Ancient Greek Agriculture

An Introduction

Signe Isager, Jens Erik Skydsgaard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415001649
• eBook ISBN: 9781134818266
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The initial focus of Ancient Greek Agriculture is firmly on the art of agriculture proper, the tools and the technique, the plants cultivated and the animals reared. Thereafter, Isager and Skydsgaard focus on the position of agriculture in the society of gods and men in the Greek city-states . The arguments of Ancient Greek Agriculture are strengthened by the book's close adherence to contemporary Greek sources, literary as well as archaeological, avoiding the use of later as well as Roman material.

Part I

THE ART OF AGRICULTURE

INTRODUCTION

‘On n’insistera pas ici sur les aspects proprement agricoles (cultures et techniques) de la vie rurale: cela est banal et exposé partout.’ Thus Edouard Will in his outstanding history of Greece, Le Monde grec et L’Orient (1972). The authors of the present volume have, however, encountered some difficulty in finding the numerous treatises or textbooks on ancient Greek agriculture that Will seems to presuppose. Considering that, today, interest is generally concentrated on agriculture as the most important occupation in a pre-industrial society, we might have expected an increased interest in this occupation, but most authors (such as, for instance, Will) are satisfied with devoting a few, albeit brilliant, pages to the subject. However, agriculture is a complex phenomenon, in history as well as the present day. It requires an intimate knowledge of the natural possibilities and limitations set by climate and soil, and it presupposes the command of a technology that is often very complicated. If, as an industry, agriculture aims at something more than sustaining life within the framework of a family, its production must be viewed in its relation to the needs of the entire community and the economic system. Agriculture is a basic industry, but it does not exist independently, removed from the general norms of the society. It may be argued that from the time when man first began to cultivate the land, agriculture was one of the leading factors in the social structure, primarily because of the status attributed to the land in its various relations to those who worked it. Who owns the land, how is ownership transferred from one person to another, what is the relation between the person who owns the land and the person who works it? A whole series of questions of this nature may be asked, but needless to say not all of them can be answered. Finally, there is the question of cultivation itself: what was cultivated, and how? Here, historians will often find themselves in a difficult situation – cultivated plants may have changed in their essential features over the many centuries separating the present time from ancient Greece. Even in primitive agriculture selection takes place in the reproduction of plants, and it may be exceedingly difficult to envisage the ancient types of grain, let alone undertake quantitative calculations of the yield. Historians may often feel hampered because their botanical insight is limited, and their knowledge of soil science, manuring and many other phenomena, self-evident to the farmer, will frequently be embryonic, to say the least. The work done by the historian is usually tied to ancient sources, and the sources concerning Greek agriculture are extremely scarce, which is paradoxical considering the multitude of sources referring to the importance of agriculture. Greek has no fixed terminology for notions like ‘terrace’, ‘nursery bed’, and so on. Should we conclude, then, that these phenomena did not exist? In his classic book, The Ancient Economy (1973a), Moses I. Finley has stressed that the absence of a set of terms for economic concepts is due to the lack of economic thinking. Were we to transfer this principle to agriculture, we might be tempted to doubt that it was the main industry of the Greeks. Attempts have been made to fill the gaps in our knowledge in various ways. With H. Michell, The Economics of Ancient Greece (1957), one may draw on the Roman sources, first and foremost geographers and agronomists. Here, however, we must take into account that, in essential points, geographical conditions in Italy differ from those of Greece, and that there is a significant chronological difference between Archaic and Classical Greece and Late Republican Italy. It has been argued that technological development in antiquity was extremely slow, if indeed it existed at all. But it was precisely in the Late Republican period of Italy, with its many medium-sized villae rusticae under the same owner, that production, in particular of wine and olive-oil intended for the markets, increased. Some of the technical innovations were directly derived from Hellenistic technique, such as the screw press, a prerequisite for which was the Archimedean screw. Even a casual visit to Greece and Italy will reveal to those who are interested that natural conditions for the integration of estates are far more readily at hand in Italy, and if we take a look at economic history, it is immediately apparent that the Roman conquests created an economic upper class that had the will and the means to invest in the traditional industry. Nothing comparable was to be found in Archaic and Classical Greece where the narrow confines of the city-state set a natural limit with regard to the integration of estates and the accumulation of wealth in land. In our opinion, a closer link between the Greek and the Roman sources is a hindrance, rather than a help, towards a more precisely defined understanding of the specific character of Greek agriculture.¹

