História da Grécia Antiga #5 com Donald Kagan, de Yale

okay we were discussing the rise of the polus and I was uh into the subject of the way the Greeks thought about the significance and the function of the polus which is really critical I believe in distinguishing between the polus as example of a city state and other city states in history and it's the notion of what the function of that state is I think that is most striking I um I was about to tell you last time about the poet hiad who lived in a little town uh in biosa to the north of ateka

uh he describes himself as a farmer and in the works and days he talks about um the quarrel he had with his brother and how he was mistreated in his opinion when his brother bribed the uh the Barons the basil in his area uh and cheated him of his Birthright and uh he quotes a um kind of a fable he says he is a fool I'm sorry he tells this this Fable of the hawk and The Night Andale which illustrates really the doctrine of Might over right and the the hawk says he is a fool

who tries to match his strength with the stronger he will lose the battle and with the shame will be hurt also so don't try to fight against stronger people as what he says uh he see it says this is the wrong Doctrine it is better he says to go by the path leading to justice for when Justice is out raged and by the way Justice here is personified in the form of the Goddess called Decay she follows perforce weeping to the polus and the Gatherings of people she puts a Dark Mist upon her and brings

a curse upon all those who drive her out who deal in her and twist her in dealing and he speaks about the word polus more than once in the same G enal context he draws a contrast between the men who give just decisions to strangers and to Natives and who do not depart from what is just and those who practice violence and cruel deeds in the case of the former the polus flourishes and its people Prosper peace Reigns over their land and Zeus keeps them free of Wars they don't suffer famines or disasters they flocks

have thick wool their wives bear them children so fruitful is their land that they are spared the evil necessity of traveling on ships and there you have uh an interesting point about the Greeks he is not alone in saying for God's sake try not to take a voyage at Sea because your chances of coming back are really bad which was a reality uh to a degree that's a very strange thing because the Greeks turn out to be an enormously active sea fairing people with tremendous fear of the sea I think that those things are connected

but what about those who don't follow the path of righteousness of justice of Decay Zeus orders severe punishments for them often even a whole polus is paid punishment for one bad man his people are troubled by disasters plagues famines the men die the women are Barren at another time Zeus destroys the wide camped Army of people or wrecks their city with its walls or their ships on the open water well one thing that emerges from these lines in hiad is that PO the polus is already there there is no way to talk about what he's

talking about in the kinds of settlements that existed before the invention of the Pol and that I think is worth mentioning if our date for him which is very problematical but if it's right roughly then by certainly by 700 BC there are people who know what poce are poce exist but beyond that there is the fact that for the Greeks that early and Always by the way it remains so the notion of uh justice is directly connected with a polus the only place where Justice exists or can exist is in a polus the only way

you can lead a good life is if you live in a polus and when you do live in a polus of course you will have to behave justly because and this is tremendously important your behavior doesn't affect just you and your family it in involves the entire Community remember even one bad man can ruin a polus that is a very strong statement about the priority of community and it's very different from the values that we knew we saw in The Iliad and the Odyssey you cannot imagine it seems to me in the world that heia

describes Achilles or anybody else saying well you insulted me and so I'm not going to fight anymore for my polus that would have been inconceivable in this world now so we're on at this given this information we are on to the problem that will be a problem for the Greek polus for the rest of its history and is really a problem to this very day for all people who live in some sort of a civilized Community how to reconcile the interests and desires and well well beinging of the individual and his immediate family with those

of the community at large they may seem and probably might even be said to be different and antagonistic at some point and when they are what should you do for the Greeks the answer was pretty clear Hereafter one ought to be interested and to take action in behalf of the polus and we'll be seeing this kind of argument and people presenting positions about it going on into the future but the positions nobody is going to be very comfortable if comfortable at all it would be a very Oddball position to take for the rest of Greek

history no the right thing to do is to take care of yourself in the hell with the polls that's not what you're going to hear what you're going to hear is to the contrary a little bit later when we get to talking about Sparta you'll see a beautiful example of that in the form of the poems of tus who was a poet in Sparta whose uh poetry became so Central to their way of thinking and living that they were used as marching songs for the Spartan Army as they walk and they make the same point

but I'll come back to that now here's another document that you want to be aware of that gives you some idea of what the Greeks fairly early thought the polus was for and about and what the relationship between individual and polus was in this case I'm talking about uh Herodotus who very early in his history speaks about uh tells the story really of U his visit to Lydia to the um land of the great Tyrant cresus who is also the richest man in the world it's not clear that this event ever really took place but

