Changes in agriculture 47 



sacrificed. The passages in which agriculture is connected 1 with large 

 property occur in a play produced 392 BC, at which time great changes 

 had happened. It is highly probable that, among these changes, much 

 Attic land had passed from the hands of ruined yeomen into those of 

 rich men possessed of ready money and able to buy in a glutted market. 

 In a later period we shall find yewpyeiv used in the sense of acting the 

 country landowner. To illustrate the life and ways of the peasant 

 farmers of this period Aristophanes supplies endless references descrip- 

 tive and allusive. The chief of these have been cited above. A few 

 more may be added here. In the Clouds Strepsiades, urging his son to 

 a rustic life, hopes to see him dressed in a leathern jerkin, like his 

 father before him, driving in the goats 2 from the waste (<eXXeo><?, the 

 rocky hill-pasture). Here is a good instance of husbandry in the Attic 

 highlands, in short a case of crofters. What a refugee might hope to 

 save in his flight and take back to his farm on the return of peace 

 it amounts to a few implements 3 is set out in the Peace. Loss of oxen, 

 a yoke of two, driven off by Boeotian raiders, is pitifully bewailed 4 by 

 a farmer in the Acharnians. But in general the farmers of the earlier 

 plays are represented as tough elderly men. They are the 'elder 

 generation/ and the poet genuinely admires them. For the younger 

 generation he has a profound contempt. Evidently he thought that 

 the soundest breed of Athenian citizens was dying out; and I am not 

 sure that he was wrong. 



I conclude that the evidence of Aristophanes on the whole points 

 to an agriculture mainly carried on by working farmers with the help 

 of slaves. This system was subjected to a very severe strain by the 

 war-conditions prevailing for many years, and I do not think that it 

 was possible to revive it on the same footing as before, even when 

 Attica was no longer exposed to frequent raids. It was not merely the 

 loss of fixed capital that told on the farmer class. Importation of corn 

 was so developed and organized to meet the necessities of the crowded 

 city, that it completely dominated the market, and in the production 

 of cereals the home agriculture could now no longer compete with 

 foreign harvests. There remained the culture of the olive and vine: 

 but it needed years to restore plantations of these and other fruit-trees, 

 and to wait for revival needed a capital possessed by few. The loss of 

 imperial revenues impoverished Athens, and the struggle with financial 

 difficulties runs through all her later history. It did not take the 

 poorer citizens long to see that how to get daily bread was the coming 

 problem. State-pay was no longer plentiful, and one aim of jealous 

 franchise-regulations was to keep down the number of claimants. Had 



1 Eccl 197-8, 591-2. 2 Nub 71-2. Cf <f>e\\{a in Isaeus vm 42 p 73. 



3 Pax 552, 1318. 4 Ach 1018-36. 



