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CHAPTER 11

Farmers and Hoplites: Models of Historical Development

HANS VAN WEES

Insofar as modern histories of ancient Greece have a grand narrative at all, it is almost always the story of the rise of democracy—too selective and limited even as an account of Athenian history, never mind the history of the Greek world at large. A rare exception is Victor Davis Hanson’s
The Other Greeks
(1995), which writes the economic, social, political, and military history of Greece as the story of the rise and fall of the independent “yeoman” or “middling” farmer and his culture of “agrarianism.” This is an admirable attempt to construct a more comprehensive model of historical development insofar as it offers an internally coherent explanation for a wide range of fundamental historical developments over a period of more than four centuries. In doing so, and in making social and economic change the primary driver of political and military change, rather than the other way round, Hanson points the way to just the sort of master narrative that Greek history needs.

But although
The Other Greeks
provides an account of the right kind, it seems to me that its story is in important respects wrong. I shall argue that something much like the rise of the small independent “middling” farmer posited by Hanson did occur, but only around 550/500 BC, two centuries later than he suggests, and only in some parts of Greece. The period 750–550/500, which for Hanson marks the rise and dominance of a class of small farmers and their characteristic military and political systems, was an era in fact dominated by gentlemen farmers, leisured landowners.
¹
They established the first republics, which were oligarchic in nature, and the first heavy infantry militias, which were small and irregular. The period 550–300 BC, which for Hanson marks the slow demise of the small independent working farmer, in fact saw first the rise and then the decline of this social and economic class, along with political and military changes. But even when and where working farmers did become a significant force, they rarely dominated politics or warfare. Leisured landowners usually retained political power and continued to claim dominance in war, while in cities that developed more democratic forms of government working farmers were only one element among a coalition of forces opposing the landed elite.

The Republic of Yeomen: Hanson’s Model

Center stage in
The Other Greeks
stands the “yeoman” or “family farmer,” variously described as a “small” or “middling” landowner. One of the virtues of Hanson’s account is that these terms, which other scholars tend to use quite vaguely, are precisely defined:

• The yeoman farmer owned about 10 acres (4 ha) of land, which was enough for him and his family to earn an independent livelihood.
²

• A yeoman farmer’s labor force consisted of his family and “one or two” slaves.
³

• Yeomen farmers constituted nearly half, and no less than a third, of the population of most archaic and classical Greek cities.
⁴

These small family farmers typically lived on the land, outside the city walls, and rarely went into town—“mostly just to vote and go home, disgusted at the noise, the squalor, and the endless race for pelf and power.”
⁵
They emerged as a class circa 750–700 BC and became the dominant political and military force in Greek cities until 500/490 at least.
⁶

The rise of the yeoman farmer, Hanson argues, was the result of an economic transformation set off by population growth in the late eighth century: a predominantly pastoral economy was replaced by a regime dominated by the cultivation of cereals, olives, and vines. In the process, many families carved out a new, independent living for themselves, in particular by occupying small plots of uncultivated land on the margins of the territory and making these new farms viable by means of intensive cultivation. Apart from the families who benefited from such “internal colonisation,” there were also those who took part in external colonization, establishing themselves in new settlements abroad, and those who leased land from their richer neighbors.
⁷