The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization - Softcover

Hanson, Victor Davis Davis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520209354 ISBN 13: 9780520209350

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

For generations, scholars have focused on the rise of the Greek city-state and its brilliant cosmopolitan culture as the ultimate source of the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and politics. This passionate book leads us outside the city walls to the countryside, where the vast majority of the Greek citizenry lived, to find the true source of the cultural wealth of Greek civilization. Victor Hanson shows that the real "Greek revolution" was not merely the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm.

The farmers, vinegrowers, and herdsmen of ancient Greece are "the other Greeks," who formed the backbone of Hellenic civilization. It was these tough-minded, practical, and fiercely independent agrarians, Hanson contends, who gave Greek culture its distinctive emphasis on private property, constitutional government, contractual agreements, infantry warfare, and individual rights. Hanson's reconstruction of ancient Greek farm life, informed by hands-on knowledge of the subject (he is a fifth-generation California vine- and fruit-grower) is fresh, comprehensive, and absorbing. His detailed chronicle of the rise and tragic fall of the Greek city-state also helps us to grasp the implications of what may be the single most significant trend in American life today―the imminent extinction of the family farm.

About this title

About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson is Professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno, and author of Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (Revised edition, California 1998),The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (1986), and Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (1996).

From the Back Cover

For generations, scholars have focused on the Greek city-state and its brilliant cosmopolitan culture as the ultimate source of the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and politics. This passionate book leads us outside the city walls to the countryside, where the majority of the Greek citizenry lived, to find the true source of the cultural wealth of Greek civilization. Victor Hanson shows that the "Greek revolution" was not the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm.

The farmers, vinegrowers, and herdsmen of ancient Greece are "the other Greeks", who formed the backbone of Hellenic civilization. It was these fiercely independent agrarians, Hanson contends, who gave Greek culture its emphasis on private property, constitutional government, and individual rights. Hanson's reconstruction of ancient Greek farm life, informed by hands-on knowledge of the subject (he is a fifth-generation California vine- and fruit-grower) is fresh, comprehensive, and absorbing.

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"Exhaustively documented and developed, beautifully reasoned, clearly and--for the most part--calmly stated."

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The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization

By Victor Davis Hanson

University of California Press

Copyright 1999 Victor Davis Hanson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520209354
Chapter 1
The Liberation of Agriculture

But pattern for planting, and seedling's earliest form
were nature herself: she first created things;
for berries and acorns falling from trees
in time produced a swarm of sprouts beneath them.
At whim thereafter, men set shoots in branches
and buried fresh cuttings in earth about their fields.
They tried to grow first one thing, then another
on their loved lands, and saw wild plants turn tame
in the soil with coddling and gentle, coaxing care.
And with each day they made the woods shrink farther
up-mountain, yielding room for farms below,
for pastures, ponds and streams, grain-land, lush vineyards,
their holdings on hill and plain, for olive-groves
to run their blue-gray bands like boundary lines
flowing across the hummocks, dales, and fields,
as now you see lands everywhere picked out
with beauty, lined and adorned with apple trees;
and fruitful orchards wall them about.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things , 5.136178
(Copley translation)

Greece is not a flat territory of wide-open expanses, with regular precipitation, plentiful rivers, and ubiquitous lakes. Yet it is not a poor country either. The soil is rocky but rich, the harnessing of water possible but only through ingenuity and toil. The growing season is long, predictable, and dry, rarely humid or unsettled, accelerating more often than endangering the maturity of fruit and vegetable. Winters are cold, not harsh, and so provide critical dormancy for trees and vines rather than frosts that stunt limbs and kill canes. True, mountains and hills predominate; but slopes are more often gentle than jagged, and can shelter as well as isolate villages. Stones discourage the ploughing of broad expanses, but can be managed by the hoe and spade in more modest gardens, orchards, and vineyards. Unlike flat land, elevation encourages diverse soils and micro environments, rather than ensuring crop specialization, monotony, and vulnerability. Pasture land can be scarce for horses and cattle, but more than adequate for less impressive sheep and goats.

In agricultural terms, then, Greece offers opportunity but does not guarantee bounty. In any given year trees, vines, and grains neither uniformly fail nor inevitably flourish. Innovation and experimentation, rather than rote and timidity, overcome climate and terrain, with predictable consequences for national character and group identity. The successful harvest leads not to security, riches, and leisure, but simply the guarantee of yet one more year to come. So Greece is a poor candidate for the hydraulic dynasty, replete with vast herds, cavalry, chariotry, crop surpluses, and a complacent and ordered population. But for an insolent, self-reliant man of nerve and muscle, who welcomes the solitary challenge of the mountain terrace, the lone farmstead, the chaos of olive, grape, grain, fig, goat, and pig, the choice to fight beside his family on ancestral ground, it is an altogether hospitable place.

Before agrarianism, the Greek countryside was not extensively worked and could not facilitate population growth. But radical changes in labor, farming technique, and land tenure did more than feed more people. These brilliant adaptations to the unique terrain and geography of Greece also created a new citizen, with a completely different set of values and characteristics. When, where, how, and why he emerged from obscurity are the subjects of the next two chapters.

