C)4 THEFARMERS HI

for export. Agriculture, improved by specialization and by
certain, though late and modest, attempts of intensification, and
thus enabled to survive periods of reduced trade and export,
was on the whole saved by trade. The main producers for
export were, of course, the larger estates, but it must have been
useful and even essential for the small farmer, that, poor as he
was, he could always make some money from part of his pro-
duce. In consequence Attic agriculture did not perish during
the Hellenistic Age; it even experienced a kind of revival
during the second century B.C.1 Although Athens lost her
pre-eminence as a centre of trade and industry, she lived on,
though enfeebled, for two reasons: because of the Peiraeus
where corn was always imported, even when later the harbour
was no longer a centre of international commerce, and because
of Attic agriculture which even attained a new degree of
prosperity.

1 W. S. Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens^ 207, 231!*, emphasizes the new and
considerable importance of the rural part of Attica, the 'Mesogaia', in the
second century B.C.