purpose itself is clearly and consistently marked. The desire of the
war-time farmers is simply to return to their farms[163] and to resume
the life of toil and plenty, varied by occasional festivals, that had
been interrupted by the war. They long to escape from the abominations
of the crowding and unhealthiness prevailing in the city. Once they get
back to their old surroundings, all will be well. Time and labour will
even repair the damages caused by the enemy. No misgivings suggest that
a change of circumstances may be found to have robbed Attic country
life of some of its charm. Nothing like the loss of the empire, the
fall of Athens, and the deadly depression of economic and political
life, is foreboded: they face the sequel with undisturbed faith in the
stability of the existing system. Nor indeed until the Sicilian disaster
(413 BC) was there much to cause uneasiness. So we find the same spirit
illustrated in the _Peace_ (421 BC), which may be regarded as driving
home the lesson of the _Acharnians_. The agricultural interests are now
represented as solidly in favour of the peace of Nicias, unsatisfactory
though it soon proved to be. While other interests are slack, indifferent
or even hostile, farmers are whole-hearted[164] in determination to
end the war and go home. Trygaeus their leader, according to the Greek
sketch of the plot an elderly rustic, describes himself[165] as a
‘skilled vine-dresser, one who is no informer or fomenter of troubles
(lawsuits).’ Needless to say, he carries his point, and the farmers march
off triumphant[166] to their farms, eager to take up the old easygoing
life once more. We must not take our comic poet too literally, but we
have no reason to doubt that feelings such as he depicts in this play did
prevail, and perhaps widely. And, though the peace was insincere, and
warfare never really ceased, the immunity of Attica from invasion for
several years gave time for agriculture to revive. When Agis occupied
Deceleia in the winter of 413, his marauders would find on the Attic
farms all manner of improvements and new plantations to destroy. And the
destruction of the fruits of a laborious revival is to be reckoned among
the depressing influences that weighed upon falling and desperate Athens.
It was surely at work in the year 411, when Aristophanes was preaching
a policy of concord at home and sympathetic treatment of the Allies in
order to save the shaken empire. In the _Lysistrata_ he represents the
mad war-fury of the Greek states as due to the misguided men, whom the
women coerce by privation into willingness for peace. This is strung up
into a passionate longing, so that neither[167] of the principal parties
is disposed to haggle over details. The Athenian breaks out ‘I want to
strip and work my land at once.’ The Spartan rejoins ‘and I want to be
carting manure.’ There is still no misgiving expressed, and the poet is
probably true to facts. The struggles of the time were a fearful strain
on Athenian resources, but it still seemed possible that the empire would
weather the storm.
This brief sketch leads on to the inquiry, what do we gather as to the
labour employed on the farms? We have to consider three possibilities
(_a_) the farmer, including his family, (_b_) hired labourers, (_c_)
slaves. It is well to begin by remarking that frequency of reference to
one of these does not necessarily imply the same proportion in actual
employment. Slavery being assumed as a fact in all departments of life
(as it is by all writers of the period), and the slave being an economic
or domestic appliance rather than a person, there was no need to call
special attention to his presence. Hence it is natural that the rustic
slave should, as such, be seldom referred to in the plays. He is in fact
mentioned several times, rather more often than the yoke of oxen. Nor was
it necessary to mention the wage-earner, the man employed for the job
under a temporary contract, and in connexion with agriculture he hardly
appears at all. But the working farmers were a class of citizens. They
had votes, and they were on political grounds a class to whose sympathies
the poet was anxious to appeal. Therefore he had no choice but to lay
stress upon their virtues and magnify their importance. Any careful
reader of Aristophanes will I think admit that he does this consistently.
In doing this with political aims he was subject to the temptation of
passing lightly over any considerations that might, whether justly or
unjustly, be turned against his case. This may serve to explain why he
refers almost solely to the small working farmer, who himself labours on
the land. We are not to infer that there were no large estates worked
by deputy, though probably there were not many: to lay stress on the
interested views of large landowners was not likely to please the jealous
Demos. Nor are we to infer that the small farmer used no slaves: that he
laboured himself is no proof, for no man could get more out of a slave’s
labour than the working owner, on whom the burden of making good his
slave’s neglect must fall. I turn now to the passages from which the
various details may be gleaned.
