Which greeks could own land

Religion, Myth, and Community. The Mythical Origin of Justice. Justice in Dark-Age Life. Tensions between Leaders and Followers. The Injustice of Chiefs to Peasants. Citizenship and the City-state. Geography and the Population of City-states. Aristotle on the City-state. Early Colonization. Economic Motives for Colonization. Mother-city and Colony. Demographic Motives for Colonization. The Tensions of Colonization. Contact with Eastern Mediterranean Civilizations.

International Commerce. The Oracle at Delphi and Colonization. The Emergence of the City-State. Aristocrats and Non-aristocrats in the City-state. Inequality and Women in the City-state.

The so-called Hoplite Revolution. Non-hoplites as Citizens. The Contribution of the Poor. Communal Decision Making. Slavery in Dark-Age Greece. The Synergy between Slavery and Freedom. Sources of Slaves. The Extent of Slavery. The Occupations of Slaves. Public Slaves. The Lives of Slaves. Women and the Household. Women Outside the Home. Marriage and Divorce. Paternalism and Women. The Early History of Sparta.

Spartan Oligarchy. The Laws of Sparta. The Dangerous Situation of Sparta. Spartan Neighbors and Slaves. The Helots of Messenia. The Contribution of Helots. The Existence of Spartan Boys. The Equals. The Spartan Common Messes.

Women at Sparta. Land Ownership at Sparta. Reproduction at Sparta. The Obligations of Spartans. Tyranny in the City-States. Tyranny at Corinth. Tyrants and Popular Support. Theseus and Democracy at Athens. The Athenian Population in the Dark Age. The Beginnings of Athenian Democracy. The Institutions of Incipient Democracy. The Laws of Draco. Economic Crisis and Subsistence Agriculture. The Reforms of Solon. Solon and Democracy. Opposition to Democracy.

Tyranny at Athens. The Struggle between Isagoras and Cleisthenes. The Democratic Reforms of Cleisthenes. Persuasion and Cleisthenic Democracy.

Lyric poetry. The Ionian Thinkers. Near Eastern Influence on the Ionian Thinkers. The Cosmos and Logos. Rational Thinking. Sources of Strife betweeen Athens and Sparta. Sowing a Seed of Conflict between Athens and Persia. Persian Religion. Persian Religious Non-Interference.

Revolt in Ionia. Persian Vengeance against Athens. The Battle of Marathon Announcing the Victory. Aftereffects of the Battle of Marathon. The Great Invasion of B. Greek Courage at Thermopylae. The Naval Battle of Salamis. End of the Persian Wars. Ethnoarchaeology has also been used to show that Greek farmers in both ancient and modern times have had to be flexible in their responses to wide variations in local topographical and climatic conditions and, thus, varied their crops and fallowing regimes to a significant degree.

Rational exploitation of fluctuations in production brought on by such variations might have been the means by which some farmers were able to obtain enough wealth to rise above their peers and become members of a landed elite and this might point to a productive mentality at odds with the Finley model.

Metals were another important landed resource of Greece and so mining occupied an important place in the economy. Ancient Greeks typically used bronze and iron tools and weapons. There is little evidence that copper, the principal metal in bronze, was ever mined in abundance on mainland Greece.

It had to be imported from the island of Cyprus, where it existed in large quantities, and other more distant regions. Tin, the other metal in bronze, was also rare in Greece and had to be imported from as far away as Britain. Iron is relatively plentiful throughout Greece and there is archaeological evidence of iron mining; however, literary references to it are few and so we know little about the process. Precious metals were used in jewelry, art, and coinage.

Athens had an abundance of silver and we know much about its mining industry from surviving inscriptions of government mine leases to private entrepreneurs.

The mines were extremely productive, providing Athens with an income of talents per year for twelve years from B. Though productive in silver, ancient Greece was not as rich in gold, which was found primarily in Thrace and on the islands of Thasos and Siphnos. Recent scholarship continues to focus on the silver mines of Athens, drawing not only on the inscribed mine leases, but also on extensive archaeological investigation of the mines themselves. In a study of mine-leasing records Kirsty Shipton has shown that the elite of Athens preferred mines leases, with their potential for greater profits, to land leases.

Thus, the traditional preference of the elite for the consumptive acquisition of land and disdain for productive investments for profit postulated by the Finley model might be a characteristic feature of the ancient Greek world as a whole, but it does not entirely hold for Athens in the Classical period.

