Writing agrarian histories of the Roman world: seasonality and scale as tools of analysis

Abstract

Agrarian labor history of Greco-Roman antiquity—indeed, labor history of the period more broadly—does not look very much like the agrarian labor histories of other periods. Many explanations might be adduced for why this is so, including the very particular circumstances that led to the development of ancient history as a discipline separate from (yet intimately related to) the humanistic intellectual traditions of classical studies in the last decades of the nineteenth century. But arguably the most fundamental constraining factor is the nature of the available evidence. Simply put, the wealthy, leisured elites responsible for the overwhelming bulk of the written materials available to us from the ancient Mediterranean world were emphatically uninterested in the sector of the population whose labor underpinned and sustained their privileged position.