The hegemony enjoyed by the values of the land-holding aristocracy is nothing peculiar to Greek and Roman culture. Similar notions were dominant in most preindustrial societies. Think, for instance, of the medieval metaphor of society as composed by the plough, the sword and the book, in other words, the peasantry, the knights and the clergy. Peasants in all such societies constituted the bulk of the working population. This is an important fact to keep in mind when we try to understand agrarian economies. The basic unit of such economies is the household; it is within the family unit that most production is organized, frequently along gender lines (Saller 2007), and afterwards consumed. But peasant producers never exist in isolation. They are spun, often forced into a web of relationships with the surrounding world, the hegemonic aristocratic and urban civilization.
Nevertheless, to many commentators Greek and Roman antiquity is primarily associated with another type of labor: slavery. In classical Marxist theory, antiquity was simply treated as the basic expression of the so-called slave-mode of production. But ancient slavery cannot be understood outside the context of a peasant economy. Even in antiquity, chattel slavery dominated labor relations only in a very restricted set of areas and periods: in the Greek world, particularly the Attica of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries bc, together with an unknowable, but far from all-encompassing number of other poleis like the island of Chios; in the Roman world, the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy, and the province of Sicily between approximately 200 BC and AD 200. The slave economies of these regions emerged as enclaves in a vast sea of peasants (Finley 1980).
The basic production logic of the peasant household is satisficing (Wolf 1966, Garnsey 1980, Gallant 1991, Cartledge 2002b). Labor is organized not with a view to the largest possible profit, but with the goal of satisfying the basic wants of the family members. When these have been met, peasant families have frequently been inclined to stop working. Against the prospect of further drudgery, they have tended to prefer the enjoyment of immediate leisure. The ability of the peasant household to reach its goals, however, is determined by a range of external factors. Most important is the availability and quality of land or, stated differently, the man : land ratio. In a ground-breaking work of agricultural economics, Boserup (1965) was able to show that population growth drove peasants to intensify production by increasing their work effort. When more people had to be fed from the same land, peasants had to put in longer hours in order to increase production. Population growth, in short, forced peasant families to exploit their means of production more efficiently and with greater intensity. In practice, that might, for instance, entail shortening the fallow period or taking in new land which had previously served as a resource for grazing or firewood. The small irrigated plots of Chinese rice-peasants, cultivated with minute care and back-breaking intensity, are a prime example of such a process. But there are also several likely candidates in antiquity such as the terracing of land in classical Attica or the expansion of olive cultivation into very marginal
Zones of late antique North Africa and Syria (Mattingly 1997; Decker 2001). The rise of extensive pottery production for export in some rural districts of southern France during the first and early second centuries ad would be a further example. The proto-industrial production of so-called terra sigillata, red-slipped table ware, in the villages of Lesoux and La Graufesenque benefited from a combination of plentiful firewood and the seasonal availability of rural surplus labor (Whittaker 2003).
By arguing for a positive relationship between population growth and agricultural productivity, Boserup attempted to stand the basic demographic insight of Thomas Malthus on its head. Malthus had made a seminal contribution to the early development of economics as a discipline by pointing out that population growth tended to outstrip increases in production. The prominence of this principle earned early economics the nickname of “the dismal science.” Any attempt by man to improve his economic condition was, in this view, bound to prove futile in the long run. Expanding production would not translate into growth in per capita income, but rather result in more mouths to feed. One cannot say that Boserup has disproved Malthus. Indeed, his basic assumption is still built into her interpretation as the underlying premise. Population growth produces a downward pressure on per capita income. Peasants, however, may respond and try to alleviate this situation by increasing their work-load and thus expand production. Agricultural production and population size remain locked into an uneasy competition. In a pre-industrial agricultural economy, however, Malthusian pressures are bound ultimately to prevail. Based on organic technology (muscle power and animal manure) without access to chemical fertilizer or industrial machines, there are very set limits to how much a peasant can continue to boost his productivity (Scheidel 2007).