I
Before the Polis

Nearly all modern accounts of the end of the Greek Dark Ages concern burials, pottery, the myth and speculation of later Greek literature, or the identification of past migrations through the spread of Greek dialects. This emphasis is understandable. It reflects both the available evidence and the interests of art historians and archaeologists in the beginnings of the urban culture of the Greek polis .

But are not our purposes different here? The countryside, not the polis proper; farmers, not urban elites; changes in agricultural practice, not pottery designs, metals, graves, urban crafts, nor even overseas trade, are the focus. I believe the latter phenomena were only "manifestations." They were the symptoms or results of far more fundamental changes in the agricultural structure of Greek society. The appearance of these early Greek polis institutions was made possible only by the birth of agrarianism. It alone created the surplus and capital to allow a significant minority of the population to shift its attention from farming and to pursue commerce, trade, craftsmanship, and intellectual development. Only a settled countryside of numerous small farmers could provide the prerequisite mass for constitutional government and egalitarian solidarity.

Demographic, technological, economic, social, and cultural circumstances that prompt dramatic innovations in land use and food production, and hence the stuff of major historical changes in any preindustrial society in general, have been long studied. No monolithic "model" exists for any given historical period. Common sense, however, tells us that a variety of factors can change the way in which people produce food.

In modern communities, the development of new machinery and chemicals dramatically increases agricultural production at lower cost, often leading to a consolidation of land holdings by wealthy partnerships and corporations, which transmit their very different ideas about culture to the society at large. These complex organizations often alone possess the necessary capital to apply innovations pragmatically on a wide scale, resulting in both higher productivity and greater vulnerability. But even breakthroughs in technology do not necessarily change the size and manner of farming nearly as much as the introduction of new crop species, irrigation, government policies including taxes, subsidies, regulations, and

inheritance laws, new or lost markets, growing population, andnever to be underestimatedshifting social and cultural attitudes toward manual work, agricultural life, and rural residence.

In the case of Greece in the eighth century, at the end of the so-called Dark Ages, there seems to have been a variety of just such conditions operating in the countryside. None of them was critical in itself, but when taken as a whole, these incremental changes did cause radical transformations in Greek society in general, and left Greece a rural society like none other in the eastern Mediterranean.

The original circumstance of social alteration was the sudden cataclysmic destruction of complex Mycenaean society in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries and the subsequent breakdown of the political hierarchy. We are not sure whether the end of this world was due to foreign invaders, dissatisfied subjects, natural phenomena, or general systems collapse; but there is no doubt that in the aftermath came a dramatic depopulation of the Greek peninsula. With it came an erosion of government authority, at least in the centralized, highly regimented form of the past. Judging from archaeological remains and descriptions in literature, Dark-Age Greece (i.e., 1100800 B.C .) was vastly under populated. Society apparently was organized loosely through groups of household units (oikoi ). Gradually in the general detritus re-tribalization occurred. Social and political authority was predicated on the possession of large herds, landed estates, and the ability to organize gangs of raiders and warring parties.1

There was also a tradition among the later Greeks that at various places these early clans monopolized power formally, claiming to be descendants of mythical kings, even though actual monarchy, in any regimented, centralized sense, was probably rare after the Mycenaean collapse. Thus, near the end of the Dark Ages we hear of the Neleidai at Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor, the Bacchiads of Corinth at the isthmus of Greece. Similar aristocratic cabals sprung up in Ionia, the Aegean islands, and some mainland Greek city-states. Apparently, these powerful regimes of privilege slowly wrested authority from balkanized and petty Dark-Age fiefdoms until most of the Greek countryside was controlled by an elite land-owning nobility. I say "controlled," but it is a relative term; in no instance was Greek economic life now to be anywhere as structured as under the Mycenaean palaces.2

Despite a surprising autonomy for serfs and slaves on isolated rural estates, these Dark-Age aristocracies still had not changed traditional land use and the centuries-old emphasis on livestock and horse breeding very much. Aristotle, at any rate, claimed knowledge about some of these few early aristocratic governments. He associated them with horse rearing, not intensive agricultural practice (e.g., the Hippobotai [horse breeders] at Chalcis and the Hippotrophoi [horse rearers] at Colophon). He also believed that hereditary aristocracy followed monarchy and was supported by elite cavalry rather than landed infantry. On the Aegean island of Samos, the Gemoroi ("land sharers") were apparently the aristocratic successors to an earlier quasi-monarchy. By the seventh century, the Gemoroi controlled much of the surrounding Samian countryside, operating larger estates, concerned with overseas trade, and raising horses.3

The end of earlier Mycenaean culture (12001100 B.C .) is usually portrayed negatively by social, economic, and cultural historians. It is true that the impoverished period of the Dark Ages that followed left a far less impressive cultural record in Greece.* But the sudden destruction of the mainland Mycenaean fortresses, at least in agrarian terms , was an important first advance for Greece, not a retrogression. Specialization and the subsequent frailty of the early Greek palatial kingdoms are textbook cases in the eventual collapse of complex societies whose imperial directive and bureaucracy strangle agriculture, limiting its range of response and adaptability, drawing off its surplus for elite activities, which bring only marginal returns for the society as a whole.

