Defining Rural Athenians

Who counts as a “rural” Athenian? Attempts to make a precise definition of rurality in the Athenian context often break down. One attempt might consider geography, holding the walls of Athens, as Jones (Reference Jones2004, 8) does, to mark a “formidable social and cultural divide.” But this physical divide was not absolute, for there was small-scale farming inside the walls of Athens (Hanson Reference Hanson1998, 80n3) and there were extramural industries like stone-working, mining, fishing, logging, and charcoal-burning. A second attempt might refer to people who expressed agrarian identities, attitudes, and sympathies. Yet these emerged among urbanites like Aristophanes, who himself also owned property on the island of Aegina.Footnote ³ A third option might leverage the role of the traditional hoplite farmer-soldier or the zeugitae census class. But many farmers living outside the walls were too poor to afford their own armor, whereas others were much richer than the typical hoplite.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, urbanites like Socrates and metics also served as hoplites. On top of these difficulties, we are constantly confronted with the poverty of our sources from this period. Few touch on rural or agrarian topics, largely a product of the fact that almost all our extant written evidence comes from urbanites.

Yet despite these definitional difficulties, the urban/rural divide was undeniably a deep feature of Athenian politics as far back as Pesistratus’s policies to keep people from the countryside out of the city—and therefore out of politics (Ath. Pol. 16.3–5; Zatta Reference Zatta2010). Such policies indicate an important division between the Athenians in the asty and those in the chōra. Similarly, the works of Aristophanes illustrate a semantic pattern surrounding rural characters: a farmer; a traditionalist opposed to the corruption of the city; an agrarian against the unnatural importation of food; a peacenik eager to return to life on his farm; a hoplite eager to fight on land, not at sea; and even a rustic bumpkin—though these distinctions were flexible.Footnote ⁵

Considering these historiographical difficulties, we should not demand a level of precision from our ancient sources that is difficult to attain even today (on the complexity of operationalizing rurality in empirical political science, see Nemerever and Rogers Reference Nemerever and Melissa2021). I suggest a flexible approach to the term rural. I take rural to generally refer to those whose primary residence was outside of the city walls and whose attitudes and identities exhibited a particularly agrarian character. When our sources are ambiguous about the identity of certain agents (like the precise urban/rural makeup of the hoplites in the coups of 411), we must leverage a judicious amount of inference to determine whether they were “rural” in either geography or consciousness. Therefore, when defining rural Athenians, we should tolerate considerable overlap between the following categories: Athenians living outside the city walls, rural as an identity in tension with those living in the asty, hoplite as a social group, hoplite as a military function, zeugitae as a census class, farmer as an occupation, and agrarian as a normative outlook.

In focusing our attention on the urban/rural divide, I do not claim that it was the most fundamental or important divide in the Athenian demos, which had multiple cross-cutting cleavages of which urban/rural was only one. Indeed, there were many deliberate institutional efforts to overcome the urban/rural divide, like Cleisthenes’s deme system, which incorporated people from every part of Attica into the political system as a way to mitigate geographic loyalties, and festivals like the synoikia. Footnote ⁶ For the most part, these institutions functioned as intended and did much to mitigate the urban/rural divide. Yet tensions remained, and this article attends to those tensions. Although, as Osborne (Reference Osborne1985, 189) admits, they may have only emerged in “exceptional” circumstances, urban/rural tensions still had significant consequences for democracy.

The Urban/Rural Divide in Athens

In this section, I provide a history of the urban/rural divide in democratic Athens and argue that it lurked beneath some of the most important issues in Athenian politics in the classical period. Pericles’s strategy of evacuating Attica led to a collision between urban and rural citizens and solidified amongst rural Athenians something resembling what Cramer (Reference Cramer2016, 5–6), in a different context, calls “rural consciousness”: a fierce attachment to place accompanied by a resentment of urbanites and urban spaces.

Many scholars have suggested that the Athenian demos was relatively unified in its pursuit of naval empire (e.g., Balot Reference Balot2001, 142–45, 149; Finley Reference Finley1985, 94–5; Ludwig Reference Ludwig2002, 363–4). Such a view largely stems from Pericles’s idealized depiction of Athens in his Funeral Oration, in which all citizens become one with Athens through love of her imperial power (II.43.1, see also VI.24.3). But the reality was far from the ideal; rural Athenians were often uneasy about imperialism, the result of Athens’s transition from a localist agrarian society in which rural citizens held a privileged political, social, and military role to a centralized imperial democracy in which their traditional role was largely coopted by urbanites and sailors. This urban/rural divide was exacerbated by three trends that pushed Athens in an imperialist direction at the expense of the status of rural citizens: (a) the ascendance of a centralized democracy located around Athens’s ports, (b) the increase in grain importation, and (c) the concomitant rise of the strategic importance of the Athenian navy.

