Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (62 page)

  
42
. See van Wees 1999a, 16–18.

  
43
. On the threat of violent conflict, see also van Wees 2008a, 25–35.

  
44
. Hanson 1995, 122; see further van Wees 1999a, 18–24.

  
45
. See also Plutarch,
Solon
13.1. Hanson regards the statements of pseudo-Aristotle and Plutarch about landownership as “somewhat of an exaggeration” and “an incorrect generalisation,” on the grounds that by the late fifth century “at least two-thirds of Attica constituted small farmers” (1995, 122). My argument is that the rise of these small farmers occurred after, and partly as a result of, Solon’s reforms. Hanson suggests that only a few small farmers whose enterprises failed resorted to extreme measures such as borrowing on the security of their own bodies, or accepting sixth-parter sharecropping contracts (122–24)—but failing farmers can spark a general crisis only if they fail in large numbers, and the question is what structural factors caused so many to fail (clearly not incompetence, as Hanson hints in suggesting that Solon’s reforms rewarded “agricultural expertise,” 125).

  
46
. Fr. 13.47–48: “he labours for a year”; the verb
latreuein
implies a hired laborer.

  
47
. Frs. 4, 4b, 4c, 11; see van Wees 1999a, 10–29; Fisher 1992, 69–75.

  
48
. See van Wees 2006a, 376–81. Hanson 1995, 123–24, argues that Solon did nothing to help the
thetes
; on 122–23, he suggests that the export ban was an attempt to encourage yeomen farmers to cultivate “olives and vines” while restricting richer cereal farmers, but this cannot be right, because export of
all
produce other than olive oil was banned. The ban is also unlikely to be an attempt to convert farmers to olive cultivation. Rather, it deprived the richest farmers of the most profitable outlet for their surpluses and thereby removed an incentive to compete for more land; olive oil was exempted simply because it was already too important an export: van Wees 2009, 463; Stanley 1999, 229–34.

  
49
. Sparta: Diodorus 7.12.6 (“love of silver”); Tyrtaeus fr. 2 West (redistribution of land), with van Wees 1999b, 2–6. Competition for wealth as a threat: Alcaeus fr. 360 L–P; Theognis, e.g. 227–32. Later evidence: Plutarch,
Mor
. 295cd, 304ef (Megara); Herodotus 5.28–29 (Miletus), as explained by van Wees 2008a, 29–31; contra Forsdyke 2005; and Hanson’s view that such conflict was exceptional: 1995, 109, 119.

  
50
. See van Wees 2000a, 57–63.

  
51
. 
Od
. 11.293 (herdsmen of Iphicles); 21.85 (herdsmen of Odysseus);
Il
. 11.676 (herdsmen of Itymoneus);
Il
. 11.548–55, 18.162 (herdsmen in similes); only at
Il
. 15.271–76 is the status of the
agroiotai
hunting in the mountains not clear.

  
52
. “Rustics”: Sappho, frs. 57, 110; cf. Crielaard 2009, 358–59. Hanson suggests that Theognis’ rustics are “dressed like Laertes and Hesiod,” i.e., as farmers (1995, 120; cf. 106–7); however, the “threadbare goatskin” is closer to the “bald deerskin” of a beggar (
Od
. 13.434–38), not only because both are worn out, but also because both are worn
instead of
a woolen cloak, whereas Hesiod’s farmer (in wet, cold weather,
W&D
536–46) and the swineherd Eumaeus (at night,
Od
. 14.428–31) wear good-quality goatskin capes
on top of
a cloak and tunic; on Homeric and archaic dress, see van Wees 2005; 2006b.

  
53
. See esp. Morris 2000, 114–19 (classical), 157–71 (archaic); also Kurke 1999; contra Kistler 2004; Hammer 2004. Despite saying at one point that “archaic poets imagined
hoi mesoi
as self-sufficient farmers” (2000, 161), Morris argues that to be “middling” is essentially a state of mind and cannot be identified with a particular social group.

  
54
. For Theognis’ image of society, see van Wees 2000a; for Solon’s image, see Mitchell 1997. Note also Theognis’ rejection of “poverty” (i.e., having to work for a living) as a fate worse than death: 173–78, 181–82, 267–68.

  
55
. Hanson 1995, 109–17, claiming on p. 115 that Aristotle “implies that agrarians of the middle had been widespread throughout the early
polis
history of Greece,” on the basis of Aristotle,
Pol
. 1292b25–35, 1305a18–20, 1318b7–15. Contrast
Pol
. 1295a23–26, 37–40 (middle class very rare), 1296a18–22 (Lycurgus middle class). On Aristotle’s flaws as a historian of archaic Greece, see van Wees 2002, 72–77.