One implication of this condition is that the working population in the ancient world is unlikely ever to have achieved a standard of living much above basic subsistence (Hopkins 1995/6, Garnsey 1999: 12-61, Scheidel and Friesen 2008). In medieval Europe the dramatic drop in population caused by the Black Death actually improved living standards for the survivors. With fewer hands available, aggregate production in society plummeted. But with the smaller number of persons to share the land, peasants experienced rising per capita incomes. Generally not enough information has been transmitted on prices and wages from the Greco-Roman past to enable the historian to document such processes. But just enough evidence survives from Roman Egypt to suggest the probable unfolding of a similar scenario in the wake of the arrival of the so-called Antonine Plague which hit the empire in ad 165. A fall in the Egyptian population seems to have been followed by a rise in real wages (Scheidel 2002). Similarly one might hypothesize that living standards of the broad population were generally higher in the north-western part of the Roman empire than in the eastern. Though more prosperous and more intensively cultivated, the eastern regions were also much more densely populated. Hence peasants would have had to compete harder for land, work more and subsist on a diet containing less meat because grazing was scarcer.
But demographic pressures are not the only external influence on the production of the peasant household. Equally important are political pressures (Finley 1976b,
Foxhall 1990). Sometimes authorities mobilized peasant resources for their own purposes in a very direct manner. Forced requisitions by state personnel of transport animals, wagons, or lodging would be one type, corvee labor, for instance to facilitate road building or maintenance of irrigation canals, another (e. g. Cod. Theod. XI, xvi, 15, 18; P.-Oxy. 1409; Mitchell 1976). But much of the time, the peasant producers were simply made to pay for the frequently ambitious construction projects of the political elites, a process which culminated under the Roman emperors. The famed highways which came to span the length and breadth of the empire like a vast cobweb were to a large extent the work of the legions - the professional body of soldiers paid for out of the imperial tribute whose main contributors were the population of the countryside. Peasants have historically had to hand over a substantial part of their produce to others, the lords, the land-owning aristocracy. This imposes a need on the oikos to increase and intensify production to satisfy external demands also. In practice, the process of surplus appropriation has been organized in a whole range of ways. Most of these were also present within the orbit of the Greco-Roman world (De Ste. Croix 1981: 133-74). Serfdom, for instance, has often been discussed as exclusive to medieval feudalism. Certainly, the practice by which peasants cultivate for their own subsistence on their own plots of land for some days of the week and then work on the estate of the lord for the remainder, does not seem to have been in general use in antiquity. But there are many examples of serf-like relationships where peasants seem to be under some sort of control by the landlords either through ties of patronage or from legal obligation. During the wars of the late Roman republic, the nobleman Domitius Ahenobarbus is famously reported to have manned several ships with “his freedmen, slaves and peasants” (Caes. BC 1.34.3). An edict issued by the Roman emperor Caracalla commanded Egyptian peasants to be expelled from the Greek city of Alexandria and returned to their villages to cultivate the land (P. Giss. 40 II 16-29). Similarly, the Seleukid king Antiochos II is on record selling a village with its lands, people (laoi), and households to his former queen Laodike (Welles 1934: no. 18).
We can rarely study in detail such serf-like relations. Our information is simply too scanty. But several groups are on record. Most famous are the Helots of Sparta, an agrarian majority population subjected to a kind of state-serfdom where they had to supply auxiliaries to the army and provide their Spartan citizen-masters with agricultural rents (Alcock 2002; Luraghi and Alcock 2003). Other groups would include the Thessalian penestai, the laoi and temple peasants of Anatolia and various crown peasants or tenants, enjoying a mixture of special privileges and particular obligations to the monarch (Rowlandson 1985; Kehoe 1988). Another candidate for inclusion in this group is the so-called late Roman colonate. It was formerly believed that the late Roman state had tied all peasants in the empire to the land. That belief is now in need of serious modification. The state simply did not control the countryside to the extent that it could impose such a measure uniformly across its vast realm. The regulations issued by the emperors only form part of a complex of factors which increasingly strengthened the position of the landowners in relation to the peasantry (Cod. Iust. XI, 51; Wickham 2005: 520-27; Carrie 1997; Grey 2007).
