Wage-earning. Agriculture 3 



as now and more than now, chiefly recorded the exceptional. When 

 we turn to the wage-earner, who earns a living by hiring out his bodily 

 powers to an employer, we are dealing with a wholly different class. 

 These are the free men who in a slave-holding society have to compete 

 with the slave. In the course of the present inquiry we must keep a 

 sharp look-out for every reference or allusion to such persons in the 

 department of agriculture, and in particular note numerous passages 

 in which the status of labourers cannot be inferred with certainty from 

 the language. But the importance of this special point is of course not 

 confined to agriculture. 



I have chosen to limit my inquiry to the case of agriculture for these 

 reasons. First, because it was and is the industry on which human life, 

 and therefore all other industries and all progress, did and do rest. 

 Secondly, because its economic importance in the ancient world, so far 

 from declining, manifestly increased. The problem of food-supply was 

 always there. And it was never more pressing than in the later ages 

 of Rome, when imperial efforts to enforce production, if successful, fed 

 her barbarian armies, at the same time attracting the attention of bar- 

 barian invaders to lands that promised the food-crops which they 

 themselves were too lazy to produce. Thirdly, because the importance 

 of agriculture was and is not merely economic. Its moral value, as a 

 nursery of steady citizens and, at need, of hardy soldiers, was and still _J 

 should be recognized by thoughtful men. Therefore its conditions 

 and its relative prosperity or decay deserve the attention of all his- 

 torians of all periods. Unluckily statistical record of a scientific 

 character is not available for the times that we call ancient, and numbers 

 are notoriously liable to corruption in manuscripts. Therefore I have 

 only ventured to give figures seldom and with reserve. For agriculture 

 we have nothing on the scale of the inscriptions that record wages, for 

 instance on public works at Athens. On the other hand we have for 

 certain periods the evidence of specialists such as Cato^Varro and 

 Columella, to whom we owe much information as to the actual or t 

 possible conditions of rustic enterprise and labour. The relation of I _/ 

 agriculture and agricultural labour to the state as a whole is a subject \ 

 illustrated by great theorists such as Plato and Aristotle. The practical 

 problems of landowning and farming meet us now and then in the 

 contemporary evidence of such men as Xenophon and the younger 

 Pliny. Even orators, though necessarily partisan witnesses, at times 

 give valuable help : they may distort facts, but it is not their interest 

 to lessen their own power of persuasion by asserting what is manifestly 

 incredible. The ancient historians tell us very little, even of the past; 

 contemporary evidence from them is especially rare. They are pre- 

 occupied with public affairs, and the conditions of rustic life and labour 



12 