Stone for building and sculpture was another valuable natural resource of Greece. Limestone was available in abundance and fine marble could be found in Athens on the slopes of Mount Pentelikos and on the island of Paros.

The former was used in building the Parthenon and the other structures of the Athenian acropolis while the latter was often used for the most famous ancient Greek free-standing and relief sculptures. It is notoriously difficult to estimate the population of Athens or any other Greek city-state in ancient times.

Generally accepted figures for Athens at the height of its power and prosperity in B. Athens was the largest polis and the populations of most city-states were probably much smaller.

Citizens, metics , and slaves all performed labor in the economy. In addition, many city-states included forms of dependent labor somewhere in between slave and free.

As stated above, much of the agriculture of ancient Greece was carried out by small farmers who were exclusively free citizens, since non-citizens were barred from owning land. But although being a farmer was the social ideal, good land was scarce in Greece and it is estimated that in Athens about a quarter of the male citizens did not own land and had to take up other occupations for their livelihoods.

Such occupations existed in the manufacturing, service, retail, and trade sectors. Wage earning was very much looked down upon, since working for another person was thought of as an impingement on freedom and akin to slavery. Thus, free men doing the same work side by side with metics and slaves on the Acropolis building projects earned the same wages. Yet wages appear to have been adequate to make a living. In Athens the typical wage for a skilled laborer was one drachma per day at the end of the fifth century and two and a half drachmai in In the fifth century a Greek soldier on campaign received a ration of 1 choinix of wheat per day.

The price of wheat in Athens at the end of the fifth century was 3 drachmai per medimnos. There are 48 choinices in a medimnos. Thus, one drachma could buy enough food for 16 days for one person, four days for a family of four. One thing that made up for the limited number of free citizens who were willing or had to become businessmen or wage earners was the existence of metics , foreign-born, free non-citizens who took up residence in a city-state.

It is estimated that Athens had about 25, metics at its height and since they were barred from owning land, they engaged in banausic occupations that tended to be looked down upon by the free citizenry. The economic opportunities afforded by such occupations in Athens and other port cities where they were particularly abundant must have been significant.

They attracted metics despite the fact that metics had to pay a special poll tax and serve in the military even though they could not own land or participate in politics and had to have a citizen represent them in legal matters. This is confirmed by the numerous metics in Athens who became wealthy and whose names we know, such as the bankers Pasion and Phormion and the shield-maker Cephalus, the father of the orator, Lysias. Foreign-born, free non-citizen transients known as xenoi also played an important role in the ancient Greek economy, since it is apparent that many, though certainly not all, those who carried out long-distance trade were such men.

Like metics , they too were subject to special taxes, but few rights. Slaves comprised an undeniably large part of the labor force of ancient Greece. In Classical Athens it has been estimated that there were around , slaves. Thus, slaves comprised over a third of the total population and outnumbered adult male citizens by three to one.

The slaves of Athens were chattel, that is the private property of their owners, and had few, if any, rights. The demand for them was high as they performed almost every kind of work imaginable from agricultural labor to mining labor to shop assistants to domestic labor even to serving as the police force and secretaries for the government in Athens.

About the only thing slaves did not normally do was military service, except in emergencies, when they did that too. Slaves were supplied by a variety of sources. Many were war captives. Some were enslaved for failure to pay debts, though this was outlawed in Athens in the early sixth century B. Some were foundlings, abandoned children rescued and reared in return for their labor as slaves.

Of course, the children of slaves would also be slaves. In addition, there was an extensive and regular slave trade that trafficked in people who had become slaves by all the means mentioned previously. In part because of the diverse means by which slaves were supplied, there was no particular race that was singled out for enslavement. Anyone could become a slave if unfortunate enough, including Greeks.

It does appear, however, that a large percentage of slaves in Greece originated in the Black Sea and Danubian regions. In most cases they were probably captives from internecine tribal wars and sold to slave traders who shipped them to various parts of the Greek world.

The treatment of chattel slaves varied, depending on the whims of individual slave owners and the types of jobs done by the slaves. Slaves who worked in the silver mines of Athens, for example, worked in dangerous conditions in large numbers as many as 10, at a time and had virtually no contact with their owners that could result in human bonds of affection they were usually leased out.

