The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization

687 Pages·1999·7.41 MB·English

by  Victor Davis Hanson

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title : The Other Greeks : The Family Farm and the Agrarian
Roots of Western Civilization
author : Hanson, Victor Davis.
publisher : University of California Press
isbn10 | asin : 0520209354
print isbn13 : 9780520209350
ebook isbn13 : 9780585329772
language : English
subject Land use, Rural--Greece--History, Agriculture--Economic
aspects--Greece--History, Family farms--Greece--History,
Greece--Rural conditions, Civilization, Classical.
publication date : 1999
lcc : HD133.H36 1999eb
ddc : 338.1/6
subject : Land use, Rural--Greece--History, Agriculture--Economic
aspects--Greece--History, Family farms--Greece--History,
Greece--Rural conditions, Civilization, Classical.
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The Other Greeks
The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization
Victor Davis Hanson
With a New Preface and Bibliographic Essay

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University of CaliforniaPress
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1995, 1999 by Victor Davis Hanson
Preface to the Second Edition and Recent Bibliography
© 1999 by Victor Davis Hanson
First University of California Press paperback printing 1999
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hanson, Victor Davis.
The other Greeks: the family farm and the agrarian roots of western
civilization/Victor Davis Hanson; with a new preface and bibliographic essay
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Free Press, 1995.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-20935-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Land use, RuralGreeceHistory. 2. Agriculture
Economic aspectsGreeceHistory. 3. Family farms
GreeceHistory. 4. GreeceRural conditions. 5. Civilization,
Classical. I. Title.
HD133.H36 1999 99-18181
338.1'6dc21 CIP
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (TCF).
It meets the minimum requirements of American Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

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OTHER BOOKS BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece
The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece
Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience
(editor)
Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea
Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
(with John Heath)
The Wars of the Ancient Greeks

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For Cara,
and for Pauli, Billy, and Susannah

And to all the other small farmers everywhere who work
their own ground and yet walk the earth in silence

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CONTENTS
Preface to the 1999 Edition xi
Acknowledgments xxv
Author's Note xxix
Introduction: Agrarianism, Ancient and Modern: The Origin of Western Values and the Price of Their Decline 1
Part One: The Rise of Small Farmers in Ancient Greece
1. The Liberation of Agriculture 25
2. Laertes' Farm: The Rise of Intensive Greek Agriculture 47
3. Hesiod's Works and Days: The Privilege of the Struggle 89
4. The Ways of Farmers 125
Part Two: The Preservation of Agrarianism
5. Before Democracy: Agricultural Egalitarianism and the Ideology behind Greek Constitutional Government 179
6. The Ways of Fighters 219
7. The Economy of Agrarian Warfare 287

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Part Three: To Lose a Culture
8. Hoplites as Dinosaurs 321
9. The Erosion of the Agrarian Polis 351
10. Epilogue: World beneath Our Feet 397
Appendix: Farming Words 427
Notes 437
Bibliography of Works Cited 491
Supplementary Bibliography 515
Index 527
Index Locorum 537

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PREFACE TO THE 1999 EDITION
The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization was first published by the Free
Press in 1995. The editors felt that a comprehensive book outlining the Hellenic origins of the West from a new
perspective would appeal to an audience beyond professional classicists. They were especially interested in allowing
readers to gain a sense of "what it was like" for an ancient farmer or militiaman not found in traditional historical
accountsthus the two chapters "The Ways of Farmers" and "The Ways of Fighters,'' which attempted to recreate the
hoplite's agrarian and military experience and outlook with a novel approach.
But in another regard, The Other Greeks is a very traditional book in its attempt to emulate the nineteenth-century
practice of narrative, linear history. Quite simply, I wanted to organize a diverse corpus of ancient evidence in order to
present a logical and readable account of a very important event in the history of the West, a picture of farmers
presented in comprehensible language, without the use of theoretical jargon, bar graphs, intricate computer-enhanced
maps, and the increasingly common cargo of postmodern theory and social-science wisdom that now characterizes both
ancient and agrarian history. In this regard, I tried to offer summaries at each chapter subsection, repeated important
concepts, italicized key words, and drew on pragmatic, firsthand experience of tree and vine farming, all as part of the
effort to make the esoterica of Greek