it's really not very important because what Herodotus is doing is telling how he I think and how the Greeks in general viewed the questions at issue Solon goes to visit crus cus asks Solon to Helen who is the happiest the most fortunate both of those things contained in this in the words he uses that he had ever seen Solon was now a man of full years he was a man of greatly respected he turns out to be one of the seven sages that the ancient Greeks selected for the wisest men who ever were so if

uh it would be interesting to know what he thought about that um of course cus had shown his great wealth already to U Solon and in my view he he put the question this way uh so on as he looked around at his fabulous wealth and great Good Fortune he said who who do you think is the happiest most fortunate man you ever knew and you know what the answer was that he expected Solon answered tell us of Athens I bet you never heard of tell us of Athens neither had creis neither had anybody else

outside of a cus was astonished and he asked Solen why why did he select tell us and here's what Herodotus says first because his city was flourishing that is his polus that's the word in Greek was flourishing in his time and he himself had Sons both beautiful and good the words in Greek are Kos kagos for the singular C kagos and it's a kind of a formula it means a a gentleman it means the best kind of person if a person is Kos kagos it means he is good to look at and his soul is

excellent all that you could expect of a person so he had uh uh um two he had Sons beautiful and good and he lived to see children born to each of them and these children all grew up and further because after a life spent in what our people look upon as comfort his end was surpassingly glorious in a battle between the Athenians and their neighbors near elus he came to the assistance of his countrymen routed the Foe and died upon the field most gallantly the Athenians gave him a public funeral on the spot where he

fell and paid him the highest honors so to summarize the happiest the most fortunate man that Solon ever knew was a dead Athenian that nobody ever heard of why what does this say right we see in this passage something that reveals so much about what the Greek values were and you'll see how closely they were tied up with the polus and the Primacy of the polus in their lives well well why why are things good well his City his polus was doing well a man who was living in a polus not doing well how can

he be happy there's just no way secondly Sons now this has to do with the Greek idea about uh immortality and mortality since the Greeks really didn't believe in personal immortality how do you find what everybody wants immortality one way is through your family and it's sons who carry forward the family name so to speak so if you have sons and they are healthy and they do well and they have children that means your name will be carried into the future your memory will persist and that is one form of immortality and then of course

the greatest form of immortality and think of it when you compare it with what was the form of immortal it available to Achilles and his fellow Heroes you fought for your polus and when you died fighting nobly for your polus you will be and and were then you you were uh honored extraordinarily by that polus and what everybody knew then was that your memory would last thereafter so long as your polus lasted and the proof of it is that Herodotus knows that story and is telling it as will other storytellers and in fact it worked

here we are talking about Tellus all these many years later thanks to Herodotus but the point is that that this form of immortality is available to tell us because of his place in the polus because of the Deeds he does for the polus and that is the greatest possible payoff and there you see something that is you know I've been making the case that apus is a different thing from any other city state I'm not aware that any other culture that had city states had ideas of this kind that U uh helped explain why one

was associated with it and cared about it and then the final document I want to use to make the Point here comes from precisely the poems of Solon as we shall see later Solon will be a very important political figure in Athens and at a critical moment in Athenian history the Athenians will give him the honor and the responsibility of being the uh sole public official and to draw up a new constitution laws for Athens enormously important job um and in the course of doing that and in the course of defending himself against attacks after

he had done it he wrote but really amount to political pamphlets to defend his actions and to set forth the ideas that lay under his um uh the actual laws that he had put forward and um but as you may know in in writing the earliest kinds of writing among the Greeks anyway I think this is not atypical uh come not in the form of Pros but in the form of poetry and that's because people are used to uh before they use writing they are used to remembering things through verse I don't know if it's

true of you but it certainly is true of people of my generation the things that they taught us in school when they required us to remember poetry no matter how we try we can't forget it and the stuff that we had to remember that was in Pros no matter how we try we can't remember it It's the Rhythm uh I bet even all of you can can remember songs that you have known all your life but not other things so it's a great nemonic device but in any case that's why uh solon's pamphlets are written

in poetry and uh apparently in really good poetry and so it we have his very words here is a a a fragment from one of his poems so the public ruin invades the house of each Citizen and the courtyard doors no longer have strength to keep it away but it over leaps the lofty wall and though a man runs in and tries to hide in his chamber or closet it fets him out so my spirit dictates to me I must tell the Athenians how many evils a city suffers from Bad government the Greek word for

