Agriculture

Agriculture was practiced from the Neolithic period onward, but in the Near East time and again innovations were introduced that with some delay would find their way westward to the Mediterranean world. The 1st millennium BC, especially the first half of that millennium, was of great importance in this regard. It was in that period that an improved species of wheat reached Greece and a little later Italy; that the vine spread as far as the south of modern-day France; and that the cultivated olive began its triumphant conquest of practically all the coastal areas of the Mediterranean, to become a mainstay of agriculture in many regions. It was also the period in which various fruit trees as well as the art of grafting reached the Mediterranean lands from the Near East, especially from Mesopotamia and the mountainous regions to its north. The new food sources enabled the demographic recovery of Greece in the 9th and 8th centuries BC and help explain the relatively strong population growth of Italy—a more fertile country than Greece—in the course of the 1st millennium BC, from which the Greek colonies, the Etruscan cities, and the Italic peoples would all profit.

The techniques of agriculture were traditionally rather simple, and there were no major improvements in this period. This meant that higher production could only be achieved by extending the area of cultivation; hence, the growth of settlements and cultivated fields in areas that had been sparsely populated before, such as many parts of Attica around the center of Athens; and hence the migration of Greeks to various new poleis outside the motherland in the Archaic period. Work on the fields was performed either by the farmer-landowner himself or by peasant-renters or serfs dependent on him. As far as we know, this was the case everywhere in the Near East and the Mediterranean. In the short periods each year in which much of the work was concentrated, especially in the harvest period, extra labor was often hired, or the work was divided between all family members and neighbors that could be mobilized. In general, however, agriculture was not very labor intensive, which made it unprofitable to have slaves to do the work. Slavery on a large scale

Antiquity: Greeks andRomans in Context, First Edition. Frederick G. Naerebout and HenkW. Singor. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 byJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Was unknown in agriculture. Yet there were large landowners: certainly, the kings, high officials, and military officers, presumably some private individuals too, in Egypt and in the Near East, but their properties were scattered over various unconnected parcels worked by renters or serfs. Large estates of continuous fields or pastures worked by slave gangs, such as would appear in a later period, for all practical purposes did not exist.

Perhaps cattle breeding and meat consumption in Greece were more important in the Dark Age than in later periods: in the epics of Homer, at least, meat eating is presented as a normal diet. The rise in population in the 8th century BC would have led to the transformation of pasturage into agricultural fields and thus to the marginalization of cattle breeding. In any case, since the Archaic period, cattle breeding was often literally pushed to the margins of the polis territories, where sheep and goats roamed the uncultivated areas that as a rule were considered communal property. Cows and oxen were used to haul plows and carts; cattle were not raised for milk, and only very rarely for meat production. Fish, such as tuna, on the other hand, were a common and relatively cheap source of food. Poultry would arrive in Greece from Asia only in the 6th century BC. In relatively sparsely populated areas, game would provide extra meat. Horses everywhere belonged only to the wealthier citizens or kings; their possession lent the owners great prestige, but horses were hardly of much practical use outside warfare, sports, and hunting. Because of the amount of fodder they consumed, ownership of horses was a parasitic luxury in a basically weak agrarian economy.