The basic source of wealth in ancient Greece was agriculture, which changes slowly if at all. Barley, because of its hardiness, was always the chief crop in Greece; wheat was a secondary cereal. The widespread use of linen for clothing and ropes shows that flax was also grown. The scenes portrayed on the shield of Achilles include ploughing, reaping and the vintage (Iliad 18.541–72); Hesiod’s description of the farmer’s year largely concerns the same activities (Works and Days 383–617): ploughing and sowing must begin when the Pleiades set and the cranes pass overhead (October), at the start of the rainy season: this was the hardest work of the year, for the plough was a light wooden one tipped with iron, which merely scratched the surface without turning it, and had to be forced into the earth by the ploughman as he drove the oxen. Hesiod recommends two ploughs ready in case one splits, and a strong forty-year-old man; on the shield of Achilles the fallow is ploughed three times, and each man is given a drink as he reaches the end of the furrow; Odysseus watches the setting sun ‘as when a man longs for his supper, for whom all day two dark oxen have dragged the jointed plough through the fallow, and welcome to him the sunlight sinks, so that he may leave for his supper; and his knees shake as he goes’ (Odyssey 13.31ff).
Autumn and winter are the times for cutting wood for tools: keep away from the talkers round the fire in the smithy. With the rising of Arcturus (February-March) work begins again; the vines must be pruned before the swallow returns: when snails begin to climb the plants (May) it is time to start the harvest; the rising of Orion (July) signals the winnowing and storing of the corn. High summer is the only time that Hesiod recommends for resting, in the shade by a spring with wine and food – until the vintage when Orion and the Dog Star are in the centre of the sky (September).
Apart from these staple crops, various types of green vegetable and bean were cultivated, and fruit in orchards: outside the house of Alcinous there is a large orchard with pears, pomegranates, apples, fìgs and olives, together with a vegetable garden and two springs for irrigation (Odyssey 7.112ff). One fruit mentioned had not yet obtained the central importance it possessed later – the olive. Olive oil was already used in washing (like soap), but not yet apparently for lighting and cooking: the main hall was lit with braziers and torches, not oil lamps, and they cooked with animal fat. It seems that there was no specialized cultivation of the olive: this had to wait for a change in habits of consumption, and the growth of a trade in staple commodities between different areas; for the concentration on olive oil in Attica from the sixth century onwards presupposes both a more than local market and the ability to organize corn imports.
Another characteristic of early Greek agriculture has caused controversy since ancient times. Classical Greece was largely a cereal-eating culture, deriving its proteins from beans (the ancient equivalent of a vegetarian, the Pythagorean, abstained from them), fish, and dairy produce from goats and sheep. Meat was eaten mainly at festivals, after the animal had been sacrifìed to the gods and their entrails burned as offerings. But ancient scholars noted that the Homeric heroes were largely meat-eating. Moreover wealth was measured in head of cattle: slaves, armour, tripods, ransoms, women are valued at so many cattle, and the general adjectives for wealth often refer to livestock. Eumaeus describes his master’s wealth: ‘twelve herds of cattle on the mainland, as many flocks of sheep, as many droves of pigs, as many wandering herds of goats, that strangers graze and his own herdsmen’ (that is, hired and slave labour: Odyssey 14.100ff). In contrast, though Hesiod himself had his vision while tending sheep on Mt Helicon and could think of nothing better than tender veal or goat to go with his cheese and wine in the summer heat, he gives no instructions about animal husbandry: mules and oxen were beasts of burden, sheep and goats produced wool and milk products, but they were sidelines in the main business of agriculture. Horses were outside his interests, for they were few and belonged to aristocrats, to be used only in sport and warfare.
This clearly reflects a basic shift of emphasis in Greek agriculture away from animal husbandry, but the problem is how to date it. The Linear B tablets show that the Mycenean kings possessed large herds; and some scholars have seen the transition as occurring early in the Dark Age. But it seems more likely that it is a later phenomenon almost contemporary with Hesiod. Populations in movement tend to be pastoral rather than crop-growing; the animal bones found by tombs show that meat continued to be widely available for the funeral feast throughout the Geometrie period, and there are many terracotta fìgurines of domestic animals dedicated at early sanctuaries. But animals are wasteful in land-use. As the population began to grow, and men like Hesiod’s father moved into the uplands, animal husbandry gradually gave way to arable farming, until only the mountains were left for sheep and goats. It will have been the aristocrats who had the lands to keep to the old style longest; and it may also be that in Asia Minor pastures could be extended into the hinterland, in a way not possible in Greece and the islands. Homer and Hesiod between them record the transition.
The physical shape of the noble’s house provides the key to the relationship between production of wealth and its use to establish the social status of the basileus. Stripped of its heroic embellishments (so much easier to build in words than with the primitive technology of early Greece), it consists essentially of a courtyard, stables, perhaps a porch where guests might sleep, private chambers for storing wealth and weapons and for women’s quarters, and the great hall or megaron – a long room with seats round the walls and a central hearth. The master of the house may have his own private chamber, as Odysseus did, or he may sleep in the hall.
Archaeological evidence relates primarily to town settlements, and so to ordinary housing; but even these single room dwellings provide analogies to the wall seats and central hearths of the aristocracy, as if either the larger had grown from the smaller or peasants were imitating the nobility. The comparative absence of larger and more complex houses has worried archaeologists, and led many to try to relate the Homeric house across the Dark Age to the Mycenean palace. But such worries may be unfounded, for it seems that many of the nobles did not live in the towns; so that the fact that their houses have not been found is not surprising, for the countryside of Anatolia and even mainland Greece has been little explored. Essentially the oikos-economy is estate-centred and suggests a period when aristocrats lived separately from the community. The transition to city life was part of the same development whose effects have been seen in the social position of women and in agriculture. In these respects Asia Minor may well have been more conservative than mainland Greece, until the disturbances from the seventh century onwards, with the Cimmerian invasion and the attacks of Lydia, drove the Ionian Greeks into their coastal cities. Even then it seems that in some areas fortified farmsteads preserved a little of the old style of life.
Not all basilēes lived in the country: Alcinous’ house for instance is within the city walls (Odyssey 6 and 7). And two archaeological finds give reality and proportion to the poetic descriptions. At Zagora on Andros a housing complex of the late eighth century seems to belong together as a unit: it is prominently placed in the middle of the settlement near an open space and the site of a later temple. The main room in the complex is square and about 8 metres across, with a central hearth and benches along three walls. The eighth century settlement at Emporio on Chios is even more interesting. A primitive defence wall, which can hardly have been more than 2 metres high, ran round the hilltop, enclosing about 6 acres; the only two buildings within it were a later seventh century temple and, built into the wall and contemporary with it, a megaron hall 18 metres long, with three central columns and a porch supported by two more columns. Below the walls lay a village of perhaps 500 inhabitants; the larger houses were of the same megaron type with central columns and hearth, others had stone benches against the walls. Here perhaps is the roughly fortified residence of a loca1 basiletis, a refuge for his herds and for those living outside it, who must have regarded the owner of the main megaron as their leader. It was in such dim and smoke-fìlled halls as those of Zagora and Emporio that the poems of Homer were originally sung.
Early Greek society was not feudal: there was no class owing obligations to an arìstocracy in return for land, and no general serf population separate from the slaves, who were always recruited from outside the community. The various scattered forms of obligated servitude found later in Dorian communities like Sparta and Argos, or colonial cities like Syracuse, or in the static population of Athens,