The Mycenaean bureaucracies apparently practiced collectivized agriculture under central control, the age-old anathema to productive agriculture. Such a system could never have led to the free farming of the polis era. Much of the land in Mycenaean times had been allotted to local political and religious officials. They supervised vast herds of sheep, crop selection, and agricultural technique, closely monitoring returns, reimbursing seed, and bringing produce back up to the palace stores. True, there was a certain efficiency to such regimentation, but it was a redistributive system of both public and private landholding that ensured little agri-

"One of isolation, parochialism, and perhaps of unrest" (Coldstream 52); "a period of abundant land and very few people" (Donlan 1989: 134).

cultural innovation. Its rigorous complexity could not have allowed much for personal initiative, and thus maximum utilization of both human and natural resources. No city-state, no community of peers could have emerged out of that environment.4

The system was perhaps similar to the collectivized farm in modern authoritarian communist societies. Although some private land must have been outside of palace control, we can be sure the majority of crops was always in the hands of Mycenaean overlords. Wealth was not widely distributed. Food production was tightly controlled. Social life was highly regimented. Those conditions of complexity made the entire system both resistant to needed reform and extremely vulnerable to outside challenge.

From our scanty sourcesarchaeological remains and the Linear B recordsMycenaean viticulture and arboriculture were not advanced, in the sense that the range and number of domesticated species of fruit trees and olives were very limited. The total acreage devoted to successful vineyards and orchards of productive varieties was relatively small. Hence the harvests of these species must have been disappointing, given the equally low intensity of labor and productivity in only a moderately populated landscape.5

The collapse of these centralized palace economies in the twelfth century must in some sense have been inevitable. Given the stratification, the bureaucratization, and thus the vulnerability of Mycenaean agriculture, the sudden decapitation of the agricultural managerial hierarchy, whether by natural or man-made agency, left many Mycenaean farmers directionless. Outside forces may have caused the end of the Mycenaeans, but the innate complexity and fragility of a palatial society suddenly without directors certainly ensured a disorganized and feeble recovery.*

On a more mundane level, in the ensuing Greek chaos, rural people would simply have been left without stored food of their own. The palace had traditionally usurped most individual agricultural decision making, taking most food surpluses up to the citadel for storage. Even for those farmers outside the direct control of the palatial economy, the citadel of-

Tainter (1011; 200204) lists the usual cargo of these centralized regimes such as religious, governmental, and military bureaucracies which inevitably leads to stasis and a failure to adapt to changing stimuli.

ten served as a central collection depot of sorts, a "food bank," which received, stored, exchanged, and lent surplus crops and seeds, both locally and overseas. The net result of bureaucratization was as always the creation of vulnerable dependence and a restriction of agricultural expertise. Without the bureaucrats and the central directive, most farm workers probably floundered and starved until new expertise was acquired.*

Paradoxically, for all the ensuing human misery, the disruption and devastation of this "banking system" at the end of the twelfth century could in time facilitate real agricultural change. If Greek farmland was eventually allowed to fall into as many private hands as possible, and if farmers themselves could retain their own crop surpluses, people could quickly learn new potentialities for land use, novel methods of local food storage, and the grafting and propagation of an entire range of domesticated species of vines and olives. Dissemination of agricultural knowledge and expertise was practicable ifand only ifa large number of farmers gained title to their own pieces of ground, if they became freed from outside interference from the top. In the case of Greece, the process took nearly four hundred years.

No ingredient, I believe, is so dramatically successful in agriculture as free will, the ability to implement a new idea, to develop a proven routine, to learn once, not twice, from the hard taskmaster of error, to be left alone from government planning to grope for a plan of survival. Self-initiative, once turned loose on the soil, can result in spectacular results for both the farmer and the surrounding community. Never have I encountered a farmer who could believe long (and many have wished to, as I can attest) in big government, centralized control, and benign bureaucracy.

In the context of early Greek history, it is just this liberation from a stifling and unimaginative officialdom, and the subsequent freedom of agriculture that as much as anything ensured the rise of the Greek polis and the beginning of Western civilization. Individualism in early Greek poetry and philosophy was simply the manifestation of an ongoing and radically new private approach to rural life, and farming in particular.

The collapse of the Mycenaean clearinghouse of food storage and exchange left them ignorant and without the skill to grow, process, and store food on their own. See Halstead (1992: 116) for the results of the disintegration of a centralized food banking system in the Aegean.

