The climate and the topography work together to affect how humans use the land. First, crops are planted during the winter - only then is there sufficient
Water -, and the harvest takes place in the early spring. This agricultural cycle, incidentally, dictated the military season in antiquity: over the winter men stayed home and farmed; only after they had gathered in the harvest could they go out to war. Summer, then, was the time for warfare. The storms which brought the rain also made the winter unsafe for sailing so naval campaigns were confined to the summer as well.
Second, because mountains make a large percentage of the land unusable for humans, the remaining land was intensely worked to best effect. First-rate land tended to be reserved for staple grains, while the second-rate land was planted with trees and used for grazing animals. Herdsmen drove flocks of sheep into mountain valleys and onto meadows too remote for other uses, and goats could find something to eat even on the rockiest patches of ground. Place names such as Aegospotami, “Goat’s Creek” - i. e., only a goat could find something to eat there - provide evidence for the way in which the Greeks exploited goats to make even the least fruitful soil yield something useful.
The harsh struggle to win as much as possible from the land characterizes human settlement in Greece, especially in those periods when the population was growing rapidly. When the land could not yield enough staple crops, what it could produce was converted into food through trade. Megara, for example, had precious little good land after it lost the plain of Eleusis to Athens in the early sixth century (see chap. 5), but sheep could still be kept on the poorer land remaining. The Megarians could work the wool and sell it in Athens and throughout the Athenian Empire, at least until the Athenians banned this in the 430s (see chap. 12). The comic playwright Aristophanes (Acharnians, 519535) actually states that the Megarians started to starve on account of this ban, and even if he was exaggerating for effect, it still shows how the people in a given area could use even second-rate land intensely to produce a commodity for export and thus secure their survival.
States likewise could come under pressure either to conquer additional arable land from neighbors (for example, the “land wars” of the Archaic period - see chap. 5) or to take new land in their territories under cultivation. This could be done by deforestation, but that is backbreaking labor and hence not lightly undertaken. One could also, however, cultivate marginal land which had hitherto served only for grazing. In the fourth century both the Phocians and the Western Locrians appear to have done precisely this. In both cases it led to so-called Sacred Wars since the land in question was dedicated to the god Apollo (see chap. 18). This example illustrates just how the pressure to gain land by whatever means could immediately drive historical developments.
World History