At any rate, landlords did not necessarily need special legal privileges to tap the resources of the peasant population. Tenancies were used in many areas to organize the relationship between the elite and the free peasantry. The latter was granted the right to cultivate the land in return for a stipulated rent, the specific contents of which varied from region to region. With this often came relations of debt. It seems that most peasant farms were small and therefore walked a tightrope (Brunt 1971, chap. 19; D. Crawford 1971, chap. 8). Harvest failure, a recurrent curse of pre-industrial agriculture, might leave the peasant unable to pay his rent or feed his family and thus force him to approach the bigger landholders to obtain a loan to see him through till next harvest or provide him with seed grain. But that was a risky strategy. Further complications might see the peasant family descend down a slippery slope of rising debts, growing obligations and increasing dependency. Listen to how a peasantry reduced to submission might have to grovel: “To Flavius Apion, the all-honored and most magnificent. . . from the council of the chief men of the village of Takona. . . which village is dependent upon your honor’s house. . . We acknowledge that we have received from your honor on loan. . . as seed for the crops. . . two hundred artabas of uncleansed corn. . . We will pay back without fail to your honor the same amount of corn, new and sifted. . . without delay and on the security of all our property which is thereto pledged” (P. Oxy. 133, editor’s trans.).
This is where the much-disputed concept of autarky enters the picture. It has frequently been objected against the emphasis on peasant household production that these units were not self-sufficient, not autarkic (e. g. Horden and Purcell 2000). But that is beside the point. Autarky does not describe economic reality. No peasant household could be completely self-sufficient and therefore they had to band into villages and city-states, as Aristotle remarked in the Politics (1.4-8). Autarky was an economic strategy. By attempting to produce most, but not all, of what they needed at home, householders sought to retain a measure of control in relation to the outside world in order to safeguard their independence or at least keep the level of dependency to a minimum, as Horace’s charming description of the unfortunate peasant Ofellus makes clear (Sat. 2.2). The condition of the peasants was shaped by the combined pressures of population and aristocratic power and the ability of peasant households to resist. All these factors varied locally, and results would have been equally diverse, as our evidence indicates. But high rents in Egypt (Rowlandson 1996: 249) and the short-term period of lease envisaged by classical Roman law (Dig. 19.2.13.11; 19.2.24.4) both indicate that the balance was frequently tilted against the peasantry.
In some city-states, however, particularly Athens and Rome, the peasantry succeeded in tilting the balance somewhat their way for a while (Finley 1980, chaps 2, 4). Following the legal abolition of debt bondage, the peasant populations managed to strengthen their position within the state. The reason behind this success was that they were needed as soldiers. This improved their bargaining strength and enabled them, or at least a sizeable portion of them, to assert their independence from the landlords. The latter, in turn, accepted this because they were able to find a substitute - slaves. Slavery as a dominant form of surplus appropriation seems to be the exception in world history. Based on brute force, it has normally only been employed when labor was otherwise unavailable. This, for instance, was the case with the New World plantation economies of the early modern period. Black slaves were imported because the indigenous populations, suffering heavily from the introduction of lethal epidemic deceases hitherto unknown to the region, were unable to shoulder the task. Slavery, in other words, made it possible to intensify agricultural production in the absence of a capable or willing peasantry (Wallerstein 1974, chap. 2). There was no shortage of hands either in classical Attica or in the Italy of the Roman republic. This is a major difference from New World slavery. But based on military service and political participation, a sizeable portion of the peasant populations had been able to assert a degree of independence for themselves. As a result, the aristocracies had to resort to the exploitation of slaves, the quintessentially dependent and disenfranchised form of labor.
In Italy the effects were dramatic. Following in the wake of the ceaseless Roman military triumphs, won by armies manned by peasant soldiers from the third to the first century bc, a slave economy emerged centered on the Tyrrhenian coastal regions of central and southern Italy and Sicily (Scheidel 2004, 2005, 2008b; Schiavone 2000; Hopkins 1978b). Plentiful supplies of slaves captured by Roman arms enabled the aristocracy to man a system of intensively farmed middle-sized estates existing in symbiosis with small independent peasant farms. Frequently needing to supplement their meager earnings in order to subsist, the peasants constituted a ready source of casual labor to be hired onto the slave-operated estates during periods of peak activity such as harvest time (Foxhall 1990). At the end of antiquity, on the other hand, one can see the opposite process taking place. There we find landowners resisting the recruitment of peasants into the imperial army; they needed them to cultivate their lands even to the extent that they were willing to pay a tax, the aurum tironicum, to avoid having to supply recruits for the draft. In consequence, the Roman state had increasingly to resort to the recruitment of foreign mercenaries, in other words Germanic federate troops (Amm. Marc. 31.4, 31.11; B. Shaw 1999).
World History
