Agriculture
Above: Greek landscape under cultivation. Source: Unsplash. Creator: Douglas Williams. License: Unsplash license.
Articles from the
Oxford Classical Dictionary
Greek agriculture | cereals | olive | wine | fig | agricultural implements | technology | climate | irrigation | labour | arboriculture | granaries | Greek pastoralism | transhumance | food & drink | food supply | famine | water | water supply | agricultural writers
In ancient cities, 'daily bread' was a subject of prayer. Grain-harvests could be fickle, but a regular supply was a matter of survival. Food-shortage could lead to social unrest, and long-term solutions required all kinds of political an institutional resources from the authorities. Yet feeding the city was not just a problem. It was an opportunity for the political management of the poor, for competitive display among the elite, and for making money. The essays in this volume present cities and societies which responded to these challenges in very different ways, from the agro-towns in which the citizens commuted to their fields to the market-supplied towns in which an urban proletariat worked for their bread. The articles debate the food supply through all its aspects, economic, demographic, political and institutional to give a new perspective on this debate at the heart of our understandings of ancient society.
What value did the Greeks put on farming beyond its capacity to produce food? Who owned the land, and who worked it? Alison Burford examines the Greeks' preoccupation with land and agriculture to understand the nature of their society and culture in general. She focuses on how the need to make the land productive influenced social, economic, and cultural beliefs and practices throughout Greek society. Specific areas of study include land allotment in the early settlements, the function of the antidosis, Xenophon's true intent in his Oeconomicus, the understanding and use of the term peasant, environmental concerns, and nationalist feelings among tied laborers. "There can be little doubt that whenever a steady breeze got up about threshing time, most people in the Greek world would have remarked, 'Here was a fine day for winnowing.'" -- from the Introduction
Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy
Lin Foxhall explores the cultivation of the olive as an extended case study for understanding ancient Greek agriculture in its landscape, economic, social, and political settings. Evidence from written sources, archaeology, and visual images is assembled to focus on what was special about the cultivation and processing of the olive in classical and archaic Greece, and how and why these practices differed from Roman ones. This investigation opens up new ways of thinking about the economies of the archaic and classical Greek world.
Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece
This new work from Thomas Gallant provides a highly original analysis of the ancient Greek domestic economy. The nature of their environment together with only rudimentary technology caused the Greek peasants to develop an extensive but delicate web of risk-management strategies. The author details these strategies alongside the key adaptive measures by which the ancient Greeks coped with major fluctuations in food production and supply. As a whole, the book makes a major contribution to the perennial debate about how peasants secure the basic conditions of material subsistence.
Cities, Peasants, and Food in Classical Antiquity
This is a collection of essays in the social and economic history of Greece and Rome by a leading historian of classical antiquity. They are grouped in three overlapping sections, covering the economy and society of cities; peasants and the rural economy; and food supply and famine. The essays, all previously published, are presented together with bibliographical addenda by Walter Scheidel that summarize and assess scholarly reaction to the author's work. The range of subject matter and approach is wide and the treatment original and provocative.
Everyone has been taught that the Greek city-state is the ultimate source of the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and politics. For generations, scholars have focused on the rise of the city-state and its brilliant cosmopolitan culture. Now Victor Hanson, the author of several studies of ancient warfare and agriculture, has written a book that will completely change our view of Greek society. For Hanson shows that the real "Greek revolution" was not the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, remarkable as this was, but the historic innovation of the independent family farm. The heroes of his book, therefore, are what he calls "the other Greeks" -- the neglected freehold farmers, vinegrowers and herdsmen of ancient Greece who formed the backbone of Hellenic civilization. It was these tough-minded, pracitcal, and fiercely independent agrarians, Hanson contends, who gave Greek culture its distinctive emphasis on private property, constitutional government, contractual agreements, infantry warfare, and individual rights. Hanson's reconstruction of ancient Greek farm life, informed by the hands-on knowledge of the subject (he is a fifth-generation California vine and fruit-grower), is fresh, comprehensive, and totally absorbing. But his detailed chronicle of the rise and tragic fall of the Greek city-state also helps us to grasp the implications of what may be the single most significant trend in American life today -- namely, the imminent extinction of the family farm.
