Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (59 page)

The Archaeologists’ Empty Countryside

Material evidence for agriculture plays only a small role in Hanson’s argument, but he does cite instances where field divisions indicate farm sizes. The only place where 10-acre farms emerge as the norm is the Crimea, where in the fifth century BC a general redistribution of land produced many plots of 11–12 acres. All the other instances are also of classical date, and reveal only a few more farms of about 10 acres, while the vast majority range from just over 20 acres to 100 acres. One estimate for early fifth-century
Metapontum suggests that only 8 percent of farms were 11 acres in size, 27 percent were 22 acres, and 63 percent covered between 33 and 88 acres. Hanson makes the fair point that evidently even the rich in Greece were not very much richer than the yeomen (although he concedes that the wealthiest may have owned more than one farm: 1995, 187; 195), but the fact remains that 10-acre farms are rare even in the classical material record, which does reveal estates large enough to enable a leisure-class existence.
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Elsewhere, a variety of archaeological survey projects has now revealed that the Greek countryside was largely “empty” until the late sixth century. The evidence is discussed more fully elsewhere in this volume, but one example may illustrate the point. The Laconia Survey, which covered a large area from the immediate northeast of Sparta itself to the border of Laconia, found no signs of habitation between 700 and 550 BC, only a few dedications at two sanctuary sites. At some point between 550 and 450, however, the landscape filled up dramatically, with dozens of farms, several hamlets, and even a small town. These remarkable findings are mirrored elsewhere, including Metapontum.
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The material evidence is open to interpretation, of course, but it seems clear that it is incompatible with the notion of a sizable class of yeomen living on their farmsteads outside town before 550 BC. The emptiness of the landscape strongly suggests that landowners lived in town, and that cultivators lived there, too, or else lived on the land under such simple conditions that they left no trace in the archaeological record.

Conversely, the filling-in of the Greek countryside after circa 550 BC suggests a new pattern of landownership or agricultural exploitation. What exactly happened in Sparta remains unclear, since the regimented Spartan lifestyle kept citizens closely tied to the city, and they were unlikely to have begun to settle in the countryside. But elsewhere in Greece, the emergence of country-dwelling small farmers may explain the spread of rural settlement, and this may be our earliest evidence, perhaps along with Phocylides’ praise of “middling men,” for the rise of the yeoman farmer—from the mid-sixth century onward.
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The Republic of Gentlemen: Another Model

At the center of ancient Greek history stands a protagonist much less sympathetic than the hardworking independent farming family of
The Other Greeks
. This is the gentleman farmer, whom on the basis of the evidence discussed above we may define as follows:

• A gentleman farmer owned at least 30 acres (12 ha) of land, which was enough in principle for him and his family to afford a life of leisure in town, even if in practice many may have been actively involved in the management of their farms.

• A gentleman farmer’s labor force consisted of at least four agricultural workers and two domestic servants, hired or slave.

• Gentlemen farmers constituted probably no more than 10–15 percent of citizens in most archaic Greek cities.
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In writing the history of Greece, we must take as our starting point that for almost the whole of the archaic age, leisured landowners and their laborers—sharecroppers, hired men, with or without a tiny plot of land of their own, slaves, and serfs—are the only significant social classes attested. Not until later did independent yeomen farmers emerge as a class in some parts of the Greek world, including Athens—and this development must have had a fundamental impact on the history of the classical period. This chapter cannot, of course, present a full-dress revised history of ancient Greece to rival
The Other Greeks
, but I will try to sketch what such a history might look like, even if this means making bold claims without being able to offer the further substantiation that they sorely need.

Land, Labor, and Rivalry for Wealth and Honor

The striking developments of the eighth century, especially from 750 BC onward, reflect the emergence of an elite of gentlemen farmers. Population growth at the time does not now seem as drastic as was once argued, and the evidence for a shift from pastoral to agricultural economies is very limited, so for an explanation we may look instead to the sort of fierce competition for wealth, both land and livestock, on which Hesiod comments. This presumably had been a feature of Greek life for centuries and may have ultimately produced a separation between landed elite and dependent labor by 750 BC. It was this new elite that displayed its wealth and consolidated its dominant position by settling together in larger nucleated settlements, building sanctuaries and filling them with dedications, as well as constructing fortifications, more complex houses, and more visible grave monuments. The relative egalitarianism that one can often observe in the material record from this time onward reflects an egalitarian culture
within
the landed elite. It did not extend to yeomen farmers, if there were any, let alone to dependent farmers or laborers, who remain essentially invisible in the archaeological record.
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Much of archaic history can be understood as the product of two basic dynamics: tension between egalitarianism and competitiveness within the class of gentlemen farmers; and tension between the landed elite and the rest of the population. Competition for honor (
time
), in the form of status and power, meant that every individual and family aimed to raise their own standing while not allowing their peers to advance themselves. Often an informal group of ruling families, such as the
basileis
of Hesiod’s world, the Bacchiads of Corinth, or the Eupatridae of Athens, established itself within the landed elite, but their dominance was always resented and challenged by the other gentlemen farmers.
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In order to end or prevent violent conflict between sections of the landed elite, Greek cities generally developed, in the course of the seventh and early sixth centuries, republican systems of government with clear rules for power sharing among all leisured landowners. Solon’s property classes are an example of such timocratic republican institutions, which are far less “broad-based” than those envisaged by Hanson. Rivalry for status was meant to take place within this republican framework, but leading men were often not content to compete within the rules and instead established themselves as monarchs, “tyrants.” This met fierce resistance, and a republic of gentlemen was usually soon restored.

