Hanson - Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, Revised edition

Warfare and Agriculture
in Classical Greece

ALSO BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (1989)

Hoplites: The Ancient Greek Battle Experience (editor, 1991)

The Other Greeks: The Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (1995)

Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (1996)

Who Killed Homer? The Decline of Classical Education and the
Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with John Heath, 1998)

Victor Davis Hanson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England

1998 by
The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hanson, Victor Davis.

Warfare and agriculture in classical Greece / Victor Hanson Davis.[Rev. ed.]

p. cm.(Biblioteca di studi antichi; 40)
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 9780-52021596-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. AgricultureDefense measuresGreeceHistory.
2. War damage, IndustrialGreeceHistory. 3. Attike
(Greece)History. 4. GreeceHistoryPeloponnesian
War, 431404 B.C. I. Title. II. Series.
UA929.95.A35H27 1999
338.14dc21 9752207

CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

14 13 12 11 10

12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO 739.481992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).

To the Memory of
Rees Davis and Frank Hanson

CONTENTS

PART THREE: THE EFFECTIVENESS
OF AGRICULTURAL DEVASTATION

6. The Devastation of Attica
during the Peloponnesian War

Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece was first published in 1983 in the monograph series Biblioteca di Studi Antichi (edited by Graziano Arrighetti and Emilio Gabba, with Franco Montanari, and published by Giardini of Pisa, Italy). The book was, for the most part, favorably reviewed, occasionally cited, and went quickly out of print. At the time of its publication, I was a full-time viticulturist with no plans either to reenter academic life or to pursue serious research about the ancient Greek world again. Except when the occasional letter of encouragement from a classical scholar arrived, I too forgot about this thesis and went on with the business of trying to preserve our small family tree- and vine-farm during the agricultural recessions of the 1980s. I recalled that a fellow graduate student at Stanford University had remarked to me in January 1980, when I was finishing my dissertation, that few scholars had any interest in ancient warfare, much less Greek farming. Worried over that dual warning, I learned from an informal look at library card catalogues of published works in classics that no English-language book or monograph about the ancient Greek world had appeared with the word agriculture in its title or subtitle in the sixty years since W. E. Heitlands engaging study Agricola: A Study of Agriculture and Rustic Life in the Greco-Roman World from the Point of View of Labor (Cambridge, 1921). So I was not surprised that by 1985 Warfare and Agriculture was found only in a few libraries and was little known; indeed I had long ago given away all but one of my complimentary books to scholars kind enough to write me on the farm expressing interest in finding a copy.

Little did I know that as I was farming in Selma, California, in the early and mid-1980s classical scholars were well in the process of reinventing the entire field of ancient Greek warfare and agriculture. Ongoing field surveys of the Greek countryside were exploring ancient population densities, settlement patterns, and the interplay between habitation and climatic and soil conditions. The completion of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae made possible a comprehensive rather than haphazard study of the ancient Greek vocabulary of farming and fighting. Further excavations of farmhouses in southern Attica, the Crimea, and Italy were coming to light. In England, gifted Cambridge students of Anthony Snodgrass and M. I. Finley were applying various interdisciplinary approaches to ancient agrarianism, often employing theoretical models from the social sciences to reconstruct past agrarian economies and ideologies.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s first-generation summaries of these specialized philological, archaeological, and historical studies were beginning to appear, including M.-C. Amourettis Le pain et lhuile dans la Grce (Besanon, 1986), Robin Osbornes Classical Landscapes with Figures (London, 1987), T. W. Gallants Risk and Survival: Reconstructing the Rural Domestic Economy (Stanford, 1991), Robert Sallaress The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), B. Wellss (ed.) Agriculture in Ancient Greece (Stockholm, 1992), A. Burfords Land and Labor in Ancient Greece (Baltimore, 1993), and S. Isager and J. E. Skydsgaards Ancient Greek Agriculture: An Introduction (London, 1993). I have had the privilege to review in print all but one of the above books; they are uniformly excellent, and many of their ideas have saved me from more errors and misconceptions than I can recount.

At the same time, largely due to the selfless, two-decade effort of W. K. Pritchett (The Greek State at War, 5 vols. [Berkeley, 19711991]), the study of Greek warfare was turning from its traditional emphasis on strategy, tactics, logistics, and recruitment to include comprehensive study of economy and social policy. The work of Y. Garlan (Guerre et conomie en Grce ancienne [Paris, 1989]), P. Ducrey (Warfare in Ancient Greece [New York, 1989]), and J. Rich and G. Shipley (editors of War and Society in the Greek World [London, 1993]) ensured that we saw hop-lites as citizens of the polisfor so long mostly farmers who represented the property-owning infantry classand not merely anonymous warriors of the phalanx.

Warfare and agriculture have become fertile areas of contemporary research in ancient Greek history, topics at the heart of the discovery of the true nature of the Greek polis. Consequently, reissue of an updated, accessible, and corrected edition of Warfare and Agriculture perhaps makes even more sense now than its original publication did sixteen years ago.

In the present book, I have made some changes from the edition of 1983corrections of misprints and errors of fact; clarification of arguments; reformation of the entire text; relegation of some material to an appendix; reduction in the amount of quoted Greek and avoidance altogether of Greek scriptall in the interest of providing wider accessibility to readers outside the world of classical scholarship. In a few places in the original text and in the updated commentary, I have also inserted the results of some more recent firsthand experience with crop devastation. In the years since I wrote my doctoral dissertation, I returned to farm trees and vines in central California and was sometimes curious whether orchard and vineyard destruction was as difficult as it had once seemed to me in our ancient sources. Thus on numerous occasions I took lengthy notes when it was time to uproot, dig out, burn, or cut down various fruit trees and vines on the farm in the hope of someday revising the first edition; at various places in the updated commentary of the present edition, I have drawn on those observations.