Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (58 page)

In short, Solon’s
zeugitai
belong to the same group as the farmers in Homer and Hesiod: landowners who can afford to live off the labor of their workers and whose role on the farm is essentially supervisory. It was this class of gentlemen farmers, not yeomen, who received new political rights under Solon. His property class system was designed to break up attempts to monopolize power by an even narrower elite within the class of leisured landowners, the Eupatridae, whose name implies that they claimed hereditary privileges: Solon ensured that the entire leisure class—that is, all those rich
enough to be able to hold office without pay—had access to at least the lower ranks of political office.
⁴¹

Solon’s
Thetes

Homer and Hesiod tell us about gentlemen farmers and their slaves without revealing social and economic conditions at other levels of society, so although they do not mention the yeoman farmer, they do not positively exclude the possibility that he existed. Solon’s property classes and the fragments of his laws and poetry, by contrast, do paint a picture of the condition of the nonleisured classes—and the yeoman has no place in it.

In Solon’s scheme, the property class below the
zeugitai
, which embraces at least 85 percent of the population, is called
thetes
, “hired laborers.” They are, in other words, people who do not have enough land to make an independent living and therefore need to hire themselves out as laborers to those who have land in abundance. Between these free laborers and the leisured elite no other group—no body of yeomen family farmers—is given a recognized status. If a sizable group of yeomen did exist, they were ignored, insultingly lumped together with the poorest, and granted no political role beyond attending assemblies, a privilege shared by all adult males. Alternatively, landownership may have been so uneven and polarized that there really were virtually no small independent farmers at all, just a yawning socioeconomic gap between the estate-owning elite and the mass of wage laborers with little or no land.

What we can gather from the fragments of Solon’s poetry supports the second scenario. After his reforms, he prided himself on having resisted calls for the redistribution of land (fr. 34.7–9), but it is revealing that such calls were issued at all: only when wealth is very unevenly distributed and a large proportion of people simply do not have enough income to survive will such radical measures be demanded. Although stopping short of a full-scale redistribution, Solon did “liberate the earth” by “removing boundary markers planted everywhere,” which in my view means that he restored illegally occupied or confiscated land to its rightful owners or to common use (fr. 36.3–7).
⁴²
The other major demand, to which Solon did accede, was for a cancellation of debts, since indebtedness had got to the point where “the poor” (
penichroi
) were sold abroad into slavery by their creditors, or else left the country in order to avoid slavery. Others remained in Attica, “trembling at their masters’ whims,” evidently in a highly vulnerable position (frs. 4.23–25; 36.8–15). Solon stressed that it was only thanks to his reforms that the crisis did not escalate into bloodshed, for which both the rich and poor were fully prepared (fr. 36.20–25), and that “the people” had wanted him to go much further than reform: they expected him to seize sole power in Athens and force through more radical changes (frs. 32, 33, 34, 37).

Solon may have overstated his case, but his poems nevertheless offer clear evidence that Athens’
thetes
were being viciously exploited in the years around 600 BC and were on the brink of mounting a violent rebellion against the exploitative landed and leisured elite—including the
zeugitai
.
⁴³
Classical evidence further fleshes out the picture with the information that many of the poor were
pelatai
, “clients” and dependants, of the rich, and worked on the land of the rich as
hektemoroi
, “sixth parters,”
which Hanson rightly understands as sharecroppers who were rewarded with only one-sixth of the harvest—a highly exploitative form of sharecropping, given that the most common sharecropping contracts divide the harvest fifty-fifty between cultivator and landowner.
⁴⁴
Thetes
would hardly have tolerated such conditions unless there was no other way to gain access to land because “all the land was in the hands of few” ([Arist.]
Ath. Pol
. 2.1, 4.1). Everything thus points to a situation in which the top three property classes monopolized most of the land, while the bulk of the population made do with tiny plots or no land at all. If everyone below the leisure class was labeled a “hired laborer,” it was because there were indeed no independent yeomen farmers to speak of.
⁴⁵
It is no coincidence that when Solon mentions farming in a poem counting the ways in which people try to make a living, his agricultural worker is not a small struggling landowner, but a hired laborer on an annual contract.
⁴⁶

Much like Hesiod, Solon acknowledges in his poetry that no amount of wealth is ever enough, since even the very rich want to be richer still, and that it is perfectly acceptable to “yearn for wealth,” so long as one acquires it by legitimate means only. It is because the elite of Athens knew no such restraint but indulged in greed and
hybris
, arrogant aggression, according to Solon, that they had reduced the rest of the community to actual or virtual slavery and brought Athens to the brink of civil war.
⁴⁷
He therefore helped the
thetes
by imposing limits on existing forms of exploitation, creating new kinds of legal protection, restoring usurped land to private and public ownership, and reducing incentives to compete for wealth by enacting sumptuary laws and a ban on most agricultural exports. The elite could console themselves with their new access to political office, in compensation for these economic and legal restrictions.
⁴⁸

A similar situation prevailed at Sparta a little before Solon’s time. A line of an archaic poem that became proverbial warns that “love of wealth” might destroy Sparta, and a poem by Tyrtaeus alludes to calls for the redistribution of land in the late seventh century. In Sparta, too, large numbers of people were evidently falling below the subsistence minimum while others accumulated great wealth. Elsewhere, poets throughout the archaic period express concern about the consequences of competition for wealth, and we find stories in classical and later sources about civil conflicts that opposed landowners against dependent rural laborers, not independent smallholders. Debtors and clients rioted in Megara, circa 600; a bloody civil war between the rich and their agricultural laborers nearly ruined Miletus, probably in the late seventh century.
⁴⁹

Theognis’ Rustics and Phocylides’ Middling Men

Three snippets of verse dating to about 540 BC are Hanson’s only other archaic evidence for the rise of the yeoman farmer. The first is a lament by Theognis of Megara (53–58):

Cyrnus, this city is still a city but its people now are other men, who previously knew no courts or laws, but wore threadbare goatskins on their backs and grazed like deer outside this city. And now, son of Polypaos, they are good men, and those who used to be fine men are now worthless. Who could bear to see such things?

