Many of these themes run through Hesiod’s Works and Days, as the poet narrates how his brother, “foolish Perses,” lost his oikos in Boeotia due to an accumulation of chrea (debts).58 Hesiod instructs his brother on the work habits and social behaviors necessary to remake himself as an independent peasant farmer, as well as on appropriate practices of farm management. A presupposition of these is “clearing of your debts” (403). Having accomplished that, he tells Perses, you will need to acquire sufficient money through your labors that “you may negotiate for another man’s kleros [plot of land, allotment], not another man for yours” (341). That one could negotiate to acquire another man’s plot, or he for yours, indicates that land was indeed alienable, and the whole text suggests a growing crisis of impoverishment and dispossession. The poet Theognis would seem to have been referring to precisely such phenomena when he wrote, at some point during the sixth century, “They seize possessions by force, and order has been destroyed/There is no longer an equitable distribution” (677–78).59 Older forms of reciprocity, or “equitable distribution,” had broken down, and now “possessions,” particularly land, were being seized by the rich.
This is the context in which Works and Days advises the poor man on how to avoid debts and loss of his land. Hesiod describes a social crisis of indebtedness and dispossession. And where relinquishment of land could not discharge debts, the handover of persons could—by way of the debt bondage of the debtor or his dependents.60 Even those commoners who could evade debt bondage, unable to count on the “generosity” of their superiors, had increasingly to resort to greater engagement with the market. It is revealing that Hesiod instructs his brother on how to conduct “seafaring” so that he might get his produce to market (641–45). With communal assistance receding, rudiments of market dependence emerged. This is why, rather than an isolated complaint, Hesiod’s poem would have resonated with audiences throughout Greece, expressing a widespread egalitarian sensibility.61
The increase in dispossession appears to have been discursively registered in the growing use by aristocrats of servile terms to refer to the poor of Attica, not merely to enslaved people. In the early part of the archaic age, slavery or servility, as we have seen, applied to foreigners, to those captured via war and conquest. Native members of the community, irrespective of wealth, were “free,” a term that connoted, among other things, being undefeated by outsiders.62 Now, however, many were being defeated by insiders, and subjugated to them. By the beginning of the sixth century BCE, according to the Constitution of Athens, written by Aristotle or one of his students, terms for slavery and bondage were applied interchangeably to the condition of the Athenian-born poor:
The poor were in a state of bondage to the rich, both themselves, their wives, and their children, and were called Pelatæ [bond-slaves for hire], and Hektemori [paying a sixth of the produce as rent]; for at this rate of hire they used to work the lands of the rich. Now, the whole of the land was in the hands of a few, and if the cultivators did not pay their rents, they became subject to bondage, both they and their children, and were bound to their creditors on the security of their persons, up to the time of Solon.63
It is this historical situation that haunts Hesiod’s Works and Days. In its treatment of market practices and the crisis confronting the poor, this work contrasts mightily with the Homeric epics. In Homer, remarks critic James Redfield, “the heroes do not buy and sell”—though he quickly adds, “except perhaps to purchase a slave,” a vital exception to which we shall return. Odysseus does proclaim that “most men risk the seas to trade with other men” (Odyssey, 9.141). But as a general rule, the epics do not portray the aristoi buying and selling, practices that are frequently treated as unheroic. King Nestor, for instance, scorns both traders and pirates, even though, incongruously, he recounts the fortune he attained through plunder (Odyssey, 3.80–83, 117–18, 170). Yet, we know that buying and selling, along with raiding and slaving, were well-established noble undertakings by the time Homer’s epic poems were written down, around 650 BCE. If, as a growing scholarly consensus has it, Homer largely projected the relations of his society onto a glorious past in ways meant to heroize aristocratic warriors,64 then his near silence about noble involvement in market transactions would seem symptomatic. It suggests that the poet suppressed evidence of a practice of which he was well aware, but whose effects troubled him or his listeners; it suggests that trade was considered unheroic. Redfield proposes that Homer’s avoidance of trade in the epics is “a specific literary strategy—which, paradoxically, implies the importance of trade in the world of the poet.”65 After all, one does not deliberately conceal an inconsequential feature of one’s world when recasting it in heroic guise. One suppresses something significant that provokes anxiety. And trade, joined to new forms of wealth and the erosion of reciprocity, was just such a troubling phenomenon. To be sure, the epics do interrogate the clash of greedy individualism or hubris (Agamemnon) versus proper noble generosity of the sort that Achilles recommends. But the conflict is portrayed in largely personal terms, as behaviors pursued by individual noble figures, disconnected from social practices of accumulation associated with warrior-trading. Yet if Homer shies away from these realities, Hesiod does not. For this peasant poet, the new social dynamics—and the crisis they wrought on the small producer—are on full display.
Works and Days has been described, reasonably, as an anti-aristocratic broadside against the upheavals deriving from new market relations and practices.66 The text fairly seethes with rage against the wealthy and powerful. The poet condemns his era as an age of envy, and he denounces “those who occupy themselves with violence and wickedness and brutal deeds,” reserving special scorn for those lords who, when acting as judges, had become “bribe-swallowers” issuing “crooked judgments” (238–64). Commentators have observed the similarities between Hesiod’s social justice rhetoric and that of the great Athenian reformer, Solon, about a century later.67 By Solon’s time (590s BCE), the social tensions depicted by Homer and Hesiod had erupted into intense social conflict. So profound was the turmoil brought on by popular insurgence that the Athenian aristocracy, seeing no way out, conferred on Solon dictatorial authority to rewrite the laws in an effort to end the crisis and restabilize the polis. Echoing Hesiod, Solon plainly signaled that rapacious practices of exploitation would have to be drastically curbed. “The leaders of the people have an evil mind,” Solon warns in his poems, which were recited publicly, and “they know not how to restrain their greed” (4.7–9).68 He further intones that
I brought back to their god-given homeland Athens
many who had been sold, one unjustly,
another justly, others fleeing
from dire necessity …
Others here held in shameful slavery
Trembling at their masters’ whims
I freed … (36.8–14)
Solon’s verses condemn the oppressions afflicting the poor: the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, the displacement of growing numbers of commoners from their lands, and the languishing of others in slavery due to unpayable debts. To be condemned to exile, debt bondage, or chattel slavery also meant exclusion from the political community, and thus loss of communal rights, social belonging, and identity. Crucial to Solon’s reforms was the momentous “shaking off of the burdens” (seisachtheia), which famously involved elimination of debts and of debt bondage. But the social transformation almost certainly entailed “a more substantial structural change”—the abolition of rents on land, such as hektemorage.69 The