In the _Acharnians_ the working farmer Dicaeopolis is delighted at having
made a separate peace on his own account. He holds it a fine thing[168]
that he should now be able to perform religious rites and celebrate the
festival of the rustic Dionysia with his slaves. He is back at home[169]
in his own rural deme, and he calls his slave Xanthias to carry the
phallus in the procession. In the _Clouds_[170] old Strepsiades says that
he lives in the heart of the country, and his preference for the easy
and rather squalid life on a farm is plainly expressed. And the play
opens with his complaint that in war-time a man has not a free hand to
punish his slaves. It is however not clear that he is supposed to be at
the time living on the farm. In the _Wasps_ the chorus of old dicasts
are indignant[171] that their old comrade Philocleon should be dragged
off by his own slaves at the order of his son. The old man himself,
struggling and protesting, reminds the leading slave of the time when
he caught the rogue stealing grapes (obviously in his vineyard) and
thrashed him soundly. In the _Peace_ a rustic scene[172] is described.
The weather being unfavourable for work on the land, but excellent
for the seed just sown, it is proposed to make merry indoors. Country
fare is made ready, and the female slave Syra is told to call in the
man slave Manes from the farm. A little below Trygaeus is mocking the
workers in war-trades. To the trumpet-maker he says, fit up your trumpet
differently[173] and you can turn it into a weighing-machine: ‘it will
then do for serving out rations of figs to your slaves on the farm.’ In
the _Lysistrata_ the chorus, being aware that an interval of distress
will follow the conclusion of peace, offers[174] to tide over the crisis
by helping the fathers of large families and owners of hungry slaves
by doles of food. ‘Let them bring their bags and wallets for wheat: my
Manes shall fill them.’ After these passages the announcement of the
working of the communistic scheme[175] in the _Ecclesiazusae_ carries us
into a very different atmosphere. ‘But who is to till the soil under the
new order?’ asks Blepyrus. ‘Our slaves,’ replies Praxagora, his typical
better-half. We see that this amounts to basing society on a serf-system,
for the slaves will be common property like the rest. In the _Plutus_
old Chremylus is a farmer, apparently a working[176] farmer, but he has
a slave, indeed more than one. Age has probably led him to do most of
his work by deputy. When Poverty, in the course of her economic lecture,
explains to him[177] that wealth for all means slaves for none and that
he will have to plough and dig for his own proper sustenance, he is
indignant. The weak points of the argument do not concern us here. The
solution offered in the play, the cure of the Wealth-god’s blindness,
enabling him to enrich only the deserving, is a mere piece of sportive
nonsense, meant to amuse an audience, not to hold out a serious hope of
better things.
Enough has been said to shew that the slave had a place in farm life
as depicted by Aristophanes. It will be observed that in the earlier
plays the references are all of a casual kind: that is to say, that
slave-labour calls for no particular attention or remark. The
consideration of slave-labour as such, in fact as an economic phenomenon,
only appears later. This is, I repeat, significant of the change that
had come upon Athens and Attica in consequence of exhaustion. In respect
of hired labour it is obvious that pressure of poverty, as stated[178]
in the _Plutus_, directly influences the supply. If the possession
of a competency will deter men from professional industry in trades,
even more will it deter them from the drudgery of rough labour. The
hired men (μισθωτοί) were commonly employed in all departments, for
instance in the building trades, to which there is a reference[179] in
the _Birds_. But we may fairly assume that during the great war the
number of such ‘hands’ available for civilian services was much reduced.
In agriculture there would be little or no demand for them. And any
able-bodied citizen could earn good pay from the state. Moreover rough
labour was not much to the taste of the average Athenian,—above all,
digging[180]. ‘I cannot dig’ was proverbial. On the other hand there were
farm-duties in the performance of which sufficient care and intelligence
could only be exacted through the medium of wage-paying. Such was that
of olive-pickers, to whom and their wage we have a reference[181] in
the _Wasps_. They are probably free persons, but it is possible that
wage-earning slaves, paying rent to their owners, might be thus employed.