Hanson interprets this as a reference to “agrarians [who] had so … completely replaced birth by material success … that … now they wandered outside the walls of the
polis
with pretensions to actually being
agathoi
,” that is, members of the elite (1995, 109–10); they are “new farmers who … rarely come into town, but “pasture like deer” on their isolated farms” (120), and have changed the social order by means of “not wealth, but work” (121).

This is a very strained reading of the passage. Clearly, those who used to live outside the town, according to Theognis, are no longer in the countryside but have moved into the city, and do not merely have a high opinion of themselves but have replaced the old elite. The claim that new men have gained dominance is repeated later, with the addition that their rise involved them marrying into the old elite on the strength of wealth, not work:

Cyrnus, the good men of the past are now bad men, and those who used to be bad men are now good men. Who could bear to see such things: the good men less respected, worse men treated with respect? And the fine man courts the offspring of the bad one (1109–12). A fine man does not mind marrying a bad woman [born] of a bad man so long as [this man] gives him much wealth, nor does a woman refuse to be the wife of a wealthy bad man, but she wants riches instead of a good man. They respect wealth. (185–89).

There is no question here of a new agrarian middle class, but of high upward social mobility that turned poor country dwellers into rich city dwellers. Perhaps such high mobility really did occur or else Theognis merely slandered his rivals by claiming that they belonged to families of very low status. Either way, his underlying image is of a society divided between an urban elite and a group of rural poor who are so far removed from the trappings of civilization that they are more like animals than like humans: from his point of view, at any rate, this is still a polarized society without a middle class.
⁵⁰

Whatever Theognis thought of country dwellers, his verses show that a rural population did exist. But it does not follow that these were yeomen farmers, let alone that they were numerous. When Homer mentions “rustics” (
agroiotai
), they are always herdsmen, not farmers, and, if identified further, specifically herdsmen in the service of a rich owner.
⁵¹
Two fragments of Sappho, circa 600 BC, which gently mock an uncouth “country girl” and a rural wedding probably suggest farmers, but we cannot tell whether these are independent family farmers or dependent peasants. Theognis’ reference to “grazing” suggests that, like Homer, he was primarily thinking of herdsmen as a group of particularly low status.
⁵²

The other two snippets of archaic poetry adduced by Hanson are couplets by Phocylides of Miletus. “If you seek wealth, take care of a fertile farm, for a farm, as they say, is a horn of plenty” (fr. 7) according to Hanson (1995, 111) refers to “homestead agriculture,” but it is simply a very concise version of Hesiod’s advice (as is fr. 9) and does not imply a small farm any more than
Works and Days
does. More interesting is the second couplet: “Those in the middle have many great assets; in the middle of the city I wish to be” (fr. 12). For Hanson, this is an expression of a long-lived “middling” ideal, established by yeomen farmers in the eighth century and still shared in the fourth
century, most notably by Aristotle, who is cited at length (1995, 110, 114–19). Other scholars have adduced further evidence for this ideal, which advocated moderation and approved of those who were content to remain in the middle of the social hierarchy. Aristotle in particular argued that “middle people” (
mesoi
) provided balance and stability to communities that were in danger of being torn apart by the struggle between the rich and poor.
⁵³

Whereas the classical evidence is quite abundant and clear, however, an archaic concept of a “middling” lifestyle, let alone a “middling” social class, proves almost nonexistent. Some poets, like Hesiod and Solon, urged “moderation” in the pursuit of wealth, but this was not conceived of as a “middle” way. The closest Solon comes to using the concept of the middle is when he says that he “stood like a boundary marker in the space between the lines of battle” in a looming civil war (37.8–9). The image evokes political neutrality at a time of conflict, as do a few lines of Theognis that explicitly speak of staying “in the middle” (219–20, 331–32). Only once in Theognis is “the middle way” (
mesa
) used to mean “moderation” (335–36)—a significant conceptual innovation, but without any implication that such moderation was characteristic of a broader “middle” group. No such group appears anywhere else in Theognis, who, like Solon, sees the world strictly in polarized terms of upper-class “good men” (
agathoi
) and lower-class “bad men” (
kakoi
).
⁵⁴

Phocylides’ couplet is in fact the sole archaic text that speaks of “those in the middle” as a group, and as a permanent element of the city as a whole. Who form this “middle class” is far from obvious: they may be a new class of yeomen farmers, or they may be the lower strata of the landed elite redefining themselves as a “moderate” middle class at a time when the very rich raised conspicuous consumption to new levels of extravagance. Hanson cites Aristotle’s occasional association of the “middle” with a class of working farmers, but one cannot simply project classical idea(l)s onto Phocylides, and even less onto other archaic poetry. Even if one did, one would have to remember that Aristotle did not associate the “middle” with working farmers alone but was quite happy stretching the middle so wide that it could include, for instance, the lawgiver Lycurgus on the basis that he was regent of Sparta, not king. Moreover, Aristotle also conceded that almost nowhere in the Greek world had there ever been a middle class large enough to balance the forces of rich and poor.
⁵⁵
So we cannot safely infer that a sizable yeoman class existed by the time of Phocylides. His concept of a middle class, and Theognis’ concept of a middle way, are nevertheless significant: they show the emergence, circa 540 BC, of a conceptual space, as it were, that independent working farmers could in principle fill.