On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay Part 14

"For those servants appointed by the king for protection (are) mostly takers of the property of others (and) cheats; from them he (_i.e._ the king) should protect these people."(307)

(M137) Under the rule of the Persians, all Asia was parcelled out in such a way as to supply maintenance (t??f?) for the Great King and his host throughout the whole year.(308) The satrap of a.s.syria kept at one time so great a number of Indian hounds, that four large villages of the plain were exempted from all other charges on condition of finding them food.(309)

(M138) Solomon's table was provided after the same method.

"And Solomon had twelve officers over all Israel which provided victuals for the king and his household; each man his month in a year made provision.... And Solomon's provision for one day was thirty measures of fine flour and threescore measures of meal, ten fat oxen and twenty oxen out of the pastures and an hundred sheep, beside harts, and roebucks, and fallowdeer, and fatted fowl....

And Solomon reigned over all kingdoms from the river unto the land of the Philistines, and unto the border of Egypt; they brought presents, and served Solomon all the days of his life.... And those officers provided victual for king Solomon, and for all that came unto king Solomon's table, every man according to his charge."(310)

(M139) Sesostris is said to have obtained his revenue from the holders of ?????? in Egypt in proportion to the amount of land in each man's occupation;(311) and Pharaoh, having bought all the land at the time of the famine in Egypt except that which supported the priests, took one-fifth of all the produce, leaving the remainder "for seed of the field," and for the food of the cultivators, and their households and little ones. "And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day, that Pharaoh should have the fifth part, except the land of the priests only, which became not Pharaoh's."(312)

In this case Pharaoh became proprietor by purchase of the land in Egypt.

But it must not be supposed that by exacting a payment from the occupier, the overlord as a rule had any power over the owners.h.i.+p of the soil. He no doubt had proprietary rights over his own estate, and may or may not have had power to regulate any further distribution of the waste. But the right of receiving dues, or of appointing another to receive them, gave him no power over the actual tillage of the soil.

(M140) The maintenance of the prince was a first charge apparently upon the property of his subjects; and it is easy to see how the lion's share would always be allotted to him, alike of booty as of acquired territory.

As long as the community was pastoral, it is also easy to imagine how the chief both increased his own wealth and admitted favoured companions or resident strangers to a share in the elastic area of the common pasturage.

After agriculture had a.s.sumed equal importance in the economy of the tribe as the tending of flocks and herds, one is apt to forget that for centuries-perhaps for thousands of years-the system of agriculture that grew up, still possessed much of the elasticity of the old pastoral methods. Under the open field system, such a custom as that described by Tacitus and in the Welsh Laws, viz. of ploughing up out of the pasture or waste sufficient to admit of each tribesman having his due allotment, and letting it lie waste again the next year, admitted of considerable readjustment to meet the exigencies of declining population, as well as providing an easy means whereby any stranger prince, like Bellerophon, who might be admitted to the tribe, could be allotted either a t?e??? apart, or a ?????? in the open plain.

Pindar describes this method of cultivation when he says:-

"Fruitful fields in turn now yield to man his yearly bread upon the plains, and now again they pause and gather back their strength."(313)

(M141) It is noticeable that the Aetolians offered Meleagros a t?e??? in the fattest part of the plain, wherever he might choose, as a _gift_ (d????); and as the t?e??? would certainly be cultivated by slave or hired labour, what they really gave him was the right of receiving the produce from the 50 _guai_ composing the t?e???. But this gift was meant as a special honour or bribe, and took a special form in being in land as a means of permanent enrichment.

In similar wise Ezekiel suggested the capitalisation, as it were, by a gift of land of the contributions to the princes, which no doubt were felt to be very irksome. In the division of the land, a portion was to be set aside first for the use of the temple and priests, then a portion for the prince.

"In the land shall be his possession in Israel, and my princes shall no more oppress my people; and the rest of the land shall they give to the house of Israel according to their tribes. Thus saith the Lord G.o.d, Let it suffice you, O princes of Israel; remove violence and spoil and execute judgment and justice, and take away your exactions from my people, saith the Lord G.o.d."(314)

And again:-

"Moreover the prince shall not take of the people's inheritance by oppression, to thrust them out of their possession; but he shall give his sons inheritance out of his own possession; that my people be not scattered every man from his possession."(315)

But there can be no doubt, that although the prince may have had no power to dislodge any of the free tribesmen of his own people from their holdings, yet no one could gainsay him if he chose to enrich himself by planting or reclaiming any part of his domains, as Laertes is represented as having done.(316)

(M142) The modern usage in Boeotia and in the island of Euboea may very well represent the procedure of ancient times, and if it can be imagined that some method of the same sort was in vogue in Boeotia in the time of Hesiod, it will be understood how possible it was for Hesiod's father to settle at Askra and gradually to acquire possession of a house and ??????.

