Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (56 page)

Their new prosperity and independence enabled yeomen farmers to acquire for themselves better arms and armor, specifically a large round shield and a bronze panoply of armor, which turned them into heavy infantry, and enabled them to fight hand-to-hand in a distinctive close-order formation: thus the hoplite phalanx emerged. This new military force was so successful that it drove other kinds of troops (horsemen, light-armed) out of business and reshaped warfare to fit its own interests, developing a set of “agonal” conventions that were closely tailored to the needs of a militia of small farmers.
⁸
At the same time, yeoman farmer-soldiers started to assert themselves in politics, and managed to impose their egalitarian ideals on the whole community, creating republics governed by “broad-based timocracies” in which all adult men of yeoman status, and the small elite above them, shared equal rights. This political transformation was usually a peaceful process, though in a few cases where change did not come quickly enough yeoman farmer-soldiers supported a coup d’état by a “tyrant” to expedite the process.
⁹

From about 500 BC onward, and especially after the Persian Wars of 480–479, Greek cities faced new military demands that traditional yeoman militias could no longer meet: first the threat of Persian invasion itself, and then the endless wars for
hegemony among the Greeks that followed, required the use of navies, cavalry forces, and various types of light-armed as well as hoplites, and often required full-time soldiers rather than farmer-militias. The military role of the yeoman-hoplite shrank. Further economic developments—the development of trade, craft production, and other nonagricultural sources of income—meant that other social groups gained political influence and rights, and the yeomen lost their dominance here, too. Finally, a trend toward concentration of landownership in the hands of a few threatened the very existence of small independent farmers. After 300 BC, the yeoman farmer-soldier was no longer a significant force.
¹⁰

For all the merits of this account, at least one problem stands out immediately: among the Greek states that do not fit the model are Sparta and the cities of Crete, which is particularly troubling since the Spartans were the soldier-citizen ideal incarnate, while Crete provides us with the earliest evidence for the emergence of republican institutions. Yet in neither case were the soldier-citizens also yeomen. Instead, they were landowners who prided themselves on not tilling the soil but having serfs labor for them. Hanson does acknowledge these anomalies, calling them “strange,” “a bizarre mutation,” and even “outside the culture of the Greek polis,” but offers no explanation.
¹¹
The greatest problem with the model of
The Other Greeks
, however, is that all the evidence in support of it dates from the classical period, as we shall see. In archaic sources before the late sixth century, by contrast, there is nothing to indicate the rise of the yeoman farmer as an economic, military, or political force, and much to indicate the contrary.

Archaic Landowners and Cultivators: The Evidence

There is no doubt that small family farmers with ten-acre plots were a significant group in late classical Greece: ownership of a farm of this size was a threshold for citizenship in the fourth-century Crimea and Thessaly, as well as in Athens after the abolition of full democracy in 322 BC. It seems very likely that this was the minimum property level at which one could afford to serve as a hoplite in the militia.
¹²
The question is, however, whether there is any evidence for the existence of a significant social and economic class of this type of farmer in the early archaic period.

Homer’s
Odyssey

The first yeoman farm in the Greek literary record, as Hanson reads it, is the estate of Laertes described at the end of Homer’s
Odyssey
. Here, old Laertes works with his own hands, cultivating vines, olives, and fruit trees on a plot that he himself has carved out on marginal land.
¹³
Hanson is well aware, of course, that Laertes is the father of Odysseus and a former ruler of Ithaca and so hardly an ordinary yeoman, but he argues that Homer nevertheless portrays the farm as small (1995, 48, 87), cultivated by a resident owner (51, 65) with the help of only “a few slaves” who are “close, intimate, fellow manual labourers” rather than deemed far below their owner (66; cf.
48), and he concludes that Laertes serves as “a representation of an entire class of new farmers” (49).