that is DUS nomia uh and how good government a nomia displays all neatness and Order and many times she must put Shackles On The Breakers of laws now get this aunia levels rough places stop glut and greed takes the force from violence she dries up the growing flowers of Despair as they grow she straightens out crooked judgments remember those crooked judgments that he had complained about well the polus straightens out crooked judgments gives G uh uh given gentles the swollen Ambitions and puts an end to acts of division Strife she Stills the gall of wearisome

hate and under her influence all life among mankind is harmonious and does well wonderful where do all these good things come from from God no they come from the polus when its laws are good and therefore when the government that it provides is uh uh yomia rather than the opposite he is making a claim here which is a very strong powerful one but which was characteristic of the Greeks and I want you to take note of it here he is giving the the law and the polus that gives law it's not merely a negative thing

the way I think modern ideas about law as for instance represented in the uh American Constitution uh are which is to say its function is to prevent wrongdoing to punish [Music] wrongdoing it doesn't really well let me let me just say what the polus claims to do here in Homer it claims actually to shape the character of mankind the polus makes a good polus with following good laws makes its citizens better it not only defeats wrong but it creates right and it creates citizens who behave rightly this is tremendously important because every Greek state that

we know about made the claim that that's what it did no matter what its Constitution was no matter how these differed from one another the idea was that the state has to make good men and that for a city to be good the men must be good um this is very different if you think about the the American idea as an example of the modern way of thinking about these things and the notion is it we can't do anything the laws can't do anything about making people better or worse it takes them as they are

and then it deals with them accordingly but for the ancient Greeks that was not enough you could not uh excuse me if you even think about the founding fathers Madison uh Federalist 10 based upon the principle that you you can expect that men will do wrong things and that a good Constitution has uh the role of balancing the wrongs off against each other so as to produce the closest approximation possible to Justice you can only do that by balancing competitive desires that can be thought of as evil faction was what they were talking about and

everybody thought faction was bad but it was inevitable you couldn't get rid of faction by saying to men it's not good to be fous you should think of the whole community at all times that's not what the American Constitution is about but it was what the Greek constitutions were about a polus ought to make men like that and in fact there's a great revolution in political Theory presented by the American Constitution in that it's not the first thing to do it but it was the first one that was really applied in Turning Away rejecting the

Poss possibility that a a constitution could make men better it accepted the premise that men were what they were and that the state had to control that by various devices so it's very important to see how different from that the Greek idea was and what an enormous responsibility the polus was supposed to have and of course with that there had to be an enormous amount of support for the state by the citizens that's another thing I want to emphasize before I leave this subject the word citizen we should not take that for granted by the

way in Greek the word citizen is Poes deres from polus he's somebody who lives in AP polus he's a citizen well there never was a citizen in the world before the polus there are only subjects people who are subject either to a god or to the king or to a representative of the god or to a Chieftain or whoever but somebody in a sense owns them all but nobody owns a citizen and this is something brand new in the world and we shall see how it crops up in different forms and how it shapes the

course of Greek history well this whole business presents the problem I mentioned a moment ago all of us have this natural selfishness when we are born we all seek our own interests and soon we join up with the family we want the family's interest up to a point uh and how is this fit together with the needs of the community at large a problem the Greeks always wrestled with but when you get down to the fifth century and indeed the latter part of the fifth century there is a marvelous document that you will be reading

uh in through cities the famous funeral oration of Pericles delivered in the winter of 43130 BC where one of the in my judgment one of the great things about Pericles was that he had given a great deal of thought to this problem and presented the best argument he could think of with for solving that problem which was to claim that the individual's highest needs and greatest personal and family goals could be met only through the polus that his well-being was tied up inextricably with the well-being of the polus now you know you don't have to

buy that and individuals undoubtedly found the strain too much from time to time but what's interesting is rather the ideal the claim the theory you cannot truly achieve what you want and need as a human being without being an active and loyal citizen of this uh great Community which you need to achieve what you want in life it is a claim already and as you've seen in Aristotle towards the end of the history of the free polus it is something necessary for mankind it is the center of his life and it explains the Greeks Devotion

to the independence to the autonomy of the Pol and their desire to beautify it and make it as great as it could possibly be all of that sounds very nice and it certainly had very nice aspects to it but there was of course a downside to it as well which is every polus wanted to be great and being Greeks they wanted to be greater than their neighbors and sometimes that involved conflict and it often among the Greeks did in involve War now the Greeks were not unique in history in constantly being at war that is