The decentralized Dark Ages were for all their impoverishment an important first occurrence. They were "dark" only in the sense of not well recorded; in agrarian terms the earlier Mycenaean period had been the true dark age. But once Mycenaean palace authority was done away with, there was a second opportunity for agrarian transformation by the sheer process of neglect and unconcern , should other critical factorsmainly population growthever come into play. The Dark-Age chieftain, in an environment where efficient land use was not necessary, seems to have been indifferent to agriculture. He was more intent on raiding by land and sea, and in acquiring large herds of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs; if anything, he was more a thug than a bureaucrat.*

As in other societies where population density is low, community life embryonic, and the natural environment characterized by mountains adjoining plains, livestock and nomadic herding naturally spread in preference to intensive agriculture. As long as the population remained static and manageable, do not necessarily envision widespread impoverishment in Dark-Age Greece, which, after all, lasted for nearly four hundred years. The material record of the Dark Ages is bleak, but small communities probably for nearly three to four centuries attained a reasonable food supply from farming cereals on flat plains and concentrating on livestock.6

Under the Mycenaeans there must have been rigid protocols concerning the operation of "farms" that removed incentives for discovering new species or for mastering optimum methods of production not officially sanctioned. But in the subsequent Dark Ages it was mostly lack of interest, not bureaucratic conservatism and micro-management, that perpetuated agricultural stagnation. There is no evidence that Dark-Age hierarchy was ever as powerfully organized as Mycenaean kingship. Politi-

Thucydides (1.2.2) reflected the later Greeks' general supposition that the Dark Ages had been a time of pastoralism, not intensive agriculture and agrarian poleis: "There was no settled population. Instead migrations were common, the majority of tribes abandoning their homes under pressure from superior numbers. Since there was no trade or freedom of intercourse by either land or sea, since they cultivated no more land than what the bare necessities called for, and since they had no capital, they did not plant their land in permanent crops (oude gn phuteuontes )for they could not know whether an enemy might invade and take the produce away. And since they believed that they could supply their needs at one place as well as another, they cared little whether they changed residence. Therefore they never established great cities nor achieved any other form of greatness."

cal control was established as an informal office among noble families, who owned title to mostly flat land, and who allowed serfs and the indentured to work out crop-sharing agreements.7

Both Mycenaean and Dark-Age Greeks were relatively ignorant of intensive farming technique for entirely different reasons. Review of the Greek mythic tradition, pollen samples, and field surveys suggests that until the eighth century B.C . in Greece, there were mostly wild olives.* These trees produced erratically a poor quality of fruit with low oil content. Similarly, even species of productive grains were few. Wild vines also predominated.** While in appearance feral plant species may seem not much different from domesticated trees and vines, and while their pollen, pits, and leaves are often hard for the modern archaeologist to distinguish, for the farmer they were quite distinct. Wild varieties of trees and vines usually produce rank growth, smaller harvests, and poorer tasting fruit. Thus before the rise of the Greek polis , less prolific varieties of trees, vines, and cereals probably predominated over domesticated species.8

This absence of crop diversity reflected the timidity of past Mycenaean agronomy and the preference in the subsequent Dark Ages of aristocratic nobles for horses and livestock, as well as their own relative ignorance of sophisticated agriculture. Both the domesticated olive and vine,*** like most fruit trees, were not easily propagated in the wild. They usually demanded skilled human agency (grafting, cultivation, irrigation of young plants, pruning, suckering) to be farmed on any successful scale in orchards and vineyards.9

A few domesticated species of olives and grapes had been known for some time in Mycenaean and Dark-Age Greece. But these superior varieties apparently were not formally cultivated on a wide scale until the polis period. In that later era the more ubiquitous wild cultivars took on less and less agricultural importance, and probably themselves became genetically more similar to domesticated varieties. Quite simply, even the plentiful carbonized remains of olive woods and stones, the excavation of Bronze-Age presses, and the linguistic evidence of Linear B tablets from Minoan and Mycenaean Crete are not proof of widespread cultivation of

Olea europaea subsp. oleaster; Olea europaea subsp. sylvestris ; Greek: kotinos, phulia, agrielaia .

Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris ; Greek: agria .

Domesticated olive: Olea europaea ; Greek: elaia ; domesticated vine: Vitis vinifera ; Greek: ampelos .

domesticated species of olives and vines. More likely they reflect efforts of the palaces in collecting the fruit of wild cultivars.10

One should never underestimate this importance of fruit and vine propagation for the surrounding agrarian economy. Even today the entire industry of modern fruit production rests on the grafting of new and existing tree and vine species and a thorough knowledge of rootstocks. Many productive tree and vine species cannot be reproduced, at least in their most productive state, by seedlings. Those offspring are weak or revert to a wild state. They require grafting of scions onto established (and often feral) rootstocks. They need far more attention than wild varieties to produce superior harvests.*

Although nearly all modern tree and vine growers are knowledgeable about graftingthe art is not currently licensed or regulatedthe wholesale conversion or propagation of an entire orchard or vineyard is usually left to a small body of expert, professional grafters. Nothing is so discouraging, so costly, so embarrassing to the farmeras I can unfortunately also confirmas the failed efforts of an amateur grafter: the year-long spectacle of dead scions on freshly-cut stumps in a denuded orchard or vineyard.

If the host stump survives despite its now-dead scions, in a few weeks the wild rootstock sends out rank, bushy shoots and leaves, along with small, nearly inedible fruit. This regeneration only reemphasizes the farmer's abjectand quite visiblefailure at propagation. In an exaggerated sense, the wild species is all root with no fruit, the domesticated all fruit with no root. The Greeks' successful combination of the two on a wide scale marks a veritable revolution in the production of food.

