, the fact remains that advice about good moments
for supervision only makes sense for a farmer who is not permanently present on the farm.

Passages that urge the farmer to work hard must be seen in this light. Hesiod may say that “your slaves and you yourself alike” (
W&D
459) should plow, and that the farmer should pray to Zeus “when you put your hand on the end of the plough-handle and apply the goad to the backs of the oxen” (465–69), but the verses that immediately precede and follow explicitly describe a team of three slaves doing all the work. There is nothing left to do for the farmer himself, except supervise and lend a hand occasionally. When Hesiod tells the farmer what to do “after you have stored all your food supplies inside the house,” it is clear the storage of this grain in jars has been the work of slaves, and slaves alone; the farmer’s role is to organize the storage (597–601). Even the most emphatic exhortations to “toil at toil after toil,” to sow, plough and harvest “naked” (458–63), must therefore surely be taken as rhetorical: “toil” here means active, hands-on management of the farm, not physical labor—just as in Xenophon’s picture of a large classical estate, the landowner’s “toil” consists of walking, running, and riding from town house to farm and back again after supervising the slave workforce for a while.
²⁴

Hesiod’s apparent worries about poverty, debt, and hunger thus take on a different complexion. The need to avoid “poverty” (
penia
) and have a “sufficient” (
arkios
) livelihood is frequently stressed, and modern readers tend to assume that “sufficient” means “enough to survive” while “poverty” means falling below subsistence level. But the classical Greek definition of “poverty” was “having to work for a living,” as opposed to living off the labor of others, and there is no reason to think that Hesiod used the word differently.
²⁵
To escape “poverty” and acquire a “sufficient” livelihood, then, was to have a farm large enough to support a workforce of slaves and hired workers as well as a family of leisured owners. As for hunger and debt,
²⁶
I would argue that Hesiod’s farmers are too well-off to be seriously at risk, and that the poet evokes the worst-case scenario as the ultimate justification for his ethical advice, to which we shall return in a moment.

It should in any case be noted that warnings of poverty, debt, and hunger are only part of the picture, and are balanced by equally many references to farmers aiming for wealth, and the “excellence” and “glory” that comes with it. Hanson himself rightly makes the point, missed by many other scholars, that Hesiod’s farmer is unlike small farmers and peasants in so many other cultures, whose ambitions stop at subsistence and a fair share of what they regard as strictly limited resources. In Hesiod, the farmer aims for “untold prosperity” (376–80). He may trade his produce overseas to maximize his income (“the larger the cargo, the larger will be the profit upon profit,” 643–45), and use this to increase his landholdings (“you may buy the estate of other men,” 335–41) or his herds.
²⁷
Hesiod’s famous opening analysis of the nature of “competition” (
eris
) stresses that to strive to become richer than one’s neighbor is a good thing, so long as the competition relies on productive work and does not spill over into deceit, perjury, and violence (11–26).

Indeed, the whole of the
Works and Days
is an extended exhortation to engage in “good” and steer clear of “bad” competition. For Hesiod, the crucial problem in contemporary society is that wealthy landowners adopt a leisured lifestyle and spend
little time managing their estates, frittering away their property, while competing for greater wealth by illegitimate means—fraudulent litigation, theft, and force. His remedy is to tell these landowners that there is only one way to get rich legitimately and with lasting success: close and constant supervision of farm work with a view to getting the most out of one’s land and laborers. It is precisely because the poem is addressed to wealthy farmers who can in principle afford to leave the cultivation of their land to their slaves and hired men that Hesiod finds it necessary to stress the benefits of “toil,” which hardly needed to be rehearsed at length for poorer farmers. Hesiod justifies his advice on religious grounds by telling stories about Prometheus and Pandora, and the five races of mankind (42–201), both of which serve to show that it is the gods’ will that all men, not just the poor, should toil for a living, and that even the rich should not simply live off the labor of others:

Gods and men are filled with indignation at one who would live without working, his disposition like that of stingless drones who devour what the bees have toiled for, eating without working…. Whatever your fortune [
daimon
], it is better to work (
W&D
303–7, 314).

