IN the Hellenistic period the distribution of the soil underwent profound transformations. In the great monarchies the omnipotence of the State enabled the king to effect a wholesale distribution of land favourable to the reigning house and the immigrants alike. In the cities of Greece the diminution of the population, the conflicts of the classes, and the decay of agriculture, and perhaps, too, the vague influence of the examples set in the East, gave rise to serious disturbances in landed property.
Even before the conquest of Asia, a system existed in Macedonia of which the Greeks had no idea. Patriarchal kings, at once feudal and absolute, owned a domain which comprised a vast extent of arable land, forests, and mines. They made lavish use of this in favour of the great lords. Philip and Alexander had many a time granted concessions, with reserve of the royal confirmation in case of transfer. Thus there was formed in Macedonia, above the free peasants, a class of great land-owners. The eight hundred Companions (Hetairoi) of Philip owned, it was said, as much land as ten thousand Greeks.
When the son of Lagos became master of Egypt, he must all the same have been a little bewildered by the principle which the Pharaohs had bequeathed to him. Here the king had an eminent right over all the land of which he was the chief and the god. He was the sole landlord. His word governed absolutely the relations of men with the soil.
The Crown especially reserved to itself a vast domain, the Royal Land. The king, who never renounced the mines and quarries, also possessed in every nome vines, palm-groves, orchards, and, above all, fields in which he harvested cereals, oil-seeds, and textile fibres. The lands of the domain were very scattered, and comprised quite small parcels or great stretches containing whole series of villages. They were not worked direct by the Government; the “king’s farmers” were tenant-farmers. But the leases, although they were of long duration in practice, were not for a fixed period. The fellah submitted a tender in writing, but there was no formal contract; the Government accepted an offer, declared the proposed undertaking binding, and bound itself to nothing. The “understanding” was an agreement by which one side had all the profit and the other all the obligations. For a long time, however, the position of the farmer was not bad. When he had paid his rent the rest of the harvest was his. There was a certain amount of bidding for farms. Moreover, the farmers of a village were responsible to the State as one body. They formed an association managed by the “elders,” with a scribe to keep its accounts. Being bound by mutual guarantees, they formed one civil personality, under the supervision of the royal administration. But gradually the fiscal authorities became more exacting, the position of the farmer grew worse, and even his liberty was compromised. The officials saw how they could profit by the bond by which they held the king’s farmers. When a farmer asked for an advance of seed-corn, he had to undertake to work the land until he had paid his rent; he was attached to the soil at least for one farming season. This was the origin of colonatus in Egypt. Towards the end of the Ilnd century work on the royal land left so little profit to the farmers that they fled as soon as they could. To maintain the returns at the old rate was now out of the question; the authorities resigned themselves to farming out land “on an estimate,” with a reduction on the official price. But, if no one appeared to make a tender, then the king remembered that he was absolute lord of men and of lands. Recourse was had to the system of “constraint without agreement,” of “designation”; tenures were distributed and rents were fixed by administrative decree; the tenant had not the right to leave his village, and could be evicted in the course of the lease. The king’s farmers were indispensable; in the sweat of their brow they kept the court and the officials alive, fed the monopoly factories, and supplied commodities for export which could be converted into coin. They certainly deserved to be able to live on their labour. Subjected to taxation and forced labour, driven by blows of the stick, they were the victims of the system of which they were the backbone.
But, distinct from the Royal Land, there was the Concession Land. This comprised the property of the clergy, and also considerable portions of the royal domain which had been conceded to private individuals. The Crown jealously kept the land which was reached by the floods, but on other ground it readily entrusted reclamation to chosen concessionnaires, and realized the rights of the State in the double form of administrative control and annual rent.
The Sacred Land was left to the god to enjoy. But the god could not be represented by the priests, who were merely servants, especially with regard to the king, who was supreme god. The king remained lord of the land which he left to the temples. It was managed by the Government, and worked by farmers on the same terms as the land of the royal domain, the rent being paid into the same treasuries.
Very occasionally, in reward of exceptional services, the king presented his high officers with great properties known as Gift Land. These estates embraced whole villages with fields in full bearing; they could be leased in parcels to tenants; they were even exempt from burdens, so far as this supreme favour did not infringe the sovereign rights of the State.
