Agricultural Systems, Land Tenure, and the Reforms of Solon

Abstract

The reforms of Solon have been a source of debate for many years now. The number of articles, chapters, and books written about them is legion. The justification for the present attempt is that it approaches the problem from a slightly different angle. The overriding aims of this paper are: (a) to elucidate what the agricultural system was in this period and to demonstrate that it did not ‘change with glacial slowness’ and that farmers were not incapable of increasing production; (b) to propose the adoption of a slightly different theoretical framework for analysing the culture of Greece in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Here, as in so many studies of archaic economies, the main schools of thought are the formalists and the substantivists; the formalists can be further broken down into the capitalists and the Marxists (see below p. 119). Proponents of both sides use predominantly, though not exclusively, analogies derived from Medieval Europe; this, as I shall argue shortly, has led to some serious misunderstandings. Feudal Europe was the culmination of a long development which was very different from that which preceded archaic Greece. Although it is possible to see some resemblances, on the whole they were two distinct cultures.