There are clearly vital landownership changes throughout the Aegean. In formerly flourishing Classical-Hellenistic landscapes, sparser Roman-era villas of wealthier individuals replace the denser networks of independent family farms typical for the Classical-Early Hellenistic centuries. Did this lower the intensity of land use, and the size of working populations on the land, whilst at the same time removing the stimulus for productivity for a new class of tenants and sharecroppers, hired estate labor and agricultural slaves or freed-men? The destruction of cities and crops, at times the enslavement of populations, when followed by opportunistic expansion of larger estates by wealthy locals and foreigners, may provide a key background.
In those parts of the Aegean where growth in town and country had been slow in Archaic-Classical times, and really took off in Hellenistic or Early Roman times, a picture of expansion in rural settlement and in town plans under the impact of Rome can certainly be clearly registered, one more typical from the new provinces of the Western Empire, though once again it is larger estates which predominate. Such villas probably mark opportunistic land-grabbing by foreign elites and their local clients. Rome from as early as the second century BC and on into the second century AD was reorganizing significant parts of the Greek landscape, often using new land divisions (cadasters), not just to allot land to Italian colonists, but to punish Aegean cities for disloyalty and reward its own elites and favored Greek communities (Doukellis 1988). This is a major background to the collapse of small indigenous farms in many landscapes and the rise of villa-estates, and an increasing polarization of wealth. A second observable aspect of domestic life may explain the increasing numbers of larger rural estate-centers, and that is the common elaboration of the middle - and upper-class urban house toward semi-public display and reception, increasingly limiting or even excluding the processing and storage of farm products (Westgate 2000). Many wealthier townhouses, unless they were residences for specialist merchants and manufacturers, would now require a country base for such purposes, where a slave or free manager supervised the supporting estate.
It is noteworthy that the Macedonian kingdom had always been unashamedly hierarchical, so that its own agricultural intensification might be expected to encourage sizeable rural estates. We know that the state’s expansion saw elite families gifted with lands in areas absorbed in the fourth century onwards, and now excellent recent rescue excavations by Greek archaeologists have revealed substantial farms suggested to include such “colonial” elite “villas” (Adam-Veleni et al. 2003). Likewise in the countryside of Miletos in coastal Anatolia, a city of oligarchic (aristocratic) constitution, rural survey shows site expansion in late Classical-early Hellenistic times, but with finds of large monumental graves hinting at land concentrated into larger estates (Lohmann 2001). Just as the Hellenistic conquests abroad could spread rural growth in which the rich were notably benefiting, so in the Aegean, Macedonian rule favored the upper class and we may expect here too that the decline of family farms and the rise of villas may be a trend that rises steadily through Hellenistic into Roman times. Indeed recent survey in Messenia (Alcock et al. 2005) has found that once Spartan control of this province was broken by the mid-fourth century BC and the region became independent, rural settlement expanded dramatically, as local cultivators were now able to keep the profits of their labor; but significantly new estates include villas and wealthy graves. Similar evidence comes from adjacent Elis. Overview studies of Roman villa-landscapes in the Mediterranean (Leveau et al. 2000) argue that their particular focus was generally commercial agriculture, or large-scale stockraising, thus representing the estates of the upper half of society. They are often linked with nearby villages (vici) where their dependent labor resided.
A less obvious but perhaps major change could have occurred in the support system for the lower classes in the Aegean. When community-focused city-states were common, state-funded provision of grain in times of scarcity (even if often subsidized by rich citizens) could protect those vulnerable to food shortages. With the LH-ER rise of a commercial economy in foodstuffs and the general impoverishment of city finances, the rich who controlled the majority of surplus production could exploit scarcity for profit, exacerbating the gulf between income classes. On the plus side, the obligation for most Aegean residents to pay cash taxes to Rome brought far greater interaction with marketing, with the result that provincial farmers of all classes gained easier access to international trade goods.
We are still collecting the vital quantitative data on the numbers of rural sites in LH-ER times and the likely populations involved, but provisionally it remains the case that for most Southern Mainland landscapes a real decline in both rural population and land-use intensity can be registered, whilst in previously less developed countrysides in a wider arc of the Aegean, this period can witness a major expansion in rural life. Nonetheless in both kinds of landscape-use, larger estates are the most prominent feature. It is highly unlikely that small-town inhabitants and occupants of attested villages were essentially craft and trade specialists, and we can assume that peasants now concentrated their own subsistence plots around these nucleations where they mostly now dwelt, and provided a major if not the main workforce as hired labor or share-cropper tenants on the estates of the rich which dominated the open countryside. While major movements of Greek population to the Hellenistic conquered lands in the East and large-scale enslavement by Roman armies can help account for temporary reductions in Aegean populations (Davies 2006), that cannot explain why subsequently so many Greek poleis did not compensate through increased births to infill abandoned lands. The texts we have and the archaeological evidence all seem to indicate that the land, in later Hellenistic and ER times, was progressively absorbed into the control of wealthy families, whose preferred exploitation was commercial but localized. Peasant farmers appear to lack the finances or perhaps access to use the remaining landscape in the intensive manner we have postulated for Southern Greece in Classical-Early Hellenistic times. By the mature Roman Empire, both field survey and excavations indicate Aegean landscapes dominated by villa-estates, alongside a lesser number of smaller farms which may well be largely tenanted rather than independent smallholdings.
World History