The Cleruchic Land was important in another way. The new dynasty wanted to settle in Egypt as many loyal soldiers and officials as possible, while giving a strong impetus to agrarian policy. For all schemes of internal colonization the first condition was the distribution of kleroi. In this way the Lagids gained a whole province at a stroke; the Fayum was won for agriculture. The Cleruchs, who were soldiers of the regular army liable to be called up when required, were free most of the time to work their land. The improvements which they made were bound to strengthen their right of ownership. At the beginning the State not only declared the concession inalienable; it regarded it as essentially revocable, and occasionally it actually revoked it, on the death of the Cleruch. It maintained such strict control over all these men that sometimes it even compelled them to reside on the spot and forbade them to take tenants. About 218 the State still had the right to take a lot back on death; it sequestrated the vacant property and did not recognize the heir’s claim unless the transfer under his name had been recorded within a prescribed time and the “Crown gold” had been paid. In the Ilnd century hereditary transmission became customary, without being recognized as a right, and the families of Cleruchs, by an unconscious return to the national tradition, tended to form a class which grew closer with time. But it was not until the 1st century before Christ, when the Cleruch was allowed to make a will in favour of any paternal relation, that the Cleruchic Land became true private property.
In these circumstances, how was it that Ptolemaic Egypt always had land known as Private Possession? About this we know practically nothing. We can only surmise that individuals succeeded, either by usucaption or by agreement with the authorities, in making for themselves on parcels of the domain a position similar to that of the other concessionnaires. Greek colonists obtained waste land near Alexandria for planting; perhaps they kept it by means of an emphyteusis. In villages in which the State did not find willing tenants, sons occasionally put in a claim to inherit their father’s farm; the State could only encourage such inclinations. Thus there were formed in Egypt small farms which the holder had the right to sell, cede, pledge, or leave to his heirs. But they were few, and the king always counted them among the Concession Lands.
We see how strictly the Graeco-Egyptian monarchy treated the question of property. So long as the kings were conscious of their duties as well as their rights, the country was sufficiently prosperous to enrich the treasury and to give the fellahs a decent existence. The hydraulic machine invented by Archimedes lifted and distributed the water of the river. The desert receded. Crops improved. Exact rules of rotation were laid down by the administration of the royal domain, and were generally practised on the lands of the Cleruchs and private individuals; the farm was divided into three breaks, each of which was sown two years running, and in the third year was not left fallow, but was rested by a light crop. The State organized the keeping and sale of farm produce, and public services of transport and export kept prices up to a remunerative level. In spite of the extension of cultivated land, stock-raising seems to have advanced; horned cattle, horses, and asses were very numerous, geese were exported, and camels began to appear. But the regulations were already excessive. Everybody’s harvest was threshed on the royal floor, gauged by the measurers, registered by the scribes, and taken to the royal granary. Vine-growers were subject to inspection and had to pay one tenth or one sixth of the vintage. About the middle of the Ilnd century the effects of a system which took no account of individual welfare were fully felt. The peasant now worked for the treasury alone, and the treasury, by overburdening the producer, dried up the sources which it would tap. The Cleruchs no longer found tenants; they were forced to farm their own allotments, but could not cope with the work. The Government then tried to encourage highly productive crops, and granted privileges to vine-growers and market- gardeners. All these efforts were in vain. In fifty years half of the domain lands situated in the district of Cerceosiris fell out of cultivation. The desert reconquered the ground which had been taken from it.
Just as the Lagids carried on the Pharaonic tradition in the Macedonian manner, so the Seleucids were in their own way the heirs of the 44Royal Administration” and the “Satrapic Administration.” They too owned an immense domain. There they established studs and a forestry service, while for agriculture they depended on tenants, who paid their rent in kind. All that was not comprised in the domain constituted the free land, managed by the “City Administration” or “Private Administration,” and subject to taxes in money. The king’s tenants were serfs. They owned their house, ploughing implements, and cattle; when they had paid their rent they kept what remained. But they were attached to the soil, and passed with it to those to whom the king presented it. Cities, temples, and private individuals had their serfs, like the king. Other methods of exploitation were also known, the ordinary lease and emphyteusis. This organization was developed in a remarkable way by the urban policy of the Seleucids. They constantly detached parcels of land from the domain and built on them new cities in the Greek manner, or else absorbed them in the territory of existing cities. At the same time they waged energetic war on the feudal lords and annexed their fiefs. With one thing and another, the royal domain remained more or less the same in size, and became unified, while private property developed by the side of it, and the serfs supplied every class of land with the requisite labour. Great progress was made; the vine was acclimatized in Susiana.