if you just examine the history of the human race so soon as they were sufficiently organized to wage war they began doing it all the time but it is true that the life of the Greek uh world was much more filled with war throughout the history of the pols than other civilizations because other civilizations after a time had one great power that was able to dominate the entire region Egypt being the best example so that no longer was war possible but the flip side of that is there was also another thing that was impossible freedom

and in Greece you have a lot of war and you have a lot of freedom and all of that is tied up I think very much with the development of this very special thing called the polus now let's take a look at other aspects of the polus not ideas but rather how it functioned how it how its function developed and how that uh helped to shape the characteristics that it showed in its fullblown period that is to say The Classical period I want to talk about uh there were really sort of three things that come

together one of them is how the Greeks the in the late Dark Ages and on into the period in which the polus emerges made their living and the second has to do with how they fought and um uh what's my was my third there is a third l oh yes and the third is not these are not necess necessarily in the same in any particular order and also how they were governed or rather how they governed themselves all of these three things uh in my judgment are necessary to understand how the polus came into being

how it came to be what it was and how it came to fulfill and a and believe in these ideas that I have just been telling you about and I should say at once that this is now a very controversial subject uh let me just back up a second in a way where along the way I'm attempting to also to answer the question that people always ask me when they understand I'm a a historian about Greece and if they have any interest in the subject they say yeah yeah the Greeks were terrific they achieved wonderful

things they were a miracle golden age and all that but tell me how did that happen why did they do that why them and not somebody else and until I Came Upon A a brilliant solution that another scholar presents to us all I could do was tell jokes uh I remember way before you guys were born there was a TV show run by Sid Caesar and one of the characters that repeatedly showed up on this thing was a kind of a comic German Austrian professor of seem seemingly everything and then uh car Riner would uh

interview him uh to uh on the topic that was allegedly the topic of the day and on the one I remember best was he was a great aeronautical expert and here he was Landing briefly he was being interviewed by car Rhiner ask him questions and in his comic German accent uh giving silly answers but finally um rer says well thank you Professor that's all very wonderful but you know our audience would really like it seems like a simple question but it's awfully hard to understand how can a great big enormous heavy thing like this airplane

get off the ground and he said oh it's a very simple question it's not difficult to answer I mean you know the wings go and the a runs and then the motor on the engine and it it's a miracle how it gets up there and that is the way I used to explain the Greeks because I had no better idea I could bumble around about geography and this and that but nothing then there came a great voice from the West Victor Davis Hansen who uh was a professor at um Fresno State California um thought about

this and he brought to it in addition to extraordinary intelligence and uh remarkably good knowledge of Greek and the Greeks something a magical additional element and that was the fact that he was a farmer and he was I think in the fifth generation that had farmed the same piece of Farmland in California in the Central Valley of California uh ever since the 19th century and what and that climate by the way and that whole scene is very similar to the Mediterranean kind of a climate that the uh Greek uh farmers were engaged in and so

that it had potentially Hansen thought and I think he was right uh proper analogous possibilities and U he came to the conclusion that much could be learned about the development of the polus if one looked at the business of how one farms in these kinds of environments and I think that turns out to be a great key to understanding what's happening and it's and everything you hear from me on this subject subject I learned from Hansen it is needless to say being a bright brilliant idea that one guy thought of it has been assaulted on

all sides and there is plenty of controversy about it uh you start with the Dark Ages and there was General agreement I think that the population of Greece had become much smaller than it had been in the Myan period And that from the standpoint of the population it could sustain it was underpopulated and if you start with a look at what was the way in which the land was worked for the purposes of feeding the population it would be okay to take a look at the homeric poems as some kind of evidence to help us

out and Hansen focused on this what was really obviously the unit that mattered in the in the world of Homer the call it the family or but the Greek word is oos o i Kos and it really mean it means household but it comes to mean the land that the family works the Family itself and what does it look like well in The Odyssey there is a a very fine example of the uh of such a place in the form of the uh the oos of King Lees the father of Odus who somehow is still

alive when uus is King but he is in retirement and there he is we see him nobleman that he is former King that he is working the soil and how he does this is very Illuminating what you have uh he because he is clearly according to Hansen involved in the period after the transition away from an earlier style but the earlier style pictures rather large Estates by Greek standard s with raiding Warrior groups going out to make uh uh what steal what they can they are engaged in uh raising livestock which in in Greece is