On the other hand, slaves who worked in households assisting the matron of the family in her household tasks were probably treated much better as a rule. There is enough evidence for slaves being freed to make us believe that manumission was not uncommon and many slaves could probably hope for freedom, even if most of them never actually obtained it.

But manumission was quite self-serving for slave owners, since it made slaves much less likely to risk rebellion in the hope that they might some day be given their freedom. As it turns out, there were only two noteworthy large-scale rebellions of chattel slaves in the history of ancient Greece. Moreover, inscriptions from the religious sanctuary of Delphi from the Hellenistic period show that slaves almost always had to compensate their owners for their freedom, either in the form of cash or some other valuable commodity, like their own children, who would also be slaves of the master and eventually replace their aging parents with young labor.

So it is a dubious matter to say that the manumission of slaves is a testament to the humanity of ancient Greek slavery. Individual slaves might benefit, but the practice allowed the institution of slavery to flourish throughout Greek history. When slaves were freed, they did not become citizens, but rather metics. Yet even though they still could not possess the full rights and privileges of citizens, they could prosper economically, just as other metics could.

In Athens the prominent and wealthy metic banker, Pasion, for example, was originally a slave who assisted his masters Antisthenes and Archestratus.

By the terms of his will, Pasion in turn manumitted his own slave assistant, Phormion, and not only left him his bank, but also stipulated that Phormion marry his widow and manage the inheritance of his son, Apollodorus.

In addition to chattel slavery, there were other forms of dependent labor in the ancient Greek world. One famous example is helotry , known principally from the city-state of Sparta. The helots of Sparta were agricultural serfs, indigenous peoples conquered by the Spartans and forced to work their former lands for their Spartan overlords.

They were not the private property of the individual Spartans, who were allotted the former lands of the helots , and could not be bought or sold. But their mobility was completely restricted; they had very few rights; they had to turn over a large percentage of their produce to their Spartan overlords; and they were routinely terrorized as a matter Spartan state policy.

The one drawback for the Spartans of using helot labor, though, was that the helots , living still on their former homeland and having a sense of ethnic unity, were prone to revolt and did so on several occasions at great cost both to themselves and to the Spartans. With the exception of Sparta and a few other city-states, women in ancient Greece, free citizens or otherwise, could not control land.

They could own it in name only and were not allowed to dispose of it as they saw fit, but were legally obliged to yield control of it to a male representative. Since land was the chief source of wealth in the ancient Greek economy, the inability to control it severely constrained the economic role of women.

The ideal was for women to get married, have children, raise them, and carry out the indoor tasks of the household, such as cooking and textile production.

Of course, not all women could live up to such an ideal at all times. Women undoubtedly helped outdoors on the farm during harvest time. Those of poorer families might by necessity have to sell in the market place what little surplus produce their households could generate or perform service-oriented jobs for others for wages.

Female metics and slaves did similar work and also comprised the majority of the prostitutes of Athens, which was a legal profession. Prostitutes, though, ranged from lowly brothel workers to high-class call girls, the latter of which, such as Aspasia, sometimes obtained prominence in Athenian society. Despite their disdain for certain types of work and their dependence on slave labor, most Greeks had to work hard to make a living. The availability of cheap slaves was a major factor in Greek attitudes toward labor and may also explain why there were no labor unions in Greece.

For how could wage-earners pressure their employers for better conditions or wages when the latter could always replace them with slaves if necessary? Slavery also affected manufacturing in ancient Greece. It is often said that technology and industrial organization stagnated in ancient Greece because the availability of cheap slave labor obviated any imminent need to improve them. If one wanted to produce more, one merely bought a few more slaves. Thus, most manufactured products were literally hand-made with simple tools.

There were no assembly lines and no big factories. The largest manufacturing establishment we know of was a shield factory owned by the metic , Cephalus, the father of the orator, Lysias, which employed slaves.

Most manufacturing was carried out in small shops or within households. Hence, in comparison with agriculture, manufacturing comprised a small part of the ancient Greek economy. Nevertheless, documentary and archaeological evidence attests to a wide variety of manufactured items and some in large quantities. Among the most extensively manufactured products was clay pottery, the remains of which archaeologists have found scattered throughout the Mediterranean world. The wheel-made pots took many shapes appropriate for their contents and use, which ranged from hydria for water to amphorae for olive oil and wine to pithoi for grain to aryballoi for perfume to kylikes for drinking cups.