What, meanwhile, was happening to landed property, in the old Greece? It had ceased to split up, and, on the contrary, was rapidly moving in the opposite direction. Many emigrants sold their property; families died out, and their patrimony went to swell that of the collateral branches. The “dearth of men” inevitably led to a reconcentration of the soil, which had been broken up into minute portions. At the end of the IVth century the comic poets could speak without improbability of estates measuring ten thousand cubits across (about 5,000 acres). The 700,000 acres of Laconia belonged to about a hundred proprietors. But the reconstitution of the big property, combined with the growing competition of foreign countries, produced disastrous results on the agrarian situation, and particularly on what remained of the small land-owners. There were not enough hands for agriculture; besides, what was the use of working land which no longer fed a man? The countrysides were deserted. In Thessaly several cities bought land, divided it into allotments, and distributed it to the poor. But it was all in vain; the territory of Larissa remained uncultivated. Two thirds of fertile Euboea were allowed to run wild, and the towns sent officials to buy corn abroad. In Attica the rural population of the Mesogsea dwindled rapidly.
This general decay of agriculture made the question of food-supplies extremely important, and one might say chronically acute. In the Hellenistic period, far more even than in the Vth and IVth centuries, Greece proper was obliged to ask foreign markets for its food. The reason why the situation of Athens, between the Northern kingdoms and Egypt, was so difficult, and sometimes so desperate, was that she must know whether she would have enough corn, and whence it was to come, from the Chersoneses or from Alexandria. Every island and every city of Asia Minor had the same anxieties. Therefore the State included among its duties the sitonia or corn-supply. It Was no longer sufficient, as it once had been, to encourage free trade and to protect the consumer against the excesses of the merchant; the State must itself turn corn-merchant in order to ensure cheap bread for the citizens. Its first duty was to provide for the public feeding without realizing a profit. Formerly Athens had appointed Sitophylakes to supervise dealings between individuals on the spot; now she elected Sitonai whom she sent, provided with the necessary funds, to the chief corn-markets. There was no city, however small, which had not, from the Illrd century, its “corn-buyers” or its “importers.” At Samos the State provided for the food-supply out of the interest on a fund formed by an extraordinary tax; two elected citizens bought the wheat grown on the sacred domain, at the fixed price of 5 dr. 2 ob.; if this harvest was not sufficient, a Sitones went to seek the balance abroad. At Tauromenion in Sicily we find the institution fully developed, with three bodies of officials, namely buyers, receivers, and wardens entrusted with the sale.
The position of the farmer grew more and more alarming. The least unfortunate were those who, by renouncing their right of ownership, obtained that of living on their land as tenants. Some sold their property to a god on terms of a perpetual lease; this was equivalent to a mortgage loan in which the capital had been sunk and the interest was disguised as rent. Others rented the farms for which the temples invited tenders. We can see the results which they obtained at Delos. When the lease expired the farmer could renew it by paying one tenth more rent, but he seldom made use of this faculty. Rents rose slightly for about fifteen years, then they dropped sharply, and this fall lasted almost uninterrupted for more than a century. The finest of these farms, containing several dwellings, a two-storeyed granary, a cow-byre, a sheep-fold, an oven, a mill, 72 fig-trees, and 560 vines, all in good condition and enclosed, was leased for 3,111 dr. in 297 and only fetched 799 dr. rent in 179, For the sacred domain as a whole the total of rents dropped in the same period from 16,356 dr. to 6,980 dr. Many tenants could not pay their way. They were most of them men of good family and good reputation, but agriculture did not pay. When Delos became the entrepot for foreign corn they turned their attention to vines and figs, but it was no use; they were constantly being evicted as insolvent, and the administration seized their harvest and wrote them down on the list of debtors for one and a half times the sum which they owed. From this example it is clear that, while the development of leasehold farming was a sign of the times, it only partially remedied the distress of the rural class.
And how many there were who envied the lot of these tenant-farmers! The small proprietors often had nothing left with which to sow their field. They sought work elsewhere; or else they contracted debts, and then their downfall began. Those who had no land of their own lived wretchedly from hand to mouth. There were thousands like Menander’s rustic, who goes into service that his mother may not die of hunger, thousands who were obliged to pledge themselves with wife and children to their creditors. Agrarian pauperism was the cancer of Greece in Hellenistic times. More than any other factor, it precipitated a decline which was first economic and then became political. On one side we have the wealth of a satrap, seeking articles of luxury from all over the world, and vast estates and capital which continue to attract land and money to themselves. On the other there is a mass of men without resources and often without work. Such a violent contrast could not but excite terrible envy. There was nothing theoretical about agrarian socialism now. The question of property arose everywhere in Greece, and was everywhere complicated by the question of debt. The evicted men and debtors formed one class, driven by the like destitution to attack wealth. From the Peloponnese to iEtolia the land echoed with cries of hatred, followed by massacres, banishments, and spoliations. Patriotism of the city and even that of the confederacy, already shaken by monarchic and cosmopolitan ideas, could not stand against the international solidarity of parties. Greece went down in a whirlwind, and her last defenders fell with promises of sharing land and abolishing debts on their lips.