The ancient Greeks were for the most part a rural, not an urban, society. And for much of the Classical period, war was more common than peace. Almost all accounts of ancient history assume that farming and fighting were critical events in the lives of the citizenry. Yet never before have we had a comprehensive modern study of the relationship between agriculture and warfare in the Greek world. Hanson describes the relationship between these two important aspects of life in ancient communities. With careful attention to agronomic as well as military details, this study reveals the remarkable resilience of those farmland communities. In the past, scholars have assumed that the agricultural infrastructure of ancient society was often ruined by attack, as, for example, Athens was relegated to poverty in the aftermath of the Persian and later Peloponnesian invasions. Hanson's study shows, however, that attacks on agriculture rarely resulted in famines or permanent agrarian depression. Trees and vines are hard to destroy, and grainfields are only briefly vulnerable to torching. In addition, ancient armies were rather inefficient systematic ravagers and instead used other tactics. This work suggests that for all ancient societies, rural depression and desolation came about from more subtle phenomena―taxes, changes in political and social structure, and new cultural values―rather than from destructive warfare.
Below: Amphora (storage jar) showing a scene of olive gathering; 520 BCE. Source/creator: The British Museum.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
A Companion to Ancient Agriculture
ed. David Hollander & Timothy Howe, 2021
This work offers an authoritative overview of the history and development of agriculture in the ancient world. Focusing primarily on the Near East and Mediterranean regions, this unique text explores the cultivation of the soil and rearing of animals through centuries of human civilization -- from the Neolithic beginnings of agriculture to Late Antiquity. Chapters written by the leading scholars in their fields present a multidisciplinary examination of the agricultural methods and influences that have enabled humans to survive and prosper. Consisting of thirty-one chapters, the Companion presents essays on a range of topics that include economic-political, anthropological, zooarchaeological, ethnobotanical, and archaeobotanical investigation of ancient agriculture. Chronologically-organized chapters offer in-depth discussions of agriculture in Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia, Hellenistic Greece and Imperial Rome, Iran and Central Asia, and other regions. An insightful concluding section helps readers understand ancient agriculture from a modern perspective.
In this book Kronenberg shows that Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Varro's De re rustica and Virgil's Georgics are not simply works on farming but belong to a tradition of philosophical satire which uses allegory and irony to question the meaning of morality. These works metaphorically connect farming and its related arts to political life; but instead of presenting farming in its traditional guise as a positive symbol, they use it to model the deficiencies of the active life, which in turn is juxtaposed to a preferred contemplative way of life. Although these three texts are not usually treated together, this book convincingly connects them with an original and provocative interpretation of their allegorical use of farming. It also fills an important gap in our understanding of the literary influences on the Georgics by showing that it is shaped not just by its poetic predecessors but by philosophical dialogue.
Ancient Greek Agriculture: An Introduction
Signe Isager & Jens Erik Skydsgaard, 1992
The initial focus of this book is firmly on the art of agriculture proper, the tools and the technique, the plants cultivated and the animals reared. Thereafter, Isager and Skydsgaard focus on the position of agriculture in the society of gods and men in the Greek city-states. The arguments of this work are strengthened by the book's close adherence to contemporary Greek sources, literary as well as archaeological, avoiding the use of later as well as Roman material.
Farming and Poetry in Hesiod's Works and Days
This book fills a void in classical scholarship with its treatment of the interplay between farming and poetry in Hesiod's poem and in later Greek poetry. Its accessibility to those unfamiliar with ancient Greek is heightened by the translations of Greek words and phrases, along with an introduction aimed at the non-specialist, yet the book deals masterfully with semantics and parallels within Greek poetics in order to reveal the interconnectedness of Hesiod's Almanac and moral themes. This work will be of interest to classical scholars and the general reader interested in Greek poetics.
The interpretation of archaeological remains as farmsteads has met with much debate in scholarship regarding their role, identification, and even their existence. Despite the difficult nature of scholarship surrounding farmsteads, this site type is repeatedly used to describe small sites in the countryside which have varying evidence of domestic, storage, and agricultural activity. The aim of this book is to engage with the archaeological and textual data for farmsteads dating to the Classical-Hellenistic period of mainland Greece, with the purpose of understanding how these sites fulfilled agricultural roles as centers for occupation, storage, and processing for those working the land. The conclusions reached here stress the connected nature of the agricultural landscape, and demonstrate how farmsteads played a fundamental role in ancient Greek agriculture.