The tension between Athenian agrarianism and maritime power can be traced back to the city’s mythical founding when Athena and Poseidon contended for the role of patron of Athens. Athena won the contest by gifting an olive tree to the city, but the tension between Athens as a land power and Athens as a sea power was never resolved. In predemocratic Athens, political power was most often directly tied to ownership and cultivation of the countryside. Land constituted the essential locus of families, genē, and phratries, which were often named after specific places or pieces of real estate, and the political loyalties of rural farmers were affixed to these local geographic associations (Ath. Pol. 13.4; Frost Reference Frost2005, 163–8; Herodotus 1.59.3). Solon’s class system distributed political power based on agricultural yields (Ober Reference Ober1996, 58). But after Cleisthenes’s reforms replaced the agro-centric politics of the Archaic period with a centralized democracy, political power traditionally rooted in control of the countryside was reconsolidated under the hegemony of the city centered on its ports. The agro-centrism of predemocratic politics and the centralized democratic empire represented two contradictory visions of Athens, putting traditional rural Athenians at odds with the new ethos of naval imperialism and setting the stage for urban/rural tensions to crystallize during the Peloponnesian War.

Cleisthenes’s reforms were instrumental in establishing the borders of Athenian territory to include all of what we know as Attica, thereby making distant rural residents of Attica into official Athenian citizens. Politically incorporating Attica’s very large territory and rural population, whose numbers exceeded the urban population (II.16.1), required a new way to integrate geographic and socioeconomic diversity into one democratic community (Anderson Reference Anderson2003; Vlassopoulos Reference Vlassopoulos2007, 36–7).Footnote ⁷ Through his artificial tribal organization and the incorporation of remote demes into the central government, Cleisthenes encouraged the acceptance of Athenian urban hegemony over a large rural population and territory, gradually supplanting the local identities that had dominated with communal ties mediated through the city of Athens (Anderson Reference Anderson2003, 5, 13–7, 21; Manville Reference Manville1990, 157; Von Reden Reference von Reden, Cartledge, Millett and von Reden1998). Yet although all of Attica had been de jure incorporated into democratic politics and many rural citizens participated in government, rural citizens were still politically underrepresented, particularly in the assembly; as Hansen writes, “The size of Attica was an insurmountable obstacle to having all citizens assembled regularly… . about a third of the citizens lived so far from the Pnyx that they were prevented from attending the ekklesia regularly” (Reference Hansen1987, 9).Footnote ⁸

During the Persian Wars, the general Themistocles continued the gradual separation of political identity from local geographic attachments by threatening to move the polis from Attica to Italy (Herodotus 8.61–2; Taylor Reference Taylor2009, 24; Von Reden Reference von Reden, Cartledge, Millett and von Reden1998, 171; see also Zatta Reference Zatta2011). Themistocles expanded the Athenian political imaginary by conceiving of a polis unbound by territory, enabling Pericles’s later defensive strategy of sacrificing rural lands for the sake of the empire.Footnote ⁹ The construction of the long walls created a physical barrier between city and countryside, and Pericles’s vision of imperial Athens located the polis in its male citizens and its empire, centered on the walled city—decidedly not in the rural countryside (I.143.3–4; Forde Reference Forde1989, 27–8; Taylor Reference Taylor2009, 24). This perspective was dramatically at odds with the pious attachment rural Athenians felt for their ancestral fields, homes, shrines, and villages, which Thucydides says they considered to be their native polises (II.16.2; Foster Reference Foster2010, 174–82) yet Pericles dismissed as “gardens” and “ornament[s]” (II.62.3).

Two additional interrelated trends further put rural Athenians at odds with imperialism: Athens became increasingly reliant on imported grain, and the Athenian military became increasingly reliant on its navy. These trends gradually unseated rural Athenians from their cherished role as defenders and food producers.Footnote ¹⁰ The unique demands of Greek agriculture led to the development of a novel form of warfare, the phalanx, in which farmer-soldiers, called hoplites, fought quick and decisive battles in rhythm with the agricultural calendar (Hanson Reference Hanson1989; Reference Hanson1998). The link between property, military service, and freedom formed the basis of a hoplite ideology that celebrated their status as free, independent, and self-sufficient food-producing citizens (Hanson Reference Hanson, Ober and Hedrick1996, 291; see also Ober Reference Ober1996, 64–5).Footnote ¹¹