more likely to be sheep and goats than cattle uh but also breeding horses which are the the thing that is very important for the aristocracy for carrying on Warfare let's flip back a Step Beyond that to Myan civilization for the purpose of noting the great contrast the great change remember like in the ancient near Eastern kingdoms collectivized agriculture control from the center the individuals who carry out the farming or the grazing they are don't they are not permitted individual initiative they are controlled this civilization like these other ancient Mediterranean k kingdoms were rather Advanced they

knew how to cultivate the grape to make excellent wine they knew how to cultivate olives to be able to make superb olive oil and how to process them to produce the result they were engaged in arboriculture they had uh fruit trees that produced very well it was a civilization that was rather advanced in terms of its agricultural skill they knew the techniques for grafting and improving and domesticating species of grapes and olives particularly you know you can't go out there and just plant these things and what comes out is inedible uh unusable until you finally

enter uh what's the word I want um you have to generate um what do you get when you mix two agricultural things gra you have to how to grab but what do you get the hybrids and in order to improve the the category of what you're doing well they could do all that and that's the knowledge that was uh in the palace that the allowed the Kings and his people to send out messages orders to everybody to do what they did now when the palace civilization collapses the whole system collapses there is that explains in

large part why there was such a decline in population why the Dark Ages were so dark lots of poverty lots of starvation but also as I suggested when I spoke of this earlier also the freedom if you could make it to learn and also to grow stronger now it's sometime in that period of the Dark Ages and Hansen would suggest I think probably around the 8th century is the greatest transition somehow the oos obtained means a chunk of land that is understood to belong to it the Greek word for that is a Clos k l

r oos and what happens is now the family knows that it has this land it has it now it will have it next year the the family will be will be able to pass it on from father to son so that he can inherit it and that changes is everything that kind of stability gives promise and is a basis for making every kind of necessary investment in the soil that you are working in order to uh make it better and more profitable for you and it's worth it because you'll be you and your children will

be there to collect it as Hansen says thus arose the claras or the idea of a privately held plot attached not to any one person but rather in perpetuity to a single Farm family or oost and as Hansen points out look at the difference between this and previous ways of working the soil people either rented the land from a large land owner or they were hired help who got nothing for except a salary or a piece of the what they did surfs who were compelled to work the land or in some places even slaves well

they have no incentive put aside the question even of capacity to invest capital for the purpose of uh improving the size and quality of their crops their trees their Vines they would not be willing to take the risk uh without clear title to the land that is the critical thing once they have it and they plant per permanent crops that changes the whole basis of society and the values and the attitudes that go with it in short according to Hansen it is the invention of the family farm that is the critical moment in this very

very important uh moment in the history of the human race and there certainly is no example of it that I know of apart from Greece when it happens right about this period you can imagine that this can only happen gradually none of this happens overnight but if you think of the time span about 900 to 700 BC that is when these changes are taking place I would have guessed at a an an increasing Pace as you go further down the road and then what happens is the population grows and for this the archaeological evidence is

very strong there are getting to be more and more people living on the land of Greece what do they do one of the problems that produces is the more people you have up to a point that's good there are more people who can work to increase the uh the production but beyond that point there are more people to feed than the production can produce and that leads to a desire for expansion of the land available for cultivation now there are a couple of ways that can go one that was certainly important and again it's something

that Hansen emphasizes is what he calls internal colonization it mean you know the way these things work when you are engaged in agriculture it's natural to go first to that soil to that patch of land which is known to be likely to produce the best land the most fertile the most best product the most fertile land there is so uh that's where they start but now when you need more you can't just say I only want the best bottom Land There is you move out to someplace that nobody bothered to farm before because it wasn't

profitable enough because you need more land and so marginal land is brought into play with hard work and Ingenuity and one of the things that Hansen emphasizes so helpful you got to be a farmer to understand these things not everything that you try works and the picture I think the picture he paints of farming reminds us of the picture that the Homer pays of human condition as explained in the you know the pot the two the two jars of Zeus most of the luck is bad it's hard to succeed and some combination of luck and

skill and determination and hard work uh all of that will decide which of these farmers will be successful and which will not and that's an important thing to remember there will be success and there will be failure Hansen says I'm re quoting him the real beginning in the west of individual property holding on a large scale is what he is describing and he he wants to emphasize Hansen himself has a farm that specializes in grapes for the purpose of producing raisins I guess all the raisins in the world are produced near Fresno isn't that right

