Greece, Ancient and Modern - Subsistence and Survival
'Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose'... many of the agricultural practices described in the art and literature of classical Greece persist to the present day.
Unfortunately, literary and historical works generally give only glimpses or caricatures of the peasantry. In the terminology of Robert Redfield, one of the great pioneers of peasant studies, the 'Great Tradition' of the upper classes, out of which the surviving documents come, had no interest in the 'Little Tradition' of peasant culture. Other sources are similarly difficult to use. Nearly all of those whose property or transactions appear immortalised in inscriptions on stone are not poor farmers but rich men and the hovels in which many peasants must have dwelt, and their low standard of living, means that little has survived for archaeologists to find, despite the hopes held out by regional archaeological survey and modern scientific excavation. Nonetheless, bits from all of these sources, cautiously stuck together with the analogical glue provided by modern ethnographic studies and the vast body of anthropological research on peasant farmers, can be used to create a collage, at least, of the peasantry of classical antiquity.
Analogy – that is, comparing the unknown past with the known present – must be used properly and with caution in order to provide genuine insights. The study of modern traditional farmers is most useful for establishing the ecological and technological bases for peasant cultivation as it might have been in antiquity. Working as part of a joint programme of anthropological, archaeological and historical research in Greece, (the Methana Survey Project), I have seen that making a living from the Greek earth is a hard life. The modern village studied most intensively, Kosona, on the little volcanic peninsula of Methana, is inhabited by independent subsistence farmers who produce all their own staple foods: wheat (for bread), wine and olive oil. They also grow fodder crops and hay for their animals, legumes, vegetables (largely unirrigated) and other fruit trees (especially almonds, figs, pears and carobs). Farms average about 3.3 ha (8 acres) in size. And rainfall is low: about 400mm per year on average. Since Methana is very steep and rocky there are few roads, and fields are small and usually terraced. Mechanised farming is impossible, so the motive power for agricultural work is provided mostly by mules and donkeys. In addition, most households own a small mixed flock of lean, agile, coarse-fleeced sheep and goats (usually no more than six animals). These are kept primarily for the milk they produce.
In Kosona most of the agricultural work falls in the autumn, winter and spring; summer is the time when there is least to do, when Hesiod (writing at the end of the eighth century BC) advised 'let your servants rest their poor knees and let loose your ox team' (Works and Days 608). The vintage occurs in September; later in the autumn through into winter cereals and legumes are planted and the olive harvest takes place. There is a lull in mid-winter when the weather is too cold and wet to do anything: 'miserable days, that pierce even an ox's hide', complained Hesiod (Works and Days 504). But in late winter and early spring, vines need to be pruned, then ploughed and dug, growing cereals must be weeded and fallow land to be used for summer gardens must be ploughed several times. Later in the spring these gardens must be planted, then the hay harvest comes and after that, in early summer, cereals are reaped, first barley, then wheat. Even in the summer there is still work to do: vegetables, almonds and figs must be gathered and processed. And during the period that sheep and goats are lactating, milk must be made into cheese, trachanas and noodles. Summer is also the time when maintenance work is done, as well as jobs that cannot be undertaken in busier seasons: men traditionally built and repaired terrace walls, women wove cloth. 'It won't be summer forever', said Hesiod, 'build granaries' (Works and Days 503).
One important complication which must be mentioned is the biennial fruiting pattern of the olive. Olives produce a crop only in alternate years a habit like that found in some English apples, but more extreme. Moreover, in Methana at least, the trees are synchronised: almost all bear their fruit in the same year. For the majority of the farmers on the peninsula who grow large numbers of olives, other autumn and winter tasks, especially cereal planting, must be fitted in around the busy olive picking season every other year. Not surprisingly, farmers tend to plant less grain in the years when the olives are fruiting abundantly. This has important implications for any analysis of ancient farming in areas where the olive was a major crop.
Farming on Methana is one variant of a general system prevalent in many parts of the Mediterranean region ever since the Bronze Age. But the Mediterranean 'trinity' of cereals, olives and vines can be exploited in many ways. Large estates may grow the same crops as small-scale peasant farms, but in different combinations and even using different techniques.
Looking at Kosona in the summer sun, it is easy to be lulled into a false sense of timelessness; to feel that little has altered since antiquity. Many changes have in fact, occurred. But, most of the ecological limits imposed by crops, climate and landscape are close to those which constrained ancient farmers. Furthermore, the basic elements of the diet for most families in Kosona are the same as for the countrymen of Aristophanes:
But other transitions, such as giving up the self-sufficiency of mixed farming and becoming a market farmer, might take twenty years of stopping and starting; and the old patterns still held in the minds of those too old to change their thinking. Aunt Stylou, widow of my father's brother, Zenon, could never get over not producing her own olive oil... I remember her in 1970 looking at her three leminzanes (demijohns), each one holding about twenty-five litres, and grumbling to anyone who would listen that we were half-way through the second one, and it was still a long time to go till the olive harvest. At which her son-in-law, a chemistry graduate from Birkbeck (by night), said, 'Come on, mother-in-law: if we run out of oil, we'll just go to the co-op and buy some more. They won't run out.' But although this was rational and sensible, Aunt Stylou shook her head over the idea. Well-founded families ought never to need to buy olive oil, it wasn't done. And the fact that it was now done, by everyone, only made it worse.Now, all of the strategies thus far described have assumed that peasants in ancient times, like the Methana farmers, had sufficient land available to support themselves. But what about farmers – and there were many in both the ancient and modern Mediterranean world – who held enough land to support themselves in better but not in worse years, or who owned so little land that they could never be sure of a livelihood from it? Wage labour, when available, is one possible alternative, well documented for classical antiquity. But also, various kinds of 'social defences' can supplement the barriers against hazard. Such strategies include tenancy, sharecropping and patronage (though these institutions fulfilled other roles as well). All of these relationships entail placing someone wealthier and less vulnerable between yourself and the risk of starvation.