"There is some cultivation from Plataea to Thebes, but strangely alternating with wilderness. We were told that the people have plenty of spare land, and not caring to labour for its artificial improvement, till a piece of ground once, and then let it lie fallow for a season or two. The natural richness of the Boeotian soil thus supplies them with ample crops. But it is strange to think how impossible it is, even in these rich and favoured plains, to induce a fuller population."(317)

At Achmetaga, in Euboea,

"The folk pay for their houses a nominal rental of a bushel of wheat per annum, in order to secure the owner's proprietary claim, which would otherwise pa.s.s to the occupier by squatter's right after thirty years of unmolested occupation. They are at liberty to cultivate pretty well as much land as they care to, paying to the landlord one-third in kind.... The produce here is almost exclusively wheat or maize, but every family maintains a plot of vineyard for home consumption."(318)

(M143) Whether the free tribesman ever looked upon the contribution he made to the maintenance of the princes, under whose protection he had the privilege of living, as a condition of tenure of his land, is open to doubt; but from the right to demand indiscriminate gifts, to confiscate or eject in case of refusal, it is only one step to the exaction of a regular food-rent as a return for the occupation of land.

- 7. Summary Of The Early Evidence.

It may be useful here briefly to summarise the results of the inquiry of the last three sections into the relation of the owners.h.i.+p of land to the structure of society in Homer and in early times.

(M144) the princes had their compact estates divided off from the other land of the community, so that a pa.s.ser-by could point and say, "There is the king's t?e???."(319) The ordinary tribesman on the other hand had a share in the common fields under cultivation, probably consisting of a number of scattered pieces of land lying mixed up with those of others, and therefore only referred to on the face of the land, under the comprehensive terms ????? ?a? ???a ?????p??.(320)

This share of the tribesman was, as in later times, called a ??????, it being possible for a man to enjoy several such holdings and deserve the epithet p?????????, whilst the lowest cla.s.s of freemen consisted of those who possessed no land, under the ignominious t.i.tle of ???????.

(M145) The ??????, descending from father to son, was apparently connected with the ????? or household, and supplied its maintenance. The ????? grew fat or was consumed in accordance with the capacity of its head, and its continuity was regarded as a matter of the utmost importance. Its members were bound together at their ancestral hearth by mutual ties of common maintenance. The sanct.i.ty of thus sharing the same loaf extended also to guests, whose relations to their hosts might last for several generations.

It is the necessity of supplying the ????? and its dependents with the means of sustenance and hospitality among a pastoral people gradually adapting themselves to agriculture, that regulates the tenure of land and the duties of the householder.

(M146) The power of the chieftain to draw upon the resources of his people for the entertainment of his household and his guests by exactions payable in kind, supplemented by the power he also seems to have possessed to transfer at will the right of receiving these "gifts" to any one he chose, seems to contain the germs of the more complicated system of food-rents as a condition of land tenure, which is so important a feature of the Celtic tribal arrangements.

(M147) Inasmuch as the prince was a member of the tribe, he was ent.i.tled to an allotment in the land under cultivation, the very word ??????

implying the equal right of all members of the tribe to a share in the soil. But inasmuch as the prince possessed blood royal and claimed his descent from the very G.o.ds that the tribesmen wors.h.i.+pped, his dignity was above partaking with his tribesmen of a ?????? in the common fields. He was therefore allotted a t?e??? apart, and worthy of his divine parentage. Besides the bare single allotment of the t?e???, land was set apart for him as a gift of honour by the people, from whom honour and gifts to their prince were due. Gifts in land formed a special mark of honour, and may at the same time have served another purpose from the giver's point of view by way of a permanent source of income or endowment, as it were, whereby the continuous exactions towards the maintenance of the prince from the lands of the people might tend to be alleviated. Thus much of power over the property of his inferiors he undoubtedly retained, and he probably cultivated what he liked of the outlying lands under his sway.

(M148) But the evidence does not show that he ever had the right of coming between the ????? of his tribesmen and their ??????: the only means at his disposal of severing the link between the family and the land, were those employed by Ahab and Jezebel to acquire the "inheritance" of the ancestral vineyard of Naboth at Jezreel.

- 8. Hesiod And His ??????.

In the time of Hesiod, the ??????(321) could be sold in case of need and added to the possession of another.

(M149) But the case of Hesiod is in itself somewhat exceptional. His father had fled from his own country by stress of poverty, and settled on the barren land of Askra in Boeotia, where he was allowed to acquire some land.(322) He was therefore somewhat of a sojourner (the eta??st?? of Homer),(323) and, true to the Homeric doctrine, was unenc.u.mbered by the claims of kindred. Hesiod contrasts the ready help of the neighbour with the perfunctory slowness of the kinsman, duty-bound. The neighbour, he says, is prompted by the need of mutual protection of material property, the kinsman stays to bind on his sandals and gird his loins for the labour he is forbidden to s.h.i.+rk.(324)

Hesiod and his brother Perses had divided the ?????? of their father into two, and lived apart. Perses had squandered his half, and spent his time and his livelihood in the gay life of the town, but none the less seems to have expected to be allowed to draw still further on the resources of the paternal property, to the distress of his industrious brother.

Hesiod does not contemplate any possible means of making a living other than by tilling the soil; and his quaint ideas may be taken as typical of the small Boeotian peasant-farmer, allowance being made for the short time that his family had held land at Askra.

- 9. Survivals Of Family Land In Later Times.