That in some occupations free and slave-labour were both employed
indifferently, is certain. The carriage of burdens[182] is a case in
point. But employment in odd jobs would be far more frequent in the city,
including Peiraeus, than in country places. I do not think it rash to
conclude that hired free labourers were few on the farms of Attica in the
time of Aristophanes.
Turning to citizen agriculturists, it must be mentioned that views
differ as to the proportion of large estates held and worked by wealthy
owners in this period. Such estates would almost certainly employ
slave-labour. So far as the evidence of Aristophanes goes, I should
infer that they were few. No doubt he had reasons for not making much of
such cases; still I believe that the comfortable working farmer, homely
and independent, the poet’s favourite character, was in fact the normal
type. They were not paupers,—far from it: but their capital consisted in
land, buildings, dead and live farm-stock, and the unexhausted value of
previous cultivation. These items could not suddenly be converted into
money without ruinous loss: most of them could not be carried away in the
flight to Athens. Hence the dislike felt by such men to an adventurous
policy, in which their interests were sacrificed. The passages in
which agriculture is connected[183] with large property occur in a play
produced 392 BC, at which time great changes had happened. It is highly
probable that, among these changes, much Attic land had passed from the
hands of ruined yeomen into those of rich men possessed of ready money
and able to buy in a glutted market. In a later period we shall find
γεωργεῖν used in the sense of acting the country landowner. To illustrate
the life and ways of the peasant farmers of this period Aristophanes
supplies endless references descriptive and allusive. The chief of these
have been cited above. A few more may be added here. In the _Clouds_
Strepsiades, urging his son to a rustic life, hopes to see him dressed in
a leathern jerkin, like his father before him, driving in the goats[184]
from the waste (φελλέως, the rocky hill-pasture). Here is a good instance
of husbandry in the Attic highlands, in short a case of crofters. What
a refugee might hope to save in his flight and take back to his farm on
the return of peace—it amounts to a few implements[185]—is set out in the
_Peace_. Loss of oxen, a yoke of two, driven off by Boeotian raiders, is
pitifully bewailed[186] by a farmer in the _Acharnians_. But in general
the farmers of the earlier plays are represented as tough elderly men.
They are the ‘elder generation,’ and the poet genuinely admires them. For
the younger generation he has a profound contempt. Evidently he thought
that the soundest breed of Athenian citizens was dying out; and I am not
sure that he was wrong.
I conclude that the evidence of Aristophanes on the whole points to an
agriculture mainly carried on by working farmers with the help of slaves.
This system was subjected to a very severe strain by the war-conditions
prevailing for many years, and I do not think that it was possible to
revive it on the same footing as before, even when Attica was no longer
exposed to frequent raids. It was not merely the loss of fixed capital
that told on the farmer class. Importation of corn was so developed
and organized to meet the necessities of the crowded city, that it
completely dominated the market, and in the production of cereals the
home agriculture could now no longer compete with foreign harvests.
There remained the culture of the olive and vine: but it needed years
to restore plantations of these and other fruit-trees, and to wait for
revival needed a capital possessed by few. The loss of imperial revenues
impoverished Athens, and the struggle with financial difficulties runs
through all her later history. It did not take the poorer citizens long
to see that how to get daily bread was the coming problem. State-pay was
no longer plentiful, and one aim of jealous franchise-regulations was
to keep down the number of claimants. Had Aristophanes any inkling of
the evil days to come? At all events he was aware that poverty works in
two[187] ways: if it leads one man to practise a trade for his living, it
tempts another to evildoing, perhaps to crime.