This general view of a renaissance in viticulture and arboriculture rather later in Hellenic history is markedly at odds with our traditional picture that olives, vines, fruit trees, and naked wheats were always a substantial part of the Greek agricultural landscape. Most scholars also suggest that there was relatively little change in either agricultural technique or crop species from the Mycenaean era until Hellenistic times. But keep

In a more practical sense, most small farmers in my own area feel that the successful diversified producer nearly always has about ten percent of his acreage in some type of transitional phase. Normally an orchard or vineyard each year or so is grafted over to a more productive and successful variety, or in order to replace aging and sick stock, or correct past mistakes in species selection.

in mind that domesticated species require greater knowledge and care to ensure successful propagation and continued productionan esoteric art that, like writing, was perhaps known to only a few Mycenaean bureaucrats. Archaeologists and anthropologists confirm the Greek literary tradition that there was a gradual increase in domesticated tree, vine, and cereal species at the end of the Greek Dark Ages. Once propagation was mastered and the expertise gained to cultivate orchards and vineyards on a wide scale, innovative farmers increased the number of domesticated tree and vine species, and began to liberate agriculture. They found specialized varieties for particular locales, thus increasing the potential for viticulture and arboriculture as a whole in Greece.11

New crops like domesticated trees and vines and accompanying agricultural technique did not appear suddenly and without cause. The pressure of population, as we will see, forced an end to the traditional use of land. At the end of the Dark Ages growing numbers of Greek farmers must have changed the fundamental conditions of land tenure. Thus arose the klros , or the idea of a privately held plot attached not to any one person, but rather in perpetuity to a single farm-family or oikos .*

Renters, serfs, indentured servants, or lessees cannot invest in capital crops such as trees or vines in any efficient manner. Nor will they take the considerable risks entailed in viticulture and arboriculture without clear title to the land they farm.** Farmers, especially planters of trees and vines, will soon demand to own their own land if they are to invest labor and capital in order to enrich the surrounding community. Once they own land, and plant permanent crops there, a transformation in both values and ideology ensues. But what were the more precise underlying conditions that first prompted these changes in ancient Greek agriculture and property holding? What allowed entire Dark-Age patterns of land use to erode and the agrarian revolution of the polis to begin?

Pecrka 1968: 192. Cf. Meikle 67: "Each producer produced privately and on his own account, had private property in his product and marketed it. This had not been true of palace-based cultures of the earlier period."

So, too, in the anthropologist's experience: "The conditions under which families obtain land for cultivation is also important in the way they use it. Landless farmers who have no security of rental can only plant annual crops . . . Low productivity of land and resistance to agricultural improvements are linked to the very high rate of tenancy" (Barlett 555).

II
The Peopling of Greece

The breakdown of the Mycenaean agricultural hierarchy and the indifference to farming shown by succeeding clans in the Dark Ages created an environment that might allow for family-owned and independent small farms. However, another catalyst was needed to ensure the spread of revolutionary privately held, intensively worked farms. A critical factor was the slow but steady rise in population in Greece at the end of the Dark Ages. It began in the early eighth century B.C ., when demographic increases at certain brief periods may have approached two to three percent per annum.*

This development was not always a year-by-year steady population increase, but more likely cyclical: a few years of dramatic spurts in fertility, marked by decades of retrenchment, always varying from one Greek-speaking locale to another. Nevertheless, the overall picture in Greece from (say) the ninth century to the end of the eighth is clear enough: a far more densely populated Greece, and more important, a fairly consistent pattern of varying but sustained population increase throughout the life of the later polis . Sometimes this peopling occurred in resettled citadels, on other occasions in new city centers, small villages, and isolated sites.

The archaeological evidence suggests that in a variety of regions throughout Greece the vast open spaces of the Dark Agesand the culture that operated in that landscapewere gradually disappearing. A dramatic rise in recorded settlements and individual burials has occurred in many widely diverse areas of Greece such as Messenia, Melos, Laconia, Attica, and the Argolid. The emergence of various local pottery styles also reflects the spread of independent communities. And steady population increase must lie behind the generalized remarks in Greek literature concerning the formation of capital and the development of rural infrastructure in the early Greek countryside. By at least the late seventh or early sixth century, coinage appeared at various poleis in the Aegean,

The argument for population growth at the end of the Dark Ages is now one only of degree. See Snodgrass 1977: 1019; 1980: 2024; 1983: 16171; Bintliff and Snodgrass 13941; cf. Morris 1987:23, 57; Donlan 1989: 134. On theoretical variations in population expansion, see Grigg 1980: 28295; Snodgrass 1990: 13132.

Ionia, and the general Greek Mediterranean, often with agricultural and plant motifs stamped on the bronze, silver, and gold tokens.12

But the critical question inevitably remains why population in Greece increased at all at this time, even if sporadically and cyclically at first. Did greater economic opportunity afforded by improved agricultural practices lead to bigger families? Or did preexisting trends for greater fertility require agricultural transformation?