Finely painted vases were also manufactured for decorative and ritual purposes. The finest, most numerous, and widely dispersed of these were made in Corinth, Aegina, Athens, and Rhodes. Literary accounts as well as scenes from painted vases make it clear that the ancient Greeks left textile production largely to women.

The principal material they worked with was wool, but linen from flax was also common. Textiles were used in turn in the manufacture of clothing. Again, women were largely responsible for this and it was done primarily within the household. Textiles were often dyed, the most desirable dye being a reddish purple color derived from aquatic murex snails. These had to be harvested, mashed into a jelly, and then boiled to extract the dye. Although the trees of Greece were for the most part not particularly good for woodworking materials and especially not for large-scale building, the Greeks did use wood extensively and, therefore, had to import good timber from places like Macedonia, the Black Sea region, and Asia Minor.

Given the countless islands of Greece, it is not surprising that shipbuilding was an important sector of manufacturing. Vessels were needed for commercial as well as military uses. In Athens the state obtained the necessary timber for the ships and oars of its navy, but it contracted with carpenters who worked under the supervision of state officials to craft the timber into the warships that were so vital for Athenian power in the Classical period.

Buildings ranged from private houses to monumental stone temples. The former tended to be rather humble, made of unbaked mud brick laid on a stone foundation and covered by a thatched or tiled roof.

On the other hand, the great temples of ancient Greece required much organization, many resources, and incredible technical skill. As is evidenced by the extant accounts for the construction of the buildings of the Athenian acropolis, the work was normally contracted out in small units to private individuals who either worked alone or in charge of others to do anything from quarrying marble to transporting wooden beams to sculpting facades.

The degree of specialization varied. In some cases we see contractors carrying out a variety of tasks, whereas in others we see them specializing in only one. Metal crafts were highly specialized.

The Greeks smelted iron, but only in wrought form. They were unable to achieve furnace temperatures high enough to make pig iron and did not have the technical know-how to add carbon to the smelting process with enough precision to make steel with any consistency.

Blacksmiths crafted body armor, shields, spears, swords, farm implements, and household utensils. Bronze casting reached the level of fine art in Classical Greece. Sculptors used the lost-wax method, in which they first made a clay model of a statue, then covered the model with a layer of wax, which they then covered again with another layer of clay. Small openings were left in the outer clay covering, into which molten bronze was poured.

The hot molten bronze melted the wax, which then flowed out another opening in the outer clay covering. After the bronze cooled the outer clay covering was broken off, leaving the cast bronze. According to the Finley model, there was no network of interconnected markets to form a price-setting market economy in the ancient Greek world.

Although this is true for the most part, like other aspects of the Finley model, the case is overstated. There do, for example, appear to be connections between markets for some commodities, such as grain and probably precious metals as well. In the case of grain, it can be shown that supply and demand over long-distances did have an impact on prices and traders sought to take advantage of the lag-time between price adjustments in order to make a profit.

Obviously, though, this is nothing like the modern world in which the price of crude oil changes instantly worldwide in reaction to a change in supply from one of the major producers. For the most part in ancient Greece, prices were set in accordance with local conditions, personal relationships, and haggling. Government price-fixing was limited. Although there is evidence that Athens, for example, fixed the retail price of bread in proportion to the wholesale price of grain, there is no evidence that it fixed the price of the latter.

Even in times of severe grain shortages, Athens was content to allow traders bringing grain to Athens to charge the going rate. In such cases, the state alleviated the crises for its citizens by paying the going rate for the grain and then reselling it to its citizenry at a lower price.

Despite the general absence of interconnected markets, however, there were market places. Each city-state had at least one market place agora in the heart of city and a port market emporion as well, if it had a good harbor. The agora was a place of much activity, serving not only as a center of economic exchange, but also as a political, religious, and social center.

In the agora one could find law courts, offices for public officials, and coin mints as well as shrines and temples. In fact, agorai were considered sacred places to the degree that they were marked off with boundary stones across which no one who had the stain of religious pollution could cross.

Within the agora economic activities were segregated by types of goods, services, and labor so that there were specific places where one could regularly find the fishmongers, blacksmiths, money changers, and so on. Ancient Greek city-states regulated the economic activities that took place in their markets to a certain degree. Public officials oversaw weights, measures, scales, and coinage to limit and resolve disputes in exchanges as well as to ensure state interests.