Hesiod’s conjuring up of the specter of hunger and debt serves a similar purpose: it adds an economic justification for his moral advice. In practice, for the wealthy farmers whom he addresses, the threat of hunger may have been no more acute than the danger that the gods’ “indignation” would somehow actually put an end to their dronelike existence, but the vulnerability of agriculture to natural disaster means that no farmer is completely safe from hunger and debt. This allowed Hesiod to remind them of the worst that could happen and to argue that the best way to prevent this was dedication to farm management.
²⁸

So the
Works and Days
, like the
Odyssey
, reveals the existence only of gentlemen farmers, employing slaves and hired laborers, and competing for wealth by fair means and foul. Within this group, there is a distinct ruling elite, the “lords” (
basileis
), who according to Hesiod’s
Theogony
owe their status to their special eloquence and ability to settle disputes within the community. In
Works and Days
, however, these lords are sharply addressed as among the worst offenders in getting rich through deceit and violence.
²⁹

Solon’s
Zeugitai

The laws and poems of Solon, and above all the system of property classes that he instituted or adapted in 594 BC as the basis of Athens’ political organization, constitute the most important archaic evidence for the distribution of landownership and its relation to politics and warfare. For Hanson, the third of Solon’s property classes, the
zeugitai
, represents the “yeoman” family farmer and hoplite, given new political rights under Solon’s reforms.
³⁰
Since the
zeugitai
rank below the evidently wealthy “horsemen” (
hippeis
) and five-hundred-bushel-men (
pentakosiomedminoi
), but above the evidently poor “hired men” (
thetes
), it seems at first glance fair enough to assume that they are a “middling” group of small farmers. This assumption, however, is incorrect, as Lin Foxhall demonstrated in a paper published a couple of years after
The
Other Greeks
. She pointed out that the actual property qualification associated with the
zeugitai
, an annual harvest of at least “200 measures,” shows them to be very much wealthier than yeomen farmers.
³¹

There are several ways of calculating the economic level implied by an income of “200 measures” of agricultural produce. A simple indication is how many people it could feed. A standard daily ration for an adult male was one
choinix
of barley or wheat and one
kotyle
of wine; 365
choinikes
amounted to 7.6 measures (
medimnoi
) of grain, and 365
kotylai
to 2.5 measures (
metretai
) of wine.
³²
One person therefore needed about 10 measures of grain and wine—which together formed the bulk of his diet—a year, and the minimum harvest of a
zeugites
could in principle sustain twenty adult men, though in practice we need to deduct up to a quarter of the grain harvest as seed corn for next year, and the actual number of men who could live off this income is about fifteen. Allowing for a small amount of other food and other expenses, this must still be approximately three times as much as the subsistence minimum for a family of four.

Alternatively, one can estimate what the sale value of such quantities of produce was. Although the evidence for prices is limited, the average price of barley in the late fifth and fourth century BC was 3 or 4 drachmas per
medimnos
, wheat 5 or 6 drachmas per
medimnos
, and wine probably 12 drachmas per
metretes
. After deducting seed corn, therefore, a
zeugites
might in principle sell 150 measures of barley or wheat for 450–600 dr or 750–900 dr, respectively, and his 200 measures of wine could be worth 2,400 dr. Yet at the time the minimum annual cost of feeding a family was a mere 3 obols a day, or about 180 dr a year. Even a crop of 200 measures of nothing but barley, the cheapest staple, was therefore worth at least two-and-a-half times as much as a family needed.
³³

Extrapolating the size of the farm from the size of the harvest is somewhat more speculative, but it can be done with a fair degree of precision by using comparative evidence for grain harvests in early twentieth-century Attica. A
medimnos
of barley or wheat weighed 27.5 and 33 kilograms, respectively; a
metretes
of wine or oil contained 38.88 liters.
³⁴
A harvest of 200 measures of barley, Attica’s main crop, thus amounted to 5,500 kg, and since modern records suggest that a yield of 800 kg per hectare was the maximum that could have been achieved in ancient Attica, this requires a minimum of 6.9 hectares, or 17.25 acres, under cultivation. We must double that amount to allow for biennial fallow, so that the minimum size of the
zeugites
’ farm was 13.8 ha or 34.5 acres.