In the case of Greece, like many other nonindustrial societies, population growth may have come first: it often initiates, drives, and maintains agricultural intensification. Growing numbers of people at the end of the Dark Ages simply needed to eat, and they found existing methods of food production completely inadequate. This demographic pressure forced radical changes in the way the Greeks farmed and had previously organized themselves in the countryside. After centuries of strict agronomic control, followed by the other extreme of relative agrarian neglect, agriculture in Greece was finally becoming the property of numerous individual and autonomous families.13

But why did the number of people in Greece begin to multiply during the latter Dark Ages, nearly four centuries after the fall of the palace economies? If greater fertility first forced agricultural change, what initially forced greater fertility? Some have recently suggested that Dark Age demography must be studied in relationship to "age-class" systems, or the regulations the elite clans of the Dark Ages used to discourage early marriage and procreation: either youths were regimented into relationships that did not lead to early procreation, or women avoided marriage altogether until far beyond the age of menarche. Supposedly, the delay in childbearing and the subsequent check on the Dark-Age population ensured (even if only unconsciously) greater control over their subjects for the few Greek aristocrats in power. Before having children, men first sought to accumulate a military reputation, wealth, and prestige in non-agricultural spheres. Marriage occurred relatively late. Women delayed childbearing. Thus family size was small. Such an age-class culture, inherently part of a warrior society, unnecessarily prolonged a dramatic rebound from the chaos and collapse of the Mycenaean centers.

At the end of the Dark Ages, the gradual modification and erosion of such an intrinsically regimented (and hence fragile) "system" may have led to social experimentation. Greeks no longer waited for the appropri-

ate and agreed-on moment to marry, to raise and to limit families. Instead they sought power and influence through other mechanisms (the size of their own households, the ability to raise private raiding parties, the chance to travel)all activities outside the traditional purview of local strongmen. Fertility was seen as socially advantageous, not a drawback. Military regimentation gave way to other pursuits like agriculture. Land in Greece usually used for stock or extensive agricultural practices was unable to support growing populations, threatening not only the system of pastoralism, but the military hierarchy that sponsored inefficient land use.14

Population pressure can be handled in a variety of ways. In the absence of an improvement in food supply or the widespread use of contraceptive practices, famine and disease can simply eliminate the population surplus. People then die, usually the very old and young. Yet surprisingly we hear of little fatal hunger on any mass scale in early Greece. Nor was there much wholesale conquest of foreign territory or mass importation of foodstuffs from abroad.

Thucydides and other sources remind us that another option was colonization, the mass migration of landless Greek peoples to virgin territories, usually across the Mediterranean and Aegean. Although these large scale emigrations indicate population problems at home, not all colonization was undertaken by the very poor in search of new farmland, the destitute who chafed at existing land tenure practices. At least some settlers were relatively prosperous traders and merchants, or social opportunists and outcasts who desired a completely new economic and political environment.15 These more upscale individuals could be as desirous of change as the poor, if there was little opportunity for innovation in land use at home.

Much more important, those agrarians who left mainland Greece often did so because of shared notions of the new role of agriculture. Colonists were often not critics, but supporters of agrarianism; not the poor, but members of the lower middle stratem who saw little chance of obtaining a hereditary plot for themselves inside Greece.*

Private ownership, the sanctity of the family estate, the need for increased food production to feed a growing population, all resulted in some family members sailing overseas to replicate the ideal size of the family farm they themselves did not inherit. Colonization often allowed the adherents, but not the immediate beneficiaries, of early Greek agrarian life to create abroad more perfect agricultural city-states ex nihilo (cf. Arist. Pol . 2.1266b13; Koerner 44548).

But had foreign colonization in and of itself immediately addressed the problem of surplus population in Greece, then the economy of the Dark Ages might have continued unchallenged. Any of the early hungry or disaffected could simply have fled his local environs, abandoning hope of feeding his family by making changes in the countryside of his birth, ensuring that no transformation of any note would have occurred in his homeland, guaranteeing that pastoralism and the rule of the localized clan would have continued uninterrupted. Colonization of the eighth and seventh centuries did not alleviate the need for local agricultural change, but rather was a symptom that such transformation was already occurring in Greece proper .

Population pressure can also trigger a different and potentially more volatile sort of colonization. I do not refer to the conquest and annexation of neighboring territory in massas in the case of the Spartan absorption of Messenia (a tactic that was more consistent with, than antithetical to, past Dark Age practice)but rather a more gradual internal colonization of land previously unwanted and underdeveloped. This incorporation of new farmland was an earlier response to demographic pressure, one far more serious to the existing social order, since changes in economic and social practice took place at home and thus were bound to have immediate local repercussions. The seeds of local Greek agrarian transformation surely antedated overseas colonization.

Often in the eighth century many Greeks must have also turned to alternative types of land use in response to the growing numbers of farm laborers who were ill-served by past methods of utilization. As many more Greeks sought to feed their own households, the first option would have been to look for vacant landseither communal or unownedin their immediate vicinity. These plots were usually on somewhat "marginal" lands. Given the nature of the Greek terrain and low density of the Hellenic population, new farmlands were thus to be found almost everywhere.