  
56
. Evidence cited by Hanson 1995, 195, with nn. 11–12. Metapontum: Carter 1990, 429, table 2 (his alternative estimate is even less favorable to Hanson’s view); on p. 423, average farm size c. 350–300 BC, when settlement density was highest, is given as 41.5 acres (16.6 ha). The evidence for Halieis, which Hanson cites, concerns city blocks, not farm plots (Boyd and Jameson 1981); his claim that “farms in Greek Italy, as at Halieis, were … from 16.3 to 32.6 acres in size” is not supported by any of the evidence adduced.

  
57
. Laconia survey: Cavanagh et al. (eds.) 1996, 2002. Metapontum: Carter 1981, 170, 174 (founded c. 650, first evidence of settlers in the countryside “middle of the sixth century”). See also the summary of survey results from Kea, Methana, Argolid, and Attica in Foxhall 1997, 122–27, and Foxhall’s chapter in the present volume.

  
58
. See also Morris 1998, 78. For the sake of completeness, I note two pieces of classical evidence for archaic Athens cited by Hanson as evidence for the existence of three classes. He suggests that the factions of “Shore” and “Hill” represented poorer farmers on marginal land opposed to the rich landowners of the “Plain” (it is not clear to me how this distinction is resolved into “three, not two, social groups”; 1995, 113). We are here not dealing with classes at all, but with three elite factions, each with its center in a different region of Attica (as
Ath. Pol
. 13.4 explains). Hanson also equates the
eupatridai
with landed elite, the
georgoi
with the yeoman class, and the
demiourgoi
with the landless (1995, 111, 113), when it is clear from the fact that in 580 BC all three groups are said to have been granted eligibility for the archonship (
Ath. Pol
. 13.2), which until 457 BC was open to the richest two property classes only, that the first two
groups are rich landowners (the
eupatridai
with hereditary privileges, the others without) and the third consists of rich owners of workshops and other specialists.

  
59
. Given that they amounted to no more than 17% of the citizen population of relatively egalitarian fourth-century Athens. Two important questions, rightly raised by the referees and by Hanson’s paper in this volume, are whether a “leisure class” of this size is feasible, and how it compares with the size of elites in other historical societies. Usable comparative data are not easy to come by and will require further research, but one suggestive parallel I happen to have come across is the social structure of a farming region in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, where 16% of landowners had farms of 30 acres or more, cultivated by wage labor, while 28% had farms of 10–30 acres cultivated by family labor (Wolf 1956, 201–3). It may very well be that proportional sizes of “leisured” elites in history have usually been smaller than 10–15%, and if so, a relatively large “leisure class” may be key to the distinctive historical developments of archaic Greece—but it was nevertheless only one-third the size of the class to which Hanson attributes this key role, and in a fundamentally different economic position.

  
60
. While I follow in outline Morris’s account of the changing degrees of egalitarianism in the archaeological record, I reject his idea that even in the most unegalitarian phases a broad elite of 25–50% of the population is represented, while in the most egalitarian phases the bulk of the remaining population, “the
kakoi
,” are also represented (esp. Morris 1987, 84). I suggest that the archaic material from c. 750 onward still represents only the leisured elite, and that lower-level groups enter the record only in the late sixth century (creating the false impression of a huge population increase; see Morris 1987, 73, fig. 22). In more recent work, Morris has emphasized the changing ideology reflected in the record, rather than visibility of a wider group: esp. 1998; 2000, 109–91.

  
61
. In my view the
basileis
of Homer are also a ruling group within an elite of wealth, rather than a closed aristocracy of birth (e.g., Finley 1977, 53, 59–60) or a fluid elite of merit (e.g., Ulf 1990): see van Wees, forthcoming a.

  
62
. See van Wees 2003, 45–47; cf. Purcell 2005, 117–18, who argues that colonial allotments were much larger than “a minimum for survival.”

  
63
. Native serf populations in territories conquered in archaic Crete, Thessaly, Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, Epidaurus, and Elis, as well as Sparta: van Wees 2003, 33–66.

  
64
. See van Wees 2008a for “popular tyranny,” contra Forsdyke 2005; Anderson 2005.

  
65
. Sixth-century (as opposed to seventh-century) reform: e.g., Finley 1968 (1981), 24–40; Hodkinson 1997; and in detail van Wees, forthcoming b. Regulation of competition for wealth: Hodkinson 2000, 151–302. Regulated competition for status: Cartledge 1996.