For example, Athens employed a publicly owned slave to check coins and guard against counterfeiters. In this way, Athens protected the integrity of its own coinage as well as the interests of buyers and sellers.

The state ensured the affordability of key goods, such as bread, by fixing its retail prices relative to the wholesale price of grain. Various activities in the market place were also taxed by the state. Port and transit taxes affected exchanges in emporia like the Piraeus of Athens and xenoi had to pay a special tax for engaging in transactions in the agora.

Local trade between countryside and urban center and on the retail level within cities continued largely as it had in the Archaic period. But rather than producers transporting and selling their surplus goods directly in city markets, specialized retailers kapeloi who profited as middlemen between producers and consumers became more the norm.

Local trade goods could be probably transported over short distances on land. But long-distance trade over land was difficult and time consuming, given the mountainous topography of Greece and the fact that the fragmented city-states of Greece never built an extensive system of paved roads that tied them together in the manner of the Roman Empire.

Long-distance trade was primarily done by merchant ships over the waters of the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Black Seas. Evidence from the Attic Orators indicates that during the Classical period overseas trade developed into a specialized and important sector of the economy. Trade was carried out by private individuals and not organized by the state. A typical trading venture involved a non-citizen trader emporos who either owned his own ship or rented space on a ship owned by another naukleros.

In most cases described by the orators, the traders typically borrowed money from a citizen lender to finance the venture. There is some dispute among scholars whether such loans constituted productive borrowing on the part of the traders or were just a type of insurance, because the loans would only have to be repaid if the ship and cargo reached their contracted destinations. Marine archaeology has recently increased our knowledge of merchant vessels and their cargoes tenfold by the discovery of several ancient shipwrecks.

The ships appear to have been generally small by modern standards. In the well-preserved wreck of a merchant ship from c. Being only 35 feet long and 15 feet wide with a capacity of 30 tons, it is probably the kind of merchant vessel that made short hauls and kept within sight of the coastline. But other shipwrecks as well as evidence from the Attic Orators seem to indicate that the typical capacity of merchant vessels that traveled over long distances on the open sea was some 80 tons.

Many of the goods traded throughout ancient Greek history were luxury goods, manufactured items, such as jewelry and finely painted vases, as well as specialty agricultural products like fine wine and honey. Necessities were also traded, however, for without long-distance trade, many Greek cities would not have been able to obtain metals, timber, wine, and slaves. One of the most extensively traded necessity items was grain, which came to Athens typically from the Black Sea region, Thrace, and Egypt.

According to the orator, Demosthenes, Athens imported some , medimnoi approximately 4,, liters of grain per year in the late fourth century from the Crimean kingdom of the Bosporus alone. Chiefly because of the need for certain imports, such as grain and timber, and for revenue drawn from taxes on trade, many cities did have an interest and involvement in overseas trade. Athens in particular made laws that prohibited the export of grain produced in Athens and required that loans on trading ventures be for cargoes of grain and that ships bringing grain into the Piraeus sell one-third of it on the spot and the remaining two-thirds in Athens.

Athens also instituted special courts to expedite the adjudication of disputes involving traders, granted honors and privileges to anyone who performed extraordinary services relating to trade for the city, and made agreements with other states to obtain favorable conditions for those bringing grain to Athens. Athens was not particularly concerned with helping traders and enhancing their profits per se or in obtaining a trade surplus or to protect home produced goods against imported foreign ones.

To this extent, then, the Finley model holds true, even if it is clear that the Athenian state recognized that its interests were complementary with those of foreign traders and, thus, had to help them in order to help itself. Moreover, it does appear that Athens had some concern about its home produced products as well, at least in the case of silver. Xenophon, an Athenian writer from the fourth century, noted that Athens could always be assured of traders bringing their goods into Athens, because traders knew they could always get a valuable trade commodity, namely silver in the form of Athenian coinage, in exchange.

To ensure the demand for its silver, Athens took great care to maintain the reputation of its coinage for high quality and to associate that reputation with a familiar design that went unchanged for several centuries. Such a policy attests to a state interest in production and exports, at least in this sector of the economy. Athens was also motivated to encourage trade to obtain revenue from taxes.

Both transient and resident foreigner traders had to pay poll taxes in Athens that citizens did not. Athens also had various port, transit, and market taxes that would benefit by increased trade, including a two percent tax on all imports and exports. With few exceptions Sparta being the most famous , the Greeks of the Classical period had a thoroughly monetized economy employing coinage whose value was based on precious metals, principally silver. The value of the coinage was commensurate to the value of the precious metal it contained with a small mark-up, since the value of the metal was guaranteed by its issuing state.