XI. THUCYDIDES.
=Thucydides= is a writer from whom it is extremely difficult to extract
any evidence on the subject of agricultural labour. The preeminent
importance of the problem of food-supply in the Greece of his day may be
amply illustrated from his work; but mainly in casual utterances, the
full significance of which is only to be gathered by thorough examination
such as has been made[188] by Dr Grundy. The economic revolution in
Attica that followed the reforms of Solon, the extended culture of the
vine and olive, the reduced growth of cereal crops, the development of
manufactures and sea-borne trade, the growing dependence on imported
corn, and the influence of these changes on the public policy of Athens,
are now seen more clearly as a whole than ever before. But to the great
historian these things were part of the background of his picture.
They are parts of a movement taken for granted rather than understood.
And the same is true of the existence and application of slave-labour.
In the time of Thucydides slavery was an economic and social fact,
unchallenged. It may be that it affected unfavourably the position of the
free handworker in the long run, and gave opportunities to slaveowning
capitalists. But this effect came about slowly, and freeman and slave
could and did labour[189] side by side, for instance in the great public
works promoted by Pericles. How far slave-labour was really cheaper
than free is a question beyond my subject. But it is important to note
the attitude of the poor citizen towards the question of what we call
a living wage. Once the great outlay on public works began to fall
off, and industries on a larger scale to compete with the individual
craftsman, how was the poor citizen to live? Directly or indirectly, the
profits of empire supplied the answer. Now it was obvious that the fewer
the beneficiaries the larger would be the average dividend of each. So
the policy favoured by the poorer classes was a jealous restriction of
the franchise. It was not the slave as labour-competitor against whom
protection was desired, but the resident freeman of doubtful origin as a
potential profit-sharer.
During nearly the whole of the period covered by the history of
Thucydides the public policy of Athens was controlled by urban
influences. Even before the rustic citizens were cooped up in the city,
it was no doubt city residents that formed the normal majority in the
Assembly, and to whom most of the paid offices and functions fell.
Even allowing for the recent growth of ‘seafaring rabble’ in Peiraeus,
these Athenians were not at all a mere necessitous mob. But it must
be remembered that the commercial and industrial capitalists were
interested in foreign trade. As Mr Cornford[190] points out, even metics
of this class must have had considerable influence owing to wealth and
connexions. Thus the urban rich as well as the urban poor were tempted
to favour a policy of adventure, contrary to the wishes and interests of
the Attic farmers. Now these latter were the truest representatives of
the old Attic stock. Once they were crowded into the city and many of
them diverted to state service, any sobering influence that they might
at first exercise would become less and less marked, and they would tend
to be lost in the mass. Therefore we hear only of the rustic life[191]
from which they unwillingly tore themselves in 431 BC: we do not get
any detailed picture of it, for the historian’s attention was otherwise
occupied. In the passage[192] accounting for the unpopularity of Pericles
in 430 BC we read that the Demos was irritated because ‘having less (than
the rich) to start with, it had been deprived of that little,’ while
the upper class (δυνατοὶ) had lost their fine establishments. Here the
context seems to imply that the δῆμος referred to is especially the small
farmers, still dwelling on their losses and not yet otherwise employed.
One passage is so important that it must be discussed by itself. Pericles
is made to encourage[193] the Athenians in resistance to the Spartan
demands by pointing out the superiority of their resources compared with
those of the enemy. ‘The Peloponnesians’ he says ‘are working farmers
(αὐτουργοί). They have no store of wealth (χρήματα) either private or
public. Nor have they experience of protracted warfare with operations
beyond the sea: for their own campaigns against each other are short,
owing to poverty.’ After explaining how they must be hampered by lack
of means, he resumes thus ‘And working farmers are more ready to do
service in person than by payment. They trust that they may have the
luck to survive the perils of war; but they have no assurance that their
means will not be exhausted before it ends: for it may drag out to an
unexpected length—and this is likely to happen.’ Two questions at once
suggest themselves. Is this a fair sketch of agricultural conditions in
Peloponnese? Does it imply that Attic farmers were not αὐτουργοί? To take
the latter first, it is held by Professor Beloch[194] that the passage
characterizes the Peloponnese as a land of free labour, in contrast with
slave-holding Athens. To this view I cannot assent. I am convinced that
the Attic farmer who worked with his own hands did often, if not always,
employ slave-labour also. He would not have a large gang of slaves, like
the large-scale cultivator: he could not afford to keep an overseer.