A different approach would be to study contemporary Greek agriculture, and to try and make deductions back to antiquity. We find ourselves in the fortunate situation that geographers as well as social anthropologists have taken an interest in the comparatively backward Greek countryside. This is due particularly to political conditions in modern Greece. After the Second World War and the Greek Civil War substantial amounts of capital, primarily American, were invested in order to put Greece back on her feet; it had been realized that without a thorough change in the stagnant life in the villages, the demographic distribution of the Greek population would become yet more uneven. A number of commissions under OEEC came up with recommendations supposed to guide governments in their agricultural politics. Thus, in 1951 appeared Pasture and Fodder Development in Mediterranean Countries; in general, it deals with the ever-present question concerning the relationship between agriculture and cattle-breeding, emphasizing the need to supply manure to the soil as a prerequisite for an increased agricultural productivity. Subsequent years saw a series of specific studies on Greek villages: Vasilika, A Village in Modern Greece by Ernestine Friedl (1962), Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village by Juliet du Boulay (1974) and The Greek Peasant by Scott G. McNall (1974), with analyses of villages in Boeotia, Euboea and northern Attica. Although the interest of the scholars is focused mainly on social life in a wider sense, much information concerning agriculture is to be found. In 1975 Ernestine Friedl convened a conference in New York with a view to assembling the results of field work in Greece; in 1976 the report was published, entitled Regional Variation in Modem Greece and Cyprus: Towards a Perspective on the Ethnography of Greece, edited by M. Dimen and Friedl. Here we find a series of interesting separate analyses which throw light on agricultural practice and farmers’ mentality in parts of Greece that are only to a small degree under the influence of the three phenomena that rapidly change the nature of agriculture: the use of fertilizers, artificial irrigation and mechanization. It is also noteworthy that here we find an attempt at a long-range analysis of agriculture. The same trends will be found in the so-called ‘New Archaeology’. Here, Michael H. Jameson’s project in southern Argolis, which is now nearing its final publication, and the Cambridge/Bradford Boeotian Expedition are of the greatest interest and go to show that a combined effort from scholars representing various fields of learning is of vital importance. The pioneers in Greece were the participants in the Minnesota Messenia Expedition, the results of which were published in 1972 by W.A. McDonald and G.R. Rapp with the subtitle Reconstructing a Bronze Age Regional Environment. But the concentration on prehistoric periods may well make the student of antiquity shed a bitter tear. The expedition analysed remains from the Bronze Age, but some may feel that relatively little attention was paid to later remains from the Archaic and Classical periods. A search for the Messenian Helot settlements could perhaps have furnished us with a corresponding result and would have given us an entirely different basis for our understanding of circumstances concerning the production that constituted the basis of Spartan society. Now we have to be content with the impetus that these studies have given to Bronze Age research. But other surveys are on their way. Classical archaeologists have, in fact, overcome the hesitation towards the study of material culture that Sally C. Humphreys, rather caustically, has described in her article ‘Archaeology and the social and economic history of Classical Greece’ (1967). The ecological aspect in the interpretation of the past has been emphasized also by Renfrew and Wagstaff in An Island Polity: The Archaeology of Exploitation in Melos (1982) and by J.L. Davis, J.F. Cherry and E. Mantzourani in ‘An archaeological survey of the Greek island of Keos’ (1985). Often, however, it seems that the presentation of archaeological material has receded into the background in favour of interpretation. This lessens the reader’s ability to check as he reads on; perhaps, indeed, it throws a veil over the fact that the empirical material is limited, and therefore also of limited value as evidence.² It remains to consider another interesting contribution from historical geography: The Development of Rural Settlement, A Study of the Helos Plain in Southern Greece by J.M. Wagstaff (1982). By a combination of archaeological and geographical methods we find a history of settlements in a well-defined area on the Peloponnese from prehistoric times until today, with a number of precise observations that require reflection also for a student of ancient history.