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history accessible to those readers without knowledge of the ancient world.
As the price of presenting such an unsophisticated narrative, I was quite willing toand didincur from more theoretical
scholars the charges of positivism, determinism, and historicism. All three are fair criticisms: I do think there is enough
evidence from the world of the polis to present a coherent, generally agreed-on picture of the ancient countryside. As for
determinism, I do see a growth in population, through which a middling agrarian group established its political,
economic, and military agenda, flourished, and declined. And I confess that as a historicist, I see the values and the
spirit of that renaissance as integral to Western culture and equally as important today as in antiquity. Indeed, that
concern with contemporary agriculture in The Other Greeks was characterized by at least one ancient historian as
"idiosyncratically modernising." And more than one classicist has remarked to me that such personal observations about
farming and asides on contemporary issues would cause the book to be "cited far less than it is used."
It is not easy to serve two masters. Given the usual parameters of trade-book readership, The Other Greeks had to be
aimed at general readers who were not merely interested in ancient Greece, but also were concerned with the survival of
the agrarian and Western tradition in contemporary North America. That idea of appealing to a dual audienceand the
problems of providing enough documentation for a radically new thesis to satisfy scholars without burying the
nonspecialist under an avalanche of documentationexplains two other peculiarities about the book: its structure and
multiple themes.
First, its method of citation is perhaps unusual. Simple statements of fact are supported by parenthetical references in
the text to ancient Greek and Latin authors and occasionally to the works of modern scholars. Larger discussions of
controversies that may interest a general reader are discussed at the page bottom in asterisked footnotes. In addition,
over fifty pages of more detailed references and discussions intended for classical scholars and ancient historians are
found in smaller print in endnotes at the back of the book, where there is also an Appendix on the ancient Greek farming
vocabulary. Though seemingly a cumbersome system, most readers have found that it works well enough, and thus the
original method of citation in the first edition remains here as first written.

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Second, both the Introduction and the Epilogue deal with two larger issues that grow out of the book's general thesis of
the rise of a novel middling, pragmatic citizenry. I feel that the example of a brief polis florescence (700300 B.C.),
arising after a Dark Age and followed by a polarized Hellenistic era, is a warning to any society that allows its agrarian
population to disappear: middling, autonomous farmers stand as cultural and political critics of the worst excesses of
both unbridled democracy and autocracy, and their pragmatism and autonomy are critical to any consensual society.
Indeed, in both the beginning and the end of The Other Greeks there is an apocalyptic argument that we in the United
States, like the latter fourth-century polis Greeks, are witnessing the end of agrarianismand that the repercussions of that
loss will be just as insidious as they were in the past and thus wholly negative. That idea of the cultural consequences of
the decline of contemporary agrarianism is expanded on at length in Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian
Idea (Free Press 1996), and those troubled by so pessimistic a view are advised to turn to that work for the full argument.
In addition to the main discussion of The Other Greeks, I also raise in both the Introduction and the Epilogue the issue
of contemporary classical scholarship. I make two points. First, scholarship is by nature a suburban and deskbound
enterprise, and thus scholars may often tend to be either uninterested in, or ignorant of, the degree to which an ancient
preindustrial society was agriculturaland what that meant for everyday life. In the case of Greece, that neglect, I argue,
has been especially unfortunate, since we are only beginning to appreciate that the classical Greeks were largely an
agrarian, not an urban people: that, for example, ancient rhetoric or discoursethe subject of hundreds of modern studies
by young theoristswas less important to the majority of the ancient population than the daily struggle to feed and defend
themselves.
Second, I warn scholars and graduate students about a growing irony in the relationship between the study of ancient
middling Greeks and the profession of modern classicists. Specifically, I object to the rise of reliance on theoretical
models and the language of postmodernism in classical scholarship, as well as to interest in esoteric research at the
expense of undergraduate teaching. In short, in classics' eleventh hour, I wish to rally ancient historians back to the rich
traditions of the past, to urge them to write broad narratives in engaging prose, and to see that generalization

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