In the old Dark-Age social and economic sense, that meant less accessibility to manorial centers, and less fertility for native grazing, less suitability for easy ploughing of cereals, but not unsuitability for crops such as vines and trees. "Marginal" land (eschatia ) is ubiquitous in many parts of Greece, an ideal, relatively safe springboard for anyone brave enough to embark on a new sort of agricultural strategy of outright private ownership and intensive working of permanent crops.16 Once private own-

ership by adventurous farmers was the rule, each Greek rural household sought its own parcel, to improve and pass on.* Previously unused and unowned land was thus developed by men on their own, marking the real beginning in the West of individual property holding on any wide scale.

But this expansive process of Greek intensive agriculture did not cease at the mere incorporation of newer farm ground and novel concepts of land tenure. It assumed other equally dynamic forms as well. The other option of internal colonization, besides the cultivation and improvement of unfarmed ground, was simply to "colonize" someone else's land, to apply new strategies of intensive agriculture to previously farmed but underused land. That was, in practical terms, to engage in some sort of lease agreement with a wealthier Greek landowner, who initially had neither the desire nor expertise to farm the ground productively himself, but saw advantages in drawing off surpluses from the successful work of others. Whether Greek farmers (gergoi ) first sought out marginal land, and then in the wake of success turned their attention to prized baronial estates, is unknown, but it seems a likely course of progression. For those Greeks who lacked capital or were unable to find underdeveloped land, and so entered into unfavorable rental agreements or other forms of early repressive tenancy, agricultural success was questionable from the start and was left unresolved for generations.

Slow and sporadic, rather than uniformly gradual, rises in Greek population then created pressures on Dark-Age society and revealed the inefficiency of traditional land use. Because there was not a sophisticated central political organization, a majority of gergoi gradually drifted away from past protocols, becoming relatively "liberated." They could now see that pastoralism was not a solution to the problem of feeding additional mouths. Crops alone, not animals, could feed the greater population. Because the aristocratic landholders may have been uninterested at first in agricultural innovation, the young, disaffected eliteand perhaps later the more ambitious on the lower end of the Dark-Age social scalewere prone to deviate from the traditional social patterns and military castes. One result was encroachment on marginal ground without fear of reprisal. For many aspiring farmers this must have been a preferable alternative to moving in mass across the sea.

The oikos now attached itself in perpetuity to a family plot, the klros ; see Donlan 1989: 13436.

Population increase, however, alone did not end the Dark Ages. The neglect of farming by the old elite and the presence of unused open ground cannot entirely explain the Greek agrarian renaissance of the eighth century and later. There was no guarantee that the population might not regress into past cycles of decline, as local food production failed to match population growth. Thus one or more of the following must also have taken place: (1) a quiet revolution in agricultural technique and rural social organization in general, (2) an incorporation of new technologies and crop species, (3) an intensification of labor, or (4)perhaps most likelyall three factors, which could coalesce to increase food production, and hence provide the prosperity needed to ensure that a new economic class, the independent small farmer, would be a permanent, rather than transitory, fixture on the Greek landscape.

III
The End of the Dark Ages

In characteristically Greek fashion, there was a critical adoption of foreign knowledge in a uniquely ingenious manner. Improved species of olives, grains, and cereals, along with completely novel crops, were borrowed from Asia Minor which had a rich and old tradition of intensive viticulture and arboriculture.17 In the different environment of Greece, these species were farmed in new, more productive ways. Permanent crops and diverse types of cereals can increase production remarkably under intensive cultivationlabor, both free and increasingly slave, at this juncture must have been plentiful for the first time in Greek historyand they could be uniquely integrated to fit available soil and manpower conditions.

As we will see below, olives and vines are fertile even on rocky hillsides, where cultivation with the plough is impossible or difficult. Neither requires the moisture or fertility of bottom land to produce adequate crops; the richer ground, like the more accessible and better terraced parcels, can be reserved for barley and wheat. The triadcereals, vines, olivesintensively farmed can provide an entire diet and produce storable crops for times of scarcity. At the beginning of the eighth century the Greeks discovered how to cultivate the domesticated olive on a wide scale, along with other trees and vines, and mastered the techniques of easy propagation such as grafting. That knowledge allowed for a lasting alternative to pastoralism.

Any farmer who plants trees and vines, unlike the pastoralist or even the grain grower, invests his labor and capital in a particular locale for the duration of his life. In this interdependent relationship, the cultivator's presence and commitment to a stationary residence ensure that the young orchard and vineyard will be cared for and become permanent fixtures on the landscape. People who choose this form of agriculture have confidence that they can and will stay put, that they can and will keep the countryside populated, prosperous, and peaceful. They are not just a different sort of farmer, but a different sort of person as well. The Greeks understood this. No wonder Thucydides associated the pre-polis Greeks' inability to settle in one place with their reluctance to plant trees and vines, all characteristic of unsettled times when there were no "large cities or any other form of greatness." No wonder later during the polis , Greek cultural historians themselves envisioned a clear sequence of their early Hellenic state development: primitive and random food-gathering, followed by herding, and culminating in a dynamic agriculture of "the plough, the grafting of trees, and the extension of land under cultivation."18

At the beginning of the polis -period increasing tension grew between livestock men and the less affluent (see Chapter Three). Sheep and goats gradually lost pasturage to cultivated land. More and more people homesteaded small plots. Intensive agriculture also meant a loss of political control and social prestige for the old Dark-Age clique and a greater dispersion of wealth among the populace. The process enriched the rural culture of Greece as a whole.*

The end of the Greek Dark Ages was a rare time in history. A period of fluidity in, and opportunity for, land ownership, it was an era where competence and work, not mere inherited wealth and birth, might now become criteria for economic success.