These investigations, and others, however, leave us with the fundamental question: to what degree dare we deduce from contemporary conditions to antiquity? Naturally, we are able to make adjustments here and there. The easiest is to disregard crops which we know have arrived in later periods, such as maize, tobacco, citrus fruits and so on. The main work on this subject is still Victor Hehn, Kulturpfanzen und Haustiere in ihrem Ubergang aus Asien nach Griechenland und Italien sowie in das übrige Europa (1870; reprinted in 1963). It is much more difficult to make deductions from the present landscape to what would have presented itself to us in antiquity. Which phenomena are stable, and which are subject to changes? The geographic determinism that allows one to make unmodified deductions from contemporary pre-industrial agriculture to that of the ancient world holds as many pitfalls for the person who accepts it as it does for one who deliberately rejects it. In its history, post-Classical Greece is marked by a singular lack of continuity of population: so much so that a naive inference or over-emphasis of constancy inevitably leads us to regard the natural resources as dominant in history; thus the importance of human activity tends to dwindle to a minimum. On the other hand, it is a well-known fact that you cannot grow sugar beets in the Sahara, and those who wish to disregard the later and better-known agrarian history of Greece would do well to abide by this simple rule with all its consequences. One cannot study agrarian history solely on the basis of the surviving literary sources; one must pay attention to the phenomenon known as geographic constancy. The difficulty, of course, is weighing its significance in the individual situation of interpretation.

An account of ancient Greek agriculture requires, therefore, that you steer between Scylla and Charybdis. The interpretation of the sources is, of course, fundamental. The literary sources are readily reviewed. Hesiod’s Works and Days, traditionally dated to c. 700 BC, is important. It consists of a series of very personal reflections on a peasant’s life, addressed to Perses, a brother of the poet. The so-called ‘agrarian calendar’ (11. 382 ff.) is a central part of the poem. Here we find an account of the specific tasks and the time of year when they should most advantageously be performed. The list is selective; thus, olive-growing is omitted. Nor is there a proper description of the physical frames surrounding agriculture, the farm, the village or the fields. Cattle-breeding is also left out; the most important livestock are oxen and mules as draught-animals. Hesiod’s account may be supplemented by many glimpses of country life as found in the Homeric poems, especially those occurring in the similes. Their purpose is to illustrate a given situation in the narrative of the poems which often throw a very precise light on the individual activities described, but the interpretation of the more general position of agriculture in society, as presented in the poems, is more difficult. It is inherent in the genre to which the poems belong. The setting should be heroic, but at the same time intelligible to the audience. All in all, however, we may say that with these poets, who inaugurate what we call the historical period, we may form a reasonably good picture of agriculture as it was then, or at least aspects of it. After this, there is a long interlude. It is only with Xenophon’s Oeconomicus that a coherent description of life and work in the country emerges through Socrates’ discussion with Ischomachos. The dramatic dating of this part of the dialogue must belong to the period immediately preceding the Peloponnesian War, provided it makes sense to talk about a dramatic dating.³ In the dialogue Socrates plays the part of the pupil, and Ischomachos emphasizes why agriculture is a natural phenomenon. Everyone understands that art immediately; but this cannot fool us. Knowing how to sow corn with the hand is one thing; having that special rhythm in your body which enables you to sow evenly over the entire plot of land tilled is a different matter. Xenophon doesn’t master this side of the techne of agriculture from personal experience. He is the gentleman farmer who knows agriculture primarily as a spectator.

The third description of agricu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates and Figures
• Preface
• Part I The art of agriculture
• Part II State and agriculture
• Part III Gods and agriculture
• Epilogue
• Appendix: The sacred olives
• Bibliography
• Index of passages cited
• General index