Though Greece is traditionally seen as an agrarian society, cattle were essential to Greek communal life, through religious sacrifice and dietary consumption. Cattle were also pivotal in mythology: gods and heroes stole cattle, expected sacrifices of cattle, and punished those who failed to provide them. This work ranges over a wealth of sources, both textual and archaeological, to explore why these animals mattered to the Greeks, how they came to be a key element in Greek thought and behavior, and how the Greeks exploited the symbolic value of cattle as a way of structuring social and economic relations. McInerney explains that cattle’s importance began with domestication and pastoralism: cattle were nurtured, bred, killed, and eaten. Practically useful and symbolically potent, cattle became social capital to be exchanged, offered to the gods, or consumed collectively. This circulation of cattle wealth structured Greek society, since dedication to the gods, sacrifice, and feasting constituted the most basic institutions of Greek life. McInerney shows that cattle contributed to the growth of sanctuaries in the Greek city-states, as well as to changes in the economic practices of the Greeks, from the Iron Age through the classical period, as a monetized, market economy developed from an earlier economy of barter and exchange. Combining a broad theoretical approach with a careful reading of sources, this book illustrates the significant position that cattle held in the culture and experiences of the Greeks.
A rare depiction on a kylix (drinking cup) of a farmer plowing his field; ca. 560-550 BCE. Source/creator: The British Museum.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
The controversial thesis at the center of this study is that, despite the importance of slavery in Athenian society, the most distinctive characteristic of Athenian democracy was the unprecedented prominence it gave to free labor. Wood argues that the emergence of the peasant as citizen, juridically and politically independent, accounts for much that is remarkable in Athenian political institutions and culture. From a survey of historical writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus of which distorted later debates, Wood goes on to take issue with recent arguments, such as those of G.E.M. de Ste Croix, about the importance of slavery in agricultural production. The social, political and cultural influence of the peasant-citizen is explored in a way which questions some of the most cherished conventions of Marxist and non-Marxist historiography. This book will be of great interest to ancient historians, classicists, anthropologists and political theorists, as well as to a wider reading public.
In this pathbreaking book, which includes a powerful new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene, Stephanie Nelson argues that a society's vision of farming contains deep indications about its view of the human place within nature, and our relationship to the divine. She contends that both Hesiod in the Works and Days and Vergil in the Georgics saw farming in this way, and so wrote their poems not only about farming itself, but also about its deeper ethical and religious implications. Hesiod, Nelson argues, saw farming as revealing that man must live by the sweat of his brow, and that good, for human beings, must always be accompanied by hardship. Within this vision justice, competition, cooperation, and the need for labor take their place alongside the uncertainties of the seasons and even of particular lucky and unlucky days to form a meaningful whole within which human life is an integral part. Nelson argues that both the Georgics and the Works and Days have been misread because scholars have not seen the importance of the connection between the two poems, and because they have not seen that farming is the true concern of both, farming in its deepest and most profoundly unsettling sense.
"For all scholars' good intentions, the study of the ancient city has remained the study of the town. This book is an attempt to put the countryside back into the picture. ... In the first part of the book I try to present a picture of the nature of the ancient countryside, its settlement and its exploitation. Then, in succeeding chapters, I try to show how this countryside, both in general and in specific cases, had a pervasive influence on the social, military, political and religious life of the Greek city. I try to present the ancient landscape both 'as it was', and as it was seen to be by the Greeks themselves and to explain why they saw it as they did." -- from the Introduction
Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece
In this book, Pratt explores how oil and wine became increasingly entangled in Greek culture, from the Late Bronze Age to the Archaic period. Using ceramic, architectural, and archaeobotanical data, she argues that Bronze Age exchange practices initiated a strong network of dependency between oil and wine production, and the people who produced, exchanged, and used them. After the palatial collapse, these prehistoric connections intensified during the Iron Age and evolved into the large-scale industries of the Classical period. Pratt argues that oil and wine in pre-Classical Greece should be considered 'cultural commodities', products that become indispensable for proper social and economic exchanges well beyond economic advantage. Offering a detailed diachronic account of the changing roles of surplus oil and wine in the economies of pre-classical Greek societies, her book contributes to a broader understanding of the complex interconnections between agriculture, commerce, and culture in the ancient Mediterranean.
A pioneering study in historical population biology, this book offers the first comprehensive ecological history of the ancient Greek world. It proposes a new model for treating the relationship between the population and the land, centering on the distribution and abundance of living organisms.
This collection of essays examines whether today's environmental concerns can help illuminate our study of the ancient world. The contributors consider how the Greeks and Romans perceived their natural world and how their perceptions affected society. This book shows how today's environmental and ecological concerns can help illuminate our study of the ancient world. The contributors consider how the Greeks and Romans perceived their natural world, and how their perceptions affected society. The effects of human settlement and cultivation on the landscape are considered, as well as the representation of landscape in Attic drama. Various aspects of farming, such as the use of terraces and the significance of olive growing are examined. The uncultivated landscape was also important: hunting was a key social ritual for Greek and Hellenistic elites, and 'wild' places were not wastelands but played an essential economic role. This volume shows how Greeks and Romans worked hand in hand with their natural environment and not against it. It represents an outstanding collaboration between the disciplines of history and archaeology.
