Ill THE FARM'ERS 89

their homes, though they had lost a great deal of their property,
while the townsfolk 'lived without fear',1 On the other hand,
the people left behind in the country suffered even more, and
after the occupation of Dekeleia, Eupolis could say that 'those
inside the Long Walls' had a much better breakfast than the
demes in the country.2 Even in Sparta, it is said, it was the
peasants and not the 'big people' who suffered in war, though
we may wonder to whom the poet here refers — certainly not
to the helots who cultivated the fields of the Spartiates, perhaps
to the perioeci, and even other Peloponnesians, who had
suffered from Athenian raids.3

These varied references show that the ordinary Attic farmer
had very little money (see the inscription, Plate Vc)y though
he needed it for buying seeds, manure and even food, and, after
the invasions, for restoring his farm, but that (at least before
404) he was not wholly impoverished, and had just enough to
live on. The modesty or even meanness of rural life was not
caused by the accumulation of land m the hands of a few.
There were some wealthy men whose estates were cultivated by
slaves or tenants; but the large estates, m fact never very large,
were not of decisive economic importance. The characteristic
feature of Attic agriculture was a far-going partition of the soil
rather than the reverse. The small peasant, though not
oppressed by big landowners, was oppressed by poverty and
the growing difficulty of living on the yield of his piece of
land. The population, on the whole, was growing, and so were
the people's economic demands In an ever-increasing degree
the economic life of Attica was shifting to the town where
political and social life had always been concentrated. The soil
was too scanty and too poor, and there was no important
intensification in farming methods, so that among the farmers
poverty increased steadily, and the social and intellectual level
sank.

1 Longing for the country, e g, A 201 f, K 1394, P 55iff* $6<)f — Ps -Xen
II, 14 6 SsSfjmos ocSeoos STJ Wade-Gery, JHS. LII (1932), 213, traces the
reasons for this alienation of town and country back to 457, i e to the loss of the
Athenian land empire, 'henceforth hoplites and farmers count little, sailors and
cockneys much*
2 A I022ff — Eupohs 40 P, i2ff, cf Thuc VII, 27.
3 P 622ff