12 The Farmer's qualities 



conservative Aristophanes with the suffering farmers was plainly 

 marked. The merits of the farmer-class as 'safe' citizens, the back- 

 bone of a wise and durable state-life, became almost a commonplace 

 Of Greek political theory. Plato_a,nd Aristotle might dream of ideal 

 /states, governed by skilled specialists professionally trained for their 

 ! career from boyhood. In their more practical moments, turning 

 from aspirations to facts of the world around them, they confessed 

 I the political value of the farmer-class. To ^is^otle the best hope of 

 making democracy a wholesome and tolerable form of government lay 

 in the strengthening of this element: the best Demos is the yewpyi/cos 

 77/1,09, and it is a pity that it so often becomes superseded by the 

 growing population devoted to trades and commerce. I need not 

 carry further these brief and imperfect outlines of the honourable 

 opinion held of agriculture in tj^e Greco- Roman world. Aspr7353ucir?* 

 necessary food, as rearing hardy soldiers, as favouring the growth and 

 maintenance of civic virtues, it was the subject of general praise. Some 

 might confess that they shrank from personal labour on the land. Yet 

 even in Caesarian Rome it is somewhat startling when Sallust 1 dismisses 

 farming in a few words of cynical contempt. 



It is clear that the respect felt for agriculture was largely due to 

 the opinion that valuable qualities of body and mind were closely con- 

 nected with its practice and strengthened thereby. So long as it was 

 on the primitive footing, each household finding labour for its own 

 maintenance, the separation of handwork and direction could hardly 

 arise. This primitive state of things, assumed by theorists ancient 

 and modern, and depicted in tradition, had ceased to be normal in the 

 time of our earliest records. And the employment of persons, not 

 members of the household, as hired labourers, or of bondmen only 

 connected with the house as dependents, at once differentiated these 

 'hands' from the master and his family /xjhe master could not habitually 

 hire day-labourers or keep a slave unless he found it paid him to do so. 

 For a man to work for his own profit or for that of another were very 

 different things^/This simple truism, however, does not end the matter 

 from my present point of view. It is necessary to ask whether the re- 

 spect felt for agriculture was so extended as to include the hired 

 labourer and the slave as well as the working master. We shall see 

 that it was not. The house-master, holding and cultivating a plot of 

 lufod" uir'a'secure terinre* tstKe' figure glorified in traditions and 

 legendary scenes. The Greek term ^VTOI^O^ the man who does his 

 own work, is specially applied to liiffi r fsa man that works with his 

 own hands. It crops up in literature often, from Euripides to Polybius 



1 Catil 4 i non fuit consilium . . .neque vero agrum colundo aut venando servilibus officiis 

 intentum aetatem agere. 