Competition for wealth also led to conflict within the elite as well as to increasing exploitation of the labor force, debtors, and dependants. One response was to counter the ethos of conspicuous leisure and consumption with the ideology of “toil” that we find in Hesiod, according to which the only legitimate way to gain wealth was through active farm management, close supervision of the labor force, profitable sale of surplus, and a relatively austere lifestyle. Another response was to compete by seizing wealth from new sources, through the internal “colonization” of marginal land, by raiding or settling overseas, or even by means of the conquest of neighboring territory.

Homer and archaeology suggest that marginal land was not occupied by independent small farmers but by large estates and herds; presumably the landed elite used force and intimidation to prevent their poorer neighbors from carving out their own small farms here. New settlements abroad often seem to have started out on an egalitarian basis, but even if some or most of the colonists had been poor men at home, the communities they established abroad adopted the egalitarianism of a leisure class rather than of a community of working farmers. The model is Syracuse, where the Greek settlers subjected the local population and ruled as
gamoroi
, landowners, over native serfs.
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Raiding overseas was widespread, and slaves must have been the raiders’ main spoils, so that these expeditions not only alleviated the poverty of the ships’ crews but also increased the wealth of the captains and created a supply of chattel slaves for their labor force. As for the conquest of neighboring territory, the reduction of the Messenians to a serf population feeding a leisured Spartan elite is usually regarded as unique, but there is evidence that it was by no means unusual in the archaic period.
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Despite the availability of external sources of land and labor and the preaching against violent greed by the likes of Hesiod and Solon, intense rivalry for wealth also led the gentleman-farmer elite to usurp the use of common and private land, exploit their workforce, enslave their debtors, and abuse legal process. This sparked widespread social crises from 650/600 BC onward, including radical calls for the redistribution of land in Sparta and Athens. Such social unrest could be tapped by ambitious members of the elite in their competition for status, enabling them to mobilize not only factional support within the elite but also broad popular backing for seizing monarchical power. Solon’s pride in not having imposed himself as tyrant on Athens despite having the enthusiastic support of the masses shows how well established this pattern was by 600 BC.
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In many Greek cities, such crises were never more than temporarily resolved and continued to erupt over the following centuries. But some places did achieve greater stability in the second half of the sixth century. Athens and Sparta provide us with two models that were probably mirrored in other cities.

In Athens, the position of the poor working masses was gradually improved by means of internal reform that imposed restrictions on exploitation and offered better legal protection. According to later tradition the tyrant Peisistratus even provided direct material support for farmers in need of plow oxen or seed corn. Conquest of some overseas territory in Salamis, Sigeum, the Chersonese, and Chalcis also helped. The result was the emergence, finally, of a class of independent working farmers. In 322 BC, as we saw, Athens had about 5,000 leisure-class citizens, 4,000 independent
working-class citizens, no doubt still mainly farmers, and another 20,000 or so citizens who labored for others. Note that yeomen “middling” farmers, although now a significant class, were the smallest social group, forming at most 13 percent of the citizen population. The proportions may have been similar by about 500 BC. This new social class remained
thetes
under the terms of the Athenian property-class system, however, and acquired no new formal political rights beyond their roles in popular assemblies and courts, unless perhaps they were entitled to serve on the reformed council instituted by Cleisthenes in 508 BC, which is not clear.

In Sparta, stability was achieved in the first instance by conquest of large tracts of land in Laconia and Messenia and the subjection of their inhabitants, which enabled large numbers of Spartiates to become gentlemen farmers, and staved off demands for a redistribution of land. This strategy continued after the completion of the conquest of Messenia, circa 600 BC, with attempts to seize land and labor also in neighboring Arcadia and Cynouria until circa 550 BC. After that, expeditions of conquest gave way to wars of hegemony, in which defeated enemies became subject allies rather than serfs. At about the same time, the famously “austere” and egalitarian material culture of classical Sparta emerged. It was thus probably in the late sixth century, when further conquests failed, that Sparta turned to a different way of avoiding internal conflict by creating a rigid distinction between leisure-class landowning citizens and a subject labor force, and inhibiting competition for wealth by imposing on all citizens a strictly egalitarian material culture while channeling rivalry for honor into highly regulated forms of competition.
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Far from being a “bizarre mutation” or Dark Age relic, the social and economic structure that we encounter in classical Sparta and the similar systems found in the towns of Crete and Thessaly were thus created in the late archaic period in response to the same pressures that affected Athens, Megara, Miletus, and other cities. The Spartan solution was to make as many citizens as possible gentlemen farmers at the expense of outsiders and to resort to extreme self-regulation of the leisure class. The Athenian model involved less self-regulation by the gentleman-farmer elite, and fewer conquests, but more protection of the working classes, which allowed a yeoman class to establish itself and play some part in political life even if its formal rights remained confined to voting in assemblies and juries.

Despite the reformers’ best efforts, competition for wealth and status did not stop, and in many places ultimately proved more powerful than the laws and political structures that were set up to rein it in. Already by the late fifth century, there were signs of renewed concentration of land in the hands of a few, and a shrinking of the yeoman class and ultimately even of the gentleman farmer class. Renewed exploitation of credit and labor caused new social crises; timocratic regimes became narrower and often turned into oligarchies. Even the heavily regulated elite of landowning citizens in Sparta shrank at an alarming rate, from a possible 9,000 at the time of the sixth-century reform to a mere 1,100 on the eve of the battle of Leuctra in 371 BC. Most of the losses must be due to a concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer citizens, which caused the others to fall below the property requirement and become “inferiors.”
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