This is not a tenable interpretation of the evidence. First of all, the labor force on the farm does not consist of “a few” slaves, but of two large groups. Inside the farmhouse itself live Dolios, a slave who joined Laertes’ household as part of his daughter-in-law’s dowry and now “keeps” the farm (4.735–37), “an old Sicilian woman,” evidently a bought slave (1.190–93, 24.211, 366), and their six sons (24.387–89, 497). Yet another son of this couple works as a goatherd (17.212–13), while a daughter is employed as a maidservant in town (18.321–23). Separate from this slave family (24.222–23) are an unspecified number of “coerced slaves” (
dmoes anankaioi
), who are numerous enough to be housed in a “shelter [
klision
] which ran all round the house” (24.208–10). The situation seems clear: Dolios’ long service has been rewarded with “a house, a plot of land and a much-courted wife, the kind of thing which a well-disposed master will give to a slave who has worked hard for him” (14.62–65). The property is his master’s, not his own, but he has the privilege of living in the house and having his own family, while ordinary slaves stay single and sleep in barracks. Since eight slaves live in the house, at least as many must surely live in the large outdoor “shelter,” and we must infer the presence of a labor force of at least fifteen to twenty men.

Relatively egalitarian relations may exist between the privileged slave family and their master, but ordinary “coerced” slaves are excluded from the story: they do not get to greet their master on his return, let alone support him against his enemies, as Dolios and his sons do. And although Dolios’ family share a meal with their owners, distinctions are observed: the slaves sit on low stools while Laertes and his family sit on chairs.
¹⁴

Finally, the presence of the owner on this farm, and his active participation in manual labor, are due to exceptional circumstances. We are told that “Laertes himself acquired [the farm] once upon a time after he took very great trouble over it,” and that he took his son Odysseus to visit when the latter was still a small child (
Od
. 24.205–12, 336–44). Homer must surely have imagined that Laertes was at the time still living in his house in town and taking an active part in public life, since he was, after all, “ruler over the Kephallenians” (24.378). The implication is that originally Laertes had left the running of this remote farm to Dolios and his wife, as a slave bailiff in charge of a slave workforce. Only in old age, in mourning for his missing son, did Laertes retire to this farm and express his grief by dressing and behaving like a poor farmer.
¹⁵
Even then he did not mingle with the rest of the workforce, but planted vines near the house while the rest went off farther afield performing heavy labor, gathering stones to build a wall (24.222–25).

In short, Laertes’ farm is a large estate, cultivated by a large number of slaves, which under normal circumstances would be run by a slave manager on behalf of an absentee owner who lived in town and played only a supervisory role in its cultivation. We hear of only one other farm on Ithaca, which is again on marginal land, and this is owned by the second-richest family on Ithaca, who employ hired labor. Also to be found in the more remote parts of Ithacan territory are twelve herds of goats and a troop of about one thousand pigs, owned by Laertes’ family, all managed by slaves.
¹⁶
So far as one can tell from Homer, then, marginal land and indeed the countryside at large is occupied, not by small independent farmers, but by the estates, herds, slaves, and hired laborers of the very rich.

Hesiod’s
Works and Days

Hesiod at first sight seems to offer much more support for the idea that the yeoman farmer was a rising force around 700 BC, the probable date of his
Works and Days
. This poem exhorts the farmer to work hard so as to avoid “hunger,” “debt,” and “poverty,” which sounds like—and has generally been taken as—advice addressed to farmers struggling to make a living and maintain their independence by the labor of their own hands. Hanson accordingly interprets Hesiod as representing the “small agriculturalist” (1995, 97), though he allows this “middling” yeoman a somewhat larger farm and labor force than normal: up to 15 acres (6 ha) rather than 10, and “two or more male slaves” plus a hired female servant, rather than one or two (107).

This higher number of slaves means that the dependent labor force on such a farm would be about as large as the labor force provided by the family itself, and the question arises whether one can still reasonably call this a “family” farm. By the standards of modern agribusiness, it is of course a tiny enterprise, but by the standards of the ancient Mediterranean world there would have been a significant gap in social and economic status between a family farm in the proper sense—cultivated by the labor of the family alone, except for short-term additional labor in peak seasons—and a farm with a permanent workforce of at least three servants. The question becomes all the more acute because Hanson in fact underestimates the size of Hesiod’s farm and its labor force.