Curtis and uh he uh points out that the the knowledge of how to do this of how to grow the kind of grapes you want viticulture and also our Bor culture both of these are learned from Asia the Asians were ahead and the the end of the isolation of Greece made possible communication and it allowed this kind of learning and so you got this picture of some people learning how to do these things very very well everything is farmed in a new way and let me just give you a picture of what this new farm

that Hansen describes is like there is intensive farming it's not extensive in the sense you know you just have to scatter your stuff over wide Fields the same thing over a great that's not what it is every piece of that soil is necessary a lot of it can't produce the the crop you would most like to grow so you find another crop that will grow there that can be useful that's that's the picture so you have varied crops among them these are the ones that are typical uh of a Mediterranean climate everybody needs grain bread

is the staff of life as you have been rightly told but so you try if you have if you can grow Grain on your land you grow it where you can if not you have to get it elsewhere olives for the purposes that I mentioned to you the other day that is a very important important one um vegetables can be grown many times in places where you could never grow wheat or grain um fruits from the trees what have I left out Curtis anything have you left out anything that you any of the crops that's

about it and those are the things that you do now observe several things about them they together will make up everything you need to live all the food groups are represented there I have left out Meat and Fish of course neither of them very common in the uh in this part of the world but meat was common enough because there were sheep and there were goats even when uh beef would have been very hard to get but what you need to understand about the Greeks they don't eat a lot of meat now you might say

how come no fish I mean they're surrounded by water everywhere you look well guess what turns out fish don't live everywhere in the water and they don't live very much around Greece it turns out I don't mean no fish but no sort of major schools of fish this is not the banks of New Finland and the Greeks do eat fish but not a lot so their diet is a little bit of that they some of their protein from that uh then bread olive oil fruit vegetables uh cheese milk those kinds of things they can do

well now one of the things farmers in history discovered is that it's very hard to do well as a farmer be if you all you do is grow the crops because people normally don't use what you grow in the form in which you grow it I'm thinking again of grapes and olives they may maybe mostly want olive oil and wine so what do you do well if you're a poor farmer you don't know what else to do you send it off to a middleman who does the Turning of of uh the grap and the olives

into the liquids that are necessary and he takes a good bit of the profit but these Farmers didn't do that they acquired the equipment necessary grape uh and Olive presses which allowed them to purify and to produce uh the final product and that made them more successful than they otherwise would have been and also the another great thing that you have to be able to do if you're going to succeed is the farmers you have to have places to store what you produce so that you will have it for next year when you need it

and also if you have a surplus and that's a desirable thing to do you can sell it probably in the early days this was largely a question of barter you could trade it in for those things that you didn't make yourself and needed but Anya in any case it is a profit but it's no good if it's going to spoil and so it's important to realize the role of Ceramics uh the need to make storage jars that could be sealed very well and preserve this stuff for a very long time and indeed they did that

another thing that you need to understand about these Farms if you're going to grasp their significance for the society that will come is that they are small really small uh maybe a typical uh Farm you might imagine is Maybe 10 acres that is a very small farm some of them of course were bigger there was no regulation about it but we are talking not about the emergence of an agricultural aristocracy but we are talking about the emergence of a an agricultural community of small family farms and one of the things that comes with the development

of this kind of Agriculture as the POC is coming into being is slavery now of course slavery is as old almost as the human race uh and it certainly was already present in the world of Homer uh but it looks like in the Dark Ages there were very few slaves around just because owning slaves Is wealth you can't have slaves without wealth because you got to feed them that's the the very least and no matter how Wicked a master you are dead slaves are no good to you chances are you had to pay something for

them they are like a machine if he slave dies you got to buy a new machine and while he's alive you got to feed him so when you're talking about a very poor Society you're not going to see much slavery but it is true that as the uh Family Farm I've been describing comes into being a way is found to use plays in a productive positive way positive from the standpoint of prophets um and the reason for that is if you are just engaged in um a single crop farming well you plant it you take

care of it and then when the time comes you reap it what do you do in between well there's not much to do so you have to feed the slave all year round to work only a small part of the time that's not very profitable but Hansen's Farm as I like to think of it uh there's work to do all year round because these different crops need attention at different times and they need different kinds of attention and some of them need all kinds of very hard work to keep them going so that there's plenty