The tie of the Greek monetary system to the supply of precious metals limited the ability of governments to influence their economies through the manipulation of their money supplies.

However, we do know of cases when states debased their coinages for such purposes. Ancient Greek coins are similar in appearance to modern ones. But like other manufactured products in ancient Greece, they were made by hand. The nature of the process naturally produced coins in which the image was often poorly centered on the flan. Coinage was issued in a variety of denominations and weight standards by various city-states. The chief weight standards of the Classical period were the Attic, Aeginetan, Euboiic, and Corinthian.

The basis of the Attic standard was the silver tetradrachm of It was the most widely circulated coinage during this time and appears in large numbers of hoards found throughout the Greek world and beyond. This was due not only to the far reach of Athenian trade, but also to Athenian imperialism. The local coinage had to be turned in, melted down, and re-struck as Athenian coinage for a fee. When such local issues were taken abroad, they were probably treated as bullion, as can be inferred from test-cuts often found on them.

A recent debate among scholars concerns the degree to which coinage was an economic or a political phenomenon in the ancient Greek world. States minted coins not to facilitate economic transactions among their citizens, but merely for state purposes so that, for example, it had a convenient medium through which to collect taxes or make state expenditures. But here again Finley goes too far. Although the type of a Greek coin certainly expressed political symbols and could, therefore, serve as a political tool, such symbolism was largely lost on people who used the coins in places like Egypt, the Levant, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia, where hoards of Greek coins have been found in abundance.

The fact that they could use the coins independently of their original political context and for what else besides economic purposes then? Moreover, as Henry Kim has recently argued, the minting of large quantities of small-denomination coinage from the outset in Greece shows that the state did have a concern for the wide use of coinage at the micro-level by common people in day-to-day economic exchanges, not just for large-scale public and political purposes.

Nevertheless, one of the most active areas of research on ancient Greek money and coinage today concerns its representational nature and place within sectors other than the economy, including religion, society, and politics. Both Leslie Kurke and Sitta von Reden have argued that the advent of a monetized economy employing coinage need not have undermined traditional values or led to a disembedding of the economy. Rather, the symbolic aspect of coinage could be manipulated to reinforce traditional social and religious practices that were non-economic in the modern sense.

A link between rural land division and urban planning was also found in the Roman world. Early Rome was influenced by the knowledge and experience of the Greek colonies—most of them planned—that dotted the coastal regions of southern Italy and Sicily.

This system ignored traditional boundaries and natural features of the land. Its main purposes were political control and the determination of tribute. Although Roman surveyors, like their Greek counterparts, worked mostly in the countryside, their skills were also called upon for planning new towns and cities. The earliest visible evidence of Roman urban planning comes from central Italian towns of the s and s B.

Roman towns and cities were centered on a forum, which was a large, rectangular, open space, similar to the Greek agora.

Outside towns and cities, much of the land in ancient Greece and Rome was used for farming. Some land was devoted instead to timber, and a few areas were quarried or mined. Although both Greece and Italy have mountainous terrain with thin, poor soil, the land is well-suited for growing grapes, olives, and figs, and these were important crops in ancient times, much as they are today.

Livestock, such as sheep, goats, or horses, grazed in many areas, and grains grew in the few areas where soil was fertile and the land well-watered. Land suitable for grazing livestock is relatively scarce in Greece except in the northern region, which was famous in ancient times for raising horses. Here, the best pasture region lay along the coast, where a long stretch of lakes and marshes provided ideal conditions.

The nearby mountains to the north provided grazing during the summer months. Land suitable for growing grain was primarily along a handful of valleys, such as the plain of Argos in southern Greece, where the soil was most fertile. In eastern Greece, the soil of higher ground was preferred for growing grain. Most of the grain-growing land was sown with barley, which thrives on soils that are too poor for growing wheat.

Because so little land was available in Greece for growing grain, early Greek colonists settled where conditions were favorable for grain farming, particularly the well-drained lower slopes of mountains. Although a large part of the Italian peninsula was mountainous and infertile, Rome, too, was primarily agricultural from its earliest days.

Before about B. The small Roman farm of this period was not much different from the small Italian farm of today.