  
66
. Signs of concentration of wealth: e.g., Morris 1992, 145–55. Decline of Spartan citizen numbers and landownership: Hodkinson 2000, 65–112. The late sources that claim Lycurgus redistributed all land to 9,000 citizens are peddling a third-century myth (Hodkinson 2000, 68–81), but the figure 9,000 as such may derive from the number of Spartiates included in the public messes when these were instituted in the late sixth century: see van Wees, forthcoming b.

  
67
. Rise of trade: e.g., van Wees 2009, 457–60; Hanson dates this after 480 BC (1995, 359, 365–68, 375–79), which is surely too late. That small farmers produced for the market, at least in classical Athens, is clear from the comment in pseudo-Aristotle,
Oeconomica
1344b33–34, 1345a18–19, that “‘he Attic system” is for small farmers not to store their produce but to sell everything and buy all their food and other supplies in the market.

  
68
. For the late sixth-century rise of the trireme, public navies, and wars of hegemony, see van Wees 2008b; forthcoming c; Nagy 2009. Hanson subscribes to the more common view that these were fifth-century developments (1995, 316, 334–36).

  
69
. In the absence of pay for office, positions of power would in practice necessarily have been restricted to the leisure classes, even if they were notionally open to all.

  
70
. Aristotle,
Politics
1318b7–15; for the philosopher, the working farmer’s inability to spend time on politics makes a farming democracy the “best” (i.e., least bad) form of democracy; he also claims that this was the oldest form of democracy (cf. 1305a18–20), as stressed by Hanson 1995, 116–17, but as we have seen there is no evidence for this. For the leisure-class regime of 5,000 citizens in 411, see above, n. 40.

  
71
. Grieb 2008 argues that democracy survived longer than traditionally believed.

  
72
. Size of Eretrian territory: Hansen and Nielsen 2004, 72, 652 (1,500 km
²
in fourth century); Walker 2004, 15 (one-third less in archaic period). From an Eretrian roster of c. 290 BC, Hansen 2006, 61–88, reconstructs a population of c. 4,000 adult male citizens, and argues that this represents an oligarchic regime with a high property census; Knoepfler 2007, 679–81, argues for a full franchise, but reconstructs a population of “easily” 6,000 citizens. Corinth: Salmon 1984, 19 (c. 900 km
²
); 5,000 hoplites in 479: Herodotus 9.28; this may represent a two-thirds mobilization, which was the norm later: Thuc. 2.10, 47.1. Naxos: Hdt. 5.30.4; territory 430 km
²
: Hansen and Nielsen 2004, 760.

  
73
. Plut.
Solon
9.2 (Salamis);
Mor
. 296ab (Samian dead). Samian territory: 468 km
²
plus mainland possessions: Hansen and Nielsen 2004, 1094. Casualty rates: Krentz 1985a.

  
74
. Sepeia: Hdt. 7.148. Athens: 9,000 at Marathon: Nepos,
Miltiades
5.1; Plutarch,
Moralia
305b; Pausanias 10.20.2; to Athens’ 8,000 at Plataea (Hdt. 9.28.6) one must add perhaps 1,000 hoplites serving as marines in the navy at the same time. Megara and Sicyon: Herodotus 9.28. Two-thirds mobilization: see n. 72, above. In 431 BC, Athens’ field army was just under half of all available hoplites and cavalry: Thuc. 2.13.6–7.

  
75
. Proportions: Hdt. 9.29; Sparta: seven light-armed helots for every hoplite; cf. 9.10.

  
76
. Eretria:
Ath. Pol
. 15.2;
Pol
. 1306a35–36. Chalcis: Herodotus 5.77. The other indication of time, “when cities were growing larger,” is of no use: at 1305a8–13, 18–28, Aristotle claims that “the cities were not large” at the time of Theagenes (c. 630), Peisistratus (c. 550), and Dionysius (c. 400); at 1310b17–31, he claims that “the cities had already grown large” at the time of Cypselus (c. 650), Peisistratus, and Dionysius. Critical analysis of Aristotle, see van Wees 2002, 72–77; contra, e.g., Hanson 1995, 237.

  
77
. Size of expeditionary forces: Krentz 2007, 149 (table 6.1); slave attendants: Hunt 1998, 166–68; hoplite casualties among the elite: Aristotle,
Pol
. 1303a8–10;
Ath. Pol
. 26.1. For later developments, see van Wees 2004, 93–95, 103–4.