of work to be done that is useful and profitable therefore and you will produce enough profit to make it possible so that these small farms you should imagine as typically having one or two slaves playing a part in this uh experience and um the um and the the funny I mean you should not imagine when I say slaves just take out of your mind the plantations of the Old South because when you only have one or two slaves the the master is working right alongside them doing exactly the same work that they are doing and

also instructing them and telling them what's what it's probably if you want to really understand this uh in a practical sense it's more as though these guys are Hired Hands I mean they live around they live in the house they get fed probably with everybody else they work with the master the difference being that they are slaves rather than uh free men and uh and that's one of the funny things is that the the the emergence of this family farm gives rise to the polis's character as a land in which there is a citizenry which

is to say free men who rule themselves so the polus will see the the invention of freedom in this way and oddly enough it is accompanied by the growth of slavery at the same time both slavery and freedom come along at the same time in the Greek world one of the interesting uh documents we have is a fragmentary inscription from the island of kios I think it's in the 8th Century U that Hansen points out as relevant here on it there is little language and it's obviously it's talking about some kind of a Town Council

this is the first time we have such a reference the Greek words are Boule he deos that is I best translation I can come up with is the council for the people it doesn't mean the Council of the people necessarily that would suggest something Democratic it's probably more oligarchic or aristocratic but the point is this is something we haven't heard of ever before there is clearly some kind of an official group that has some sort of political role to play Which is popular in its character it's the word damos that's at the root of deos

and deos means the people all the people that's one of its meanings and I think it's the meaning that's relevant here and as Hansen points out only in early Greece did independent agrarians have free title to their land own slaves and ultimately out of this uh Council that I told you about ultimately came to have control of their own communities uh although the political development came late in the process it did come as Hansen says the new farmer is not just a different kind of farmer but a different kind of person he is a citizen

in his political role he is a soldier but he is a soldier not in the pay or the higher of a king or of an aristocracy he is a Citizen Soldier who has participated in the decision that says it is time to go to war and who will play uh an active role in making decisions about his State's policy and behavior he is independent in a way that nobody who was not a king or an aristocrat in the past has ever been a new kind of man the backbone of the polus as it emerges I

don't want to overstate this there it will still there is still an aristocracy made up of the old guys and uh they don't just disappear and there will be a long stretch in which there will be some degree of conflict between these new independent farmers and the old established aristocracy and never does that aristocracy go away that's old I'm simply emphasizing what's new in the situation and it's very new indeed I might just uh say a little bit more um Hansen has ACT marvelous situation in which he's a scholar telling us about these these developments

in the world of ancient Agriculture and farming but he's also an active farmer and reacting to what happens to Farmers today he's written a book uh a wonderful book called feels without dreams which is the story of modern farming in America which it's also true of all of Western Europe um which is to do pretty much with the abolition of farmers and I just don't think it's right for me to pass without mentioning the significance of that nobody knows anything about it uh what percentage of Americans do you think worked on farms at the end

of the the 19th Century 20 60 you better believe it's in 6070 and the further back you go in American history the closer to 90 and 95% it gets that's the history of the world the whole human race has spent the bulk of its time farming what percentage of Americans are engaged in farming today well the figure I saw last was a number too small to be mentioned I mean to say you just can't really say how much it is but all right 2% does anybody know a farmer how how come just by accident grandf

Still Still farming God bless him is his son farming no kidding where is this fantastic that's a marvelous thing please give give him my greetings um but it it's kind of a miracle I don't know any Farmers oh yeah I know Hans but if I didn't know him I wouldn't know any Farmers so now I don't want to go too deeply into this if you're interested in this subject get a hold of his book but uh I think it's really what is inescapable is farmers are a sociological category of people different from non-farmers in all

kinds of critical ways and it is just a an example of how uh this whole business has disappeared nobody even thinks about it anymore if you were to say to me what do you think is the most important thing however you define thing that has changed the character of life in the United States in the 20th century I would say The Disappearance of farmers there are so many ways in which that has changed the world but I can't do justice to it but Hansen does so if you want to read Fields without dreams you can

ponder the significance of this great change now I've talked to you essentially about the economic aspect of this uh phenomenon and I'd like to turn uh next give me a second here I just want to find out where I am in this right these are all my proofs to tell you to support all the things that I've already told you but I'm not going to bother proving it take too long uh well I guess the next thing I might mention is in the area of politics if you look at the world of minini once again