If all else fails, the landlord (who may also be your patron) will bail you out, as did Pliny the Younger when his tenants' farming endeavours were less than successful. Indeed, Pliny, in his letters, contemplated changing from tenancy to sharecropping arrangements, hoping his tenants would make a better job of it. In the Roman farm tenancy legislation preserved in the Digest it is clear, too, that tenancy spread the risks of farming between two parties: landlord and tenant. It was normally expected that the landlord would bear responsibility for 'extraordinary' hazards (marauding flocks of birds, or armies, landslides, etc.)., while tenants bore the brunt of 'expectable' hazards (bugs in the wheat, wine turning to vinegar, weeds, etc.). In a world without insurance or relief agencies, such agreements could be crucial for a small farmer's survival.
For the peasant, obligation and debt are unpleasant, but they beat hunger hands down! Though the hektemoroi (a category of dependent peasant) in sixth century BC Athens complained about their plight they were at least alive to do so, and to demand the reforms brought about by Solon. Indeed, it could be argued, following on from Oswyn Murray's discussion in Early Greece, that many hektemoroi may well have come to resent their dependent status because they were getting richer, not poorer. With greater wealth they felt they no longer needed the safety net of dependent status: it had become a ball and chain instead of a defence.
The success of all these measures for ensuring peasant survival is evident from the fact that small farmers have continued to work the soils of the Mediterranean zone in a broadly similar way for millennia. Subsistence farming systems in the Mediterranean, though persistent, have not been static. Paradoxically, it is precisely because farming strategies were dynamic and responsive to changing hazards and conditions that such remarkable continuity in the peasants' way of life could be maintained.
I shall conclude with one historical example of how such survival strategies were capable of overcoming apparently insurmountable obstacles: the effects on Attic farming of the Lacedaimonians' annual invasions and their later occupation of Attica which occurred 431-425 and 413-404 BC during the Peloponnesian War. It has been suggested, that after such catastrophic devastation as was wreaked by Peloponnesian forces, Athenian farming came to a halt, leading to an agrarian crisis in the fourth century BC. However, a careful reading of the sources indicates that agriculture continued to flourish (though the war may have affected farming and marketing strategies). Indeed, Lysias' speech 7, On the Sacred Olive Tree, in which a man was accused of removing an enclosure where there had been a sacred olive tree on the vulnerable plain near Athens, implies that cultivation continued in this area right through the latter part of the Spartan occupation of Dekeleia in northern Attica and through the years of civil strife that followed.
According to Thucydides and other sources, crops and trees suffered most on these flatter plains of Attica. These areas would, after all, have been more accessible to invading and occupying forces. And even the Spartans probably felt that climbing rocky hills in the heat of summer just to cut down big trees with small axes (while wearing full hoplite armour) was a waste of time and energy. Here the possession of scattered land holdings would have been advantageous, for no one farmer is likely to have lost everything to the invaders or the revolutionaries. The practice of polycropping and crop diversification, too, would have helped farmers. Trees might have produced when arable crops had been ruined. Judging from the Athenian complaints that have come through to us, especially in Aristophanes' comedies, though cereals and vines were severely damaged, figs and olives emerged relatively unscathed. Even if they are neglected, olives, figs and almonds will survive. Certainly Athens imported large amounts of grain in this and later periods. But she probably could not have held out against the Spartans for so long without at least some home-produced food. Indeed, most individual Athenians probably felt that it was too risky to make themselves wholly dependent on supplies from elsewhere – no doubt this is one reason why Attic farming continued during the Peloponnesian War despite the dangers and hardships.
By 405 the Lacedaimonian forces, with Persian aid, were closing in. Yet Sophocles, in the Oedipus at Colonos (668-719), could still proclaim in a defiant spirit of patriotic fervour that Athens had two strings to her bow: her navy and her farming. And in the event, when the ships and the navy had been destroyed, the olives and the farmers remained.
- Further Reading: H.A. Forbes, Strategies and Soils: Technology, Production and Environment in the Peninsula of Methana, Greece (University Microfilms: Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982); Joan Frayn, Subsistence Farming in Roman Italy (Centaur Press, 1979); Robin Oshorne, Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attica (Cambridge University Press, 1985); K.D. White, Country Life in Classical Times (Paul Elek, 1977).
If you enjoyed this article, you might like these:
This Month's Magazine
Newsletter
From The Current Issue
Tim Stanley
|
David Coke
|
Mihir Bose
|
Roger Hudson
|
History Today App
Follow Us
From The Archive
 The Hudson's Bay Company was one of the central forces moulding the development of the vast tracts of land that today are Canada - but as Barry Gough explains here, the circumstances of its launch in 1670 also reveal much about the commercial forces, personalities and rivalries of Restoration England. |