Sunset and ripening wheat in a field in Patras. Source: Unsplash. Creator: Jason Blackeye. License: Unsplash license.
In this, the first comprehensive one-volume survey of the economies of classical antiquity, twenty-eight chapters summarise the current state of scholarship in their specialised fields and sketch new directions for research. The approach taken is both thematic, with chapters on the underlying determinants of economic performance, and chronological, with coverage of the whole of the Greek and Roman worlds extending from the Aegean Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. The contributors move beyond the substantivist-formalist debates that dominated twentieth-century scholarship and display a new interest in economic growth in antiquity. New methods for measuring economic development are explored, often combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately. Fully accessible to non-specialist, the volume represents a major advance in our understanding of the economic expansion that made the civilisation of the classical Mediterranean world possible.
This book examines the diversity of networks and communities in the classical and early Hellenistic Greek world with particular emphasis on those that took shape within and around Athens. In doing so, it highlights not only the processes that created, modified, and dissolved these communities, but also shines a light on the interactions through which individuals with different statuses, identities, levels of wealth, and connectivity participated in ancient society. By drawing on two distinct conceptual approaches, that of network studies and that of community formation, this book showcases a variety of approaches which fall under the umbrella of ‘network thinking’ in order to move the study of ancient Greek history beyond structuralist polarities and functionalist explanations. The aim is to reconceptualize the polis not simply as a citizen club, but as one interlinked community amongst many. Doing so reveals the interpenetration between public institutions and private networks which integrated different communities within the borders of a polis and connected them with the wider world.
In ancient Greece and Rome an ambiguous relationship developed between man and nature, and this decisively determined the manner in which they treated the environment. On the one hand, nature was conceived as a space characterized and inhabited by divine powers, which deserved appropriate respect. On the other, a rationalist view emerged, according to which humans were to subdue nature using their technologies and to dispose of its resources. This book systematically describes the ways in which the Greeks and Romans intervened in the environment and thus traces the history of the tension between the exploitation of resources and the protection of nature, from early Greece to the period of late antiquity. At the same time it analyses the comprehensive opening up of the Mediterranean and the northern frontier regions, both for settlement and for economic activity. The book's level and approach make it highly accessible to students and non-specialists.
Whether you farm or garden, live in the country or long to move there, or simply enjoy an occasional rural retreat, you will be delighted by this cornucopia of writings about living and working on the land, harvested from the fertile fields of ancient Greek and Roman literature. An inspiring antidote to the digital age, this book evokes the beauty and bounty of nature with a rich mixture of philosophy, practical advice, history, and humor. Together, these timeless reflections on what the Greeks called boukolika and the Romans res rusticae provide an entertaining and enlightening guide to a more meaningful and sustainable way of life. The texts are offered in fresh translations by classicist and farmer M. D. Usher, with the original texts on facing pages. Proof that farming is ultimately a state of mind we should all cultivate, this collection will charm anyone who loves nature or its fruits.
The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations
Max Weber, widely recognized as the greatest of the founders of classical sociology, is often associated with the development of capitalism in Western Europe and the analysis of modernity. But he also had a profound scholarly interest in ancient societies and the Near East, and turned the youthful discipline of sociology to the study of these archaic cultures. This book -- Weber’s neglected masterpiece, first published in German in 1897 and reissued in 1909 -- is a fascinating examination of the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hebrew society in Israel, the city-states of classical Greece, the Hellenistic world and, finally, Republican and Imperial Rome. The book is infused with the excitement attendant when new intellectual tools are brought to bear on familiar subjects. Throughout the work, Weber blends a description of socio-economic structures with an investigation into mechanisms and causes in the rise and decline of social systems. The volume ends with a magisterial explanatory essay on the underlying reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Greeks and the Environment
ed. Laura Westra & Thomas M. Robinson, 1997
Environmental ethicists have frequently criticized ancient Greek philosophy as anti-environmental for a view of philosophy that is counterproductive to environmental ethics and a view of the world that puts nature at the disposal of people. This provocative collection of original essays reexamines the views of nature and ecology found in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus. Recognizing that these thinkers were not confronted with the environmental degradation that threatens contemporary philosophers, the contributors to this book find that the Greeks nevertheless provide an excellent foundation for a sound theory of environmentalism.
Grapes on a trellis in Faistos. Source: Unsplash. Creator: Milada Vigerova. License: Unsplash license.