we've already seen this you have a despera of some kind you have some kind of a lord I mean a king if for lack of a better name a monarch who fundamentally rules and everybody is subject to him he has an aristocracy around him he has lot kind of helpers but he's the boss and that's what you see in the world everywhere else um after that if you examine as best we can the cities of the Dark Ages and ask what kind of government if you want to use that word would these communities have had

you probably wouldn't do badly if you looked at the Odyssey for the best Clues you could find of course they won't be perfect you know this mixed character of the world of Homer but still if you look at the world of Odus his home what's going on in um uh in Ithaca there are some valuable Clues there is somebody who in that world called a basos a baselo I should say no yeah basos right who is uh that a single individual who was understood to be superior in some way to everybody else however he's not

very Superior to everybody else he has all of these noblemen around him all of whom claim to be basil recall and what a fair way to put this would be that this is largely an aristocratic Society that's was our conclusion after we looked at the poems of Homer and I think that's what continues even after the when that's the world that shows up after minini people who had power by virtue of their wealth by virtue of their personal uh physical strength maybe uh by virtue of their dissent because people always have theories about individuals in

their society I mean early societies who were born to the purple so to speak but whatever the criteria were and birth always was a critical Criterion in the days of the aristocracies uh you would have aristocracies who would have the uh practical the de facto control of things well by definition an aristocracy is plural not singular so how do you make decisions in an aristocracy and the answer typically is a council I use the word council the Greek word is Boule uh and not assembly which in Greek comes to be called eaia um because an

eaia is understood to be a gathering of the entire adult male population and the Boule is understood to be not a a gathering of the whole but rather a smaller group who has some degree of authority and I would have suggested that in the earliest days uh they had all the authority that mattered however it's interesting these Greek communities from a ear very early time seem to have been different from the Myan kinds of things by virtue of the fact that the men who fought in the Army always seem to have had to be consulted

when it came to a question of fighting and so you always had an assembly even in aristocratic States but decisions in general were made by Aristocrats moreover the law was interpreted spoken and to thee to the degree it had to be enforced by the aristocrats working through a council in their community and these councils might have been elective from within the aristocracy or they could have been simply the whole aristocracy depending really on the size of the community because you can't have a council functioning to any useful purpose if it gets to be too big

it just becomes something else that's where you start that's the Dark Ages now what we shall see as the uh polus grows and develops and as these changes in the uh economic situation that I've described are happening is that these successful farmers who will as I will be telling you next time who also will be the fighting men who fight for their polus uh in as infantrymen when the Infantry becomes the critically important part of the army these men the combination of their independence their wealth I don't when I say wealth I don't mean great

wealth but the fact that they do have wealth that they amount to something and their role as soldiers makes them demand a larger voice in the uh government of the state in the decisions that affect them uh so closely and so there will be a whole I'm looking ahead now projecting into some topics that we'll explore more closely later but they will be finding different ways to insist on their inclusion and the the results will be different in every state and sometimes the old aristocracy will be able to hold on for a very long time

and to suppress any U attempt to change things other times uh and this will be widespread in certain places and will be very significant the dissatisfied people in the society mainly these Farmers I'm talking about are will get together and perhaps fix on some discontented aristocratic individuals and most particularly pick some Aristocrat who has distinguished himself typically as a soldier as a leader of troops and engage really in what amounts to a kind of a revolution or at least a coup and bring about a kind of a a different kind of a monarchy which the

Greeks called a tyranny and when these tyrannies take place they last for different periods of time but when the Tyrant is removed what follows after that is there is never again in that town one man rule of any kind either what is established after the The Tyranny is an oligarchy but notice I didn't say aristocracy an oligarchy just means rule of the few but as we shall see what changes is it is no longer the rule of those who those few who are are born in the right place it will be based upon the wealth

of those people and that means that the newly wealthy or the newly well reasonably well off will participate in their government and you the the form of government which is oligarchy will be throughout the Classical period the most characteristic form of government in Greek city states when democracy is invented it will have its moment and it will spread and there will be numerous democracies but they will never be the majority of the poce your typical polus will be a a kind of a a Hansen farmer outfit where people from that class and up will participate

in politics will be the governing uh bodies in in their state they will be the ones who continue to fight in that infantry that is decisive for the state and they will be the ones who uh make decisions and the people poorer than they will be excluded so it's very important to realize that these uh family farmers who are successful do not necessarily lead to democracy indeed I want to emphasize again it is an unusual outcome when they end up with democracy so now uh we've said something about the economic change and something about the

political change and uh next hour I'll uh start with the story of the military change that has so many uh significant consequences okay