For wheat, a rather greater weight, 6,600 kg, and a lower maximum yield, 630 kg/ha, mean that we require a minimum 10.5 ha or 26.25 acres of cultivated land, plus fallow, that is, a minimum farm size of 21 ha or 52.5 acres.
³⁵
For olive oil, the result is similar: to produce 7,775 liters at a maximum yield of 360 liters per hectare, the farmer needed 21.6 ha or 54 acres. Only wine could have been produced in sufficient quantities on the 10-acre farm envisaged by Hanson: 7,775 liters at a maximum yield of 2,500 liters per ha would have required only 3.1 ha or 7.8 acres.
³⁶
But wine could never have been the major crop of Attica, since it formed a relatively small part of the diet, and there is no sign that Athens ever exported wine in any quantity. The main agricultural
export was olive oil—already exempted from export restrictions by a law of Solon’s—which required the most land of all.
³⁷
Again, we must conclude that the farm of a
zeugites
was at least three times as large as the subsistence minimum of 10 acres.

Finally, we can calculate the approximate monetary value of these farms on the basis that the minimum price of agricultural land in the late fourth century BC was 50 drachmas per
plethron
and that one acre is 4.4
plethra
.
³⁸
Ten acres of land were thus worth at least 2,200 drachmas; 30 acres, the
zeugites
’ minimum, cost at least 6,600. Even a modest house and furnishings, a few slaves, and some livestock would bring the total value of such a property quite easily up to 8,000 drachmas. By implication, the next-highest property class, the
hippeis
, who produced 300 measures, must have owned properties worth at least 12,000 dr (2 talents), and the highest class, the
pen-takosiomedimnoi
, producing 500 measures or more, had estates worth 20,000 dr (3.3 tal.) or more. To put this in perspective, in the late fourth century the estimated level of wealth of the so-called liturgical class, the top 5 percent of rich Athenian families, was 3 talents or more, which coincides with Solon’s highest property class. A citizen property census of 2,000 drachmas, very close to the 10-acre minimum, was set after the abolition of democracy in 322 BC and in all probability represented the smallest viable family farm for a yeoman citizen-soldier.
Zeugitai
, then, were three times as rich as these yeomen, and not much less than half as rich as the wealthiest-class men in Athens. Significantly, they owned properties just above 1 talent (6,000 dr), which is the estimated level above which one was rich enough to belong to the leisure class, exempt from the need to work for a living.
³⁹

The last calculations allow us to form some idea of the absolute and relative numbers of families belonging to each property class. In 322 BC, only 9,000 households owned properties worth 2,000 dr or more, and among them approximately 1,200 households fell in the liturgical class with estimated minimum properties of 18,000 dr. If the remaining 7,800 families were equally distributed over the property range from 2,000 to 18,000 dr, the minimum census for
zeugitai
, which we estimated at 8,000 dr, would have been met by about 6,000 families. In practice, such a perfectly equal distribution is unlikely, and more properties will have fallen at the lower end of the range, so that we may reckon with about 5,000 families in the top three property classes, or only just over half of all families at yeoman level or above. The total citizen population of Athens in 322 BC was about 30,000, so the richest 5,000 constituted about 17 percent of citizens.
⁴⁰
And this was when public pay for jury and military service, and later also for attending assemblies and festivals, had done much to ensure a relatively even distribution of wealth. Under Solon, the proportion of citizens in the top three property classes must, if anything, have been smaller, and is unlikely to have been higher than 15 percent.