In a political sense, the innate conservatism that derives from the patience, worry, and waiting that cultivating the soil demands was not man-

John Davis wrote of a similar friction between intensive agriculture and the anti-agrarian mentality of a few entrenched elites during the Ottoman occupation of Greece (1991: 199): "Control of the local economy by a minority of the population may, it could be argued, have been the most significant factor inhibiting rural settlement where agricultural goals have not necessitated increased productivity of subsistence crops."

ifested as knee-jerk rejectionism and reactionismat least not in the early struggle for agrarianism. After all, farmers themselves knew the value of banding together to preserve their own hard-won gains against the wealthy in a no-nonsense pragmatism that in every early timocratic agricultural city-state checked radicalism and, eventually, the excesses of both aristocracy and democracy. Here, the widespread propagation for the first time in Greek history of permanent cropstrees and vinesseems to me every bit as significant as the more heralded intellectual, social, and military renaissance of the Greek eighth and seventh centuries. The spread of grafting and budding, which so helped to tie the new Greek tree and vine farmer to the soil, was as important as the rediscovery of writing and the rise of philosophical speculation.

Do not arboriculture and viticulture also become diagnostic criteria of a farmer's success over an entire lifetime of work? Trees and vines are to be passed down to children and grandchildren. They force the agriculturalist to invest for the future, rather than for the current year alone. They harness him bodily to his orchard and vineyard, changing his way of thinking from mere production to stewardship of a lifetime's investment. Mistakes cannot simply be ploughed away in the fall. They cannot be replaced by a fresh animal. Bare land under annual cultivation or public grazing ground, in contrast, is in a sense mute. It is unchanging, and unreflective of the generations who have staked their lives to its working.*

In a military sense, as we will soon see, there is little doubt that the superiority of Greek citizen infantry, the "planters of trees," in wars both foreign and domestic derived from the resoluteness, conservatism, independence, and physical courage prerequisite to the intensive farming of trees and vines, the need to protect and to honor the visible inherited vineyards and orchards of past generations. Aristotle saw a vast difference between such men and hired mercenaries: "Professional infantry turn out to be cowards whenever the danger proves too much and whenever they are at a disadvantage in their numbers and equipment. They are, then,

"Stable, settled populations, assured both of an economic sufficiency in return for their work and of the cultural value of their work, tend to have methods and attitudes of a much longer range. Though they have generally also farmed with field crops, established farm populations have always been planters of trees " (Berry 135; emphasis added).

the first to run away, while the militias of the polis stand their ground and die (ta de politika menonta apothnskei )" (Arist. Eth. Nic . 3.1116b19).

A variety of conditionsincreasing population, lackadaisical political authority, available land and labor (both servile and free), new crops and rural strategieswere operating in Greece during the latter centuries of the Dark Ages. They were all conducive to fundamental changes in agriculture. An increase in population created pressures on land use. This peopling of Greece brought into question the wisdom of livestock raising on a wide scale. The challenged aristocratic elite who controlled the "economy" at first would have been unenthusiastic about experimenting in intensive agriculture. Wealthy barons had a long cultural tradition that stressed cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and horses, and so they would have exhibited disdain (but also fear) for the toiler in the fields. Much land with productive potential was simply underused or even unowned in Greece, the population heretofore seeing little need or value in developing it agriculturally.

Now began the slow spread of improved and novel domesticated plant species that could be grown in a variety of climates, bringing in an entirely new approach to farming, whose unique properties could ensure the farmer independence and survival. Once the new agrarianism caught on, the control of farming was gradually dispersed into too many hands ever to revert back to either the agricultural fragility of palace bureaucracies or the subsequent neglect of Dark-Age manorial clans.

In that sense, all of Greek history in the polis period follows from the successful creation of a new agriculture and the efforts of the many to protect a novel agrarian way of life. The rural system of the gergoi created the surplus, capital, and leisure that lay behind the entire Greek cultural renaissance. It was an agrarianism that was highly flexible and decentralized economically, socially egalitarian, and politically keen to avoid the accumulation of power by a nonagricultural elite. No surprise that the later polis Greeks envisioned the rise of agrarianismwhich had created their city-stateprimarily in moral terms.*

For the real evidence of this new class of agriculturalists, we must look

"The whole course of development seems to follow a preconceived pattern. Food gathering, pasturing, and agriculture succeed each other because each one represents a stage of development which is, in some sense, more advanced (or more degenerate) than its predecessor" (Cole 55).

in more detail to the earliest Greek literature of the late eighth and early seventh century. The story of the farmers' slow emergence from the centuries of the Dark Ages need not be a dry demographic and agronomic recital. Rather, it can provide a glimpse of how men set themselves against nature in a heroic effort to create an entirely new society in their own image.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization by Victor Davis Hanson Copyright 1999 by Victor Davis Hanson. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520209354
• ISBN 13: 9780520209350
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 596