Hesiod’s advice assumes the presence of at least four slaves, and at least two full-time hired laborers. A man starting up a farm needs “first of all a house and a woman and a plough ox—a woman bought, not married, who could also follow the cattle” (
W&D
405–6). It has been plausibly argued that this is an adaptation of a proverbial line “a house and a woman and a plough ox” in which the woman is understood as the farmer’s wife. If so, it is all the more striking that the poet decided to turn the proverb into advice to the farmer to buy a slave housekeeper even before he marries, and to employ this slave woman also in agricultural work, if necessary, to help out in plowing or in taking cattle to pasture.
¹⁷
Normally, the sowing and plowing will be done neither by the housekeeper nor by the farmer himself but by two other men, ideally forty-year-olds, who are regarded as the most reliable workers (
W&D
441–47): they, too, are slaves (459). A third slave follows behind the plowman and sower to cover over the seeds with a mattock (469–71).

These are all the slaves individually identified, but there may be more: Hesiod always speaks of “slaves” in the plural, and if we take literally the implication that the farmer has a range of slaves of various ages from among whom he can pick his plowman and sower, and that younger slaves waste too much time “gawping after their peers,” that is, yet more slaves (444, 447), we must infer quite a large staff. So four slaves, three male and one female, are the
minimum
servile workforce assumed by Hesiod.
¹⁸

In addition, he recommends hiring male and female laborers at the end of the agricultural year: “when you have stored all supplies indoors, I urge you to appoint a hired man without a household [
theta t’ aoikon poieisthai
] and seek a maidservant [
erithos
] without a child.”
¹⁹
The timing makes sense only if they are hired for the duration of the next agricultural cycle, that is, on a full-time rather than seasonal contract. The purpose of hiring a mere two full-time laborers to complement a slave force of at least four is not obvious, and the point of the advice is probably not that one should hire one man and one woman but that, however many men and women one hires, they should have no landholdings or children to distract them from complete commitment to their paid work. In short, Hesiod’s total full-time workforce, not counting family members, is at least six—four male agricultural laborers and two female domestic servants—and may be larger.

This is clearly no longer a “family farm” in any meaningful sense. To employ and feed so many, a 10- or 15-acre farm will not suffice. A family of four, plus six laborers, requires at the very least 20 acres (8 ha).
²⁰
Another sign that Hesiod is not imagining a small farm is his assumption that land will be left fallow (
W&D
462–64), presumably on a biennial rotation, as was normal Greek practice: leaving half the land uncultivated is something only a well-off farmer could afford to do.
²¹
Hesiod also assumes that the farmer owns a seaworthy ship, big enough to transport a substantial part of his harvest,
²²
and that he keeps a range of livestock. The livestock are easily overlooked because Hesiod’s account of the agricultural year features almost no animals, but the closing section on auspicious days includes good days for shearing sheep (775), building sheep pens (787), gelding goats, rams, boars, bulls, and mules (786, 790–91), taming sheep, oxen, dogs, and mules (795–97), and putting a yoke on oxen, mules, and horses (815–16). A man would yoke horses only if he owned a chariot, the Greek world’s supreme symbol of wealth.

Given these indications of wealth, it is not surprising to find Hesiod’s farmer playing a supervisory role. “You must show an inclination to
arrange
[
kosmein
] work in due measure,” he is told (
W&D
306–7, emphasis added). His job is to “tell the slaves in summer to build their winter shelters” (502–3), and in the harvest season, the busiest time of the year, he must “wake up the slaves; avoid shady benches and sleeping until dawn” (573–77). If these exhortations do not exclude the farmer working alongside his slaves, the arrangements for the summer do: the master sits in the shade, drinking imported wine, eating milk bread, beef, and lamb, while he “tells the slaves” to thresh and store the grain.
²³