But it might pay him to keep one or two slaves, not more than he could
oversee himself. If the contrast be clearly limited, so as to compare
the wealth of Athens, now largely industrial and commercial, with the
wealth of a purely agricultural population, scattered over a wide area,
and having little ready money, it is reasonable and true. But this does
not raise the question of the Attic farmer at all. A little below[195]
Pericles is made to urge that class to submit quietly to invasion and
serious loss. They are not the people on whose resources he relies to
wear out the enemy. That enemy finds it hard to combine for common
action or to raise money by war-taxes. Athens is a compact community,
able to act quickly, and has at disposal the forces and tribute of her
subjects, secured by naval supremacy. To the other question, that of
Peloponnesian agriculture, I see no simple answer. All the southern
parts, the region of Spartan helotry, can hardly be called a land of
free labour in any rational sense. Nor does it appear that Argolis, in
spite of the various revolutions in local politics, could rightly be
described thus. Elis and Achaia were hardly of sufficient importance
to justify such a general description, even if it were certain that it
would apply to them locally. Arcadia, mostly mountainous and backward,
is the district to which the description would be most applicable. But
that there were slaves in Arcadia is not only probable but attested by
evidence, later in date but referring to an established[196] state of
things. At festivals, we are told, slaves and masters shared the same
table. This does not exclude rustic slaves: it rather seems to suggest
them. The working farmer entertaining his slaves on a rural holiday is
even a conventional tradition of ancient country life. Arcadia, a land of
peasant farmers, where a living had to be won by hard work, a land whence
already in the fifth century (and still more in the fourth) came numbers
of mercenary soldiers, a land whence Sparta raised no small part of her
‘Peloponnesian’ armies, is what Pericles has chiefly in mind. And that
Arcadians were normally αὐτουργοὶ did not imply that they had no slaves.
So far as Attica is concerned, Thucydides himself incidentally attests
the presence of rustic slaves. He would probably have been, surprised to
hear such an obvious fact questioned. In refusing to repeal the ‘Megarian
decree’ the Athenians charged[197] the Megarians with various offences,
one of which was the reception of their runaway slaves. In the winter
415-4 BC Alcibiades, urging the Spartans to occupy Deceleia, is made to
state[198] the advantages of that move thus ‘For of all the farm-stock
in the country the bulk will at once come into your possession, some by
capture, and the rest of its own accord (αὐτόματα).’ I take the last
words to refer especially to slaves,—rustic slaves. In recording the
success of the plan, the historian tells[199] us that more than 20000
slaves, a large part of whom were artisans (χειροτέχναι), deserted to the
enemy. We may guess that many or most of the artisan slaves had escaped
from Athens. Their loss would be felt in the reduction of manufacturing
output, so far as such enterprise was still possible at the time, and
perhaps in the dockyards. But the rest would be rustic slaves, many of
them (to judge by the map) from a district[200] in which there were
probably many small farms. On the other hand, the slaves welcomed by
the Megarians were probably from larger estates in the Thriasian plain.
Turning from Attica, we find references to rustic slaves[201] in Corcyra
(427 BC) and Chios (412 BC), where they were numerous and important
in their effect on operations. And in other passages where the slaves
belonging to the people of this or that place are mentioned we are not
to assume that only urban slaves are meant. For to live in a town, and
go out for the day’s work on the land, was and is a common usage in
Mediterranean countries. An extreme case[202] is where people live on an
island and cross water to cultivate farms elsewhere. It is perhaps hardly
necessary to remark that rich slaveowners, who could afford overseers,
did not need to reside permanently on their estates. Such a man might
have more than one farm, and in more than one district, not necessarily
in Attica at all, as Thucydides himself exploited a mining concession in
Thrace. In any case a well-equipped ‘country place’ was a luxury, and
is characterized as such[203] in words put into the mouth of Pericles,
who as the democratic statesman was concerned to stifle discontent by
insinuating that it was a mere expression of the selfishness of the rich.