Imperial Athens was perhaps the one great exception to the rule that land warfare was determined by agriculture (de Ste. Croix Reference De Ste. Croix1972, 46; Ober Reference Ober1996, 70). Some have suggested that Attic farmers from the Solonian period onward steadily shifted from growing grains to other crops better suited to the rocky soil, such as olives and figs (de Ste. Croix Reference De Ste. Croix1972, 46; Tausend Reference Tausend1989). As a result, Athens became increasingly reliant on imported grain, which necessitated a proactive policy of naval imperialism to protect grain lifelines (de Ste. Croix Reference De Ste. Croix1972, 47; Finley Reference Finley1985, 84–5; Moreno Reference Moreno2007, 323). One important consequence of grain importation was that Athenian military operations were less constrained by the agricultural schedule than those of cities that depended on domestic grain, disrupting the centrality of phalanx warfare and undermining the hoplite’s ideological justification. The grain-importing Athenians were able to pursue innovative military tactics such as the nonengagement at the core of Pericles’s defensive strategy (I.141.3). By contrast, the mere threat of crop devastation was enough to make other cities capitulate, as in the case of Acanthus (IV.88.1).

Athens’s unique relationship to its land allowed it to devote itself to becoming the preeminent naval power in the Mediterranean, often preferring to project its power through naval raids rather than phalanx warfare. The poor, landless urbanites that mostly staffed the navy became essential to feeding and defending the polis, usurping the functions of the rural hoplites, who had increasingly become dependent for defense on those they saw as their social inferiors (see Old Oligarch I.2).Footnote ¹² Indeed, after the Periclean evacuations, Ehrenberg (Reference Ehrenberg1962, 91) writes, “never again could the peasants argue that their work was indispensable.” There is also evidence that food importation and the imperialism it demanded were seen as profoundly changing Athens. In a fragment from Aristophanes’s Seasons, an agrarian character mocks food importation as unnatural (because seasonal crops become available at any time of year) to underscore fundamental shifts in Athenian society: “You’ve changed their city from Athens into Egypt” (fr. 581; see also Old Oligarch II.6).

Rural Athenians posed a liability to Athenian imperial ambitions, their local attachments tempering their desire for empire (Foster Reference Foster2010, 176). Pericles saw attachment to Attica as a strategic disadvantage (I.143.4–5). Farmers tried to force the entire polis to fight to protect their farms, jeopardizing the empire (II.20.3–4; see Acharnians 233). At other times, there was an impression that rural citizens curried favor with the Spartans to save their lands from destruction (Herodotus 9.73.3; Old Oligarch II.14; see Acharnians 185–200). Even if such occurrences were extremely rare, situations like these illustrate the disruptive effect the pursuit of empire had on rural citizens, and their prevalence in literature reflects their cultural salience. This is not to say that rural Athenians never benefitted from the empire; the Old Oligarch says that Athens abandoned Attica for greater goods (II.16; Strauss Reference Strauss1986, 60). But the calculation was different for rural citizens. For them, there was a trade-off between securing the empire and securing their homes and traditional way of life—a trade-off that did not exist for urbanites (see Knights 671).

Urban/rural divisions also manifested in a culture war between rural agrarians and urbanites. In Clouds (423 BCE), Aristophanes represents the fraught relationship between rural Attica and urban Athens in the unhappy marriage of the rural protagonist Strepsiades and his urbanite wife (41–52; Jones Reference Jones2004, 201). Similarly, the debate between Just Speech and Unjust Speech illustrates a contest between traditional hoplite values—the “education [that] nurtured the men who fought at Marathon” (985)—and the newfangled values of the city, which were accused of producing effeminate men with “pale complexion[s], small shoulders, narrow chest[s]” (1017).Footnote ¹³ As Strauss (Reference Strauss1993, 146) argues, the intergenerational conflict in Clouds between old and new values mapped onto other tensions in Athenian society. One of these was urban versus rural. In Clouds, Socrates repeatedly makes Strepsiades’s rurality into a pejorative: “How rustic [agroikos] you are and poor at learning!” (646); “You’re crude [agreios] and a dullard” (655; Jones Reference Jones2004, 202). Similar remarks are made by Socrates in the Republic, where “rustic” is almost always used negatively (e.g., 361e, 411a, 560d; Jones Reference Jones2004, 249).

When we disabuse ourselves of the idea of a monolithic Athenian demos committed to imperialism, our picture of Athens becomes more nuanced. Rather than simply accepting the Corinthian characterization of the Athenians—that “they are born neither to enjoy any peace [hēsychian] themselves nor to allow it to others” (I.70.8)—we find that many Athenians longed for peace and scorned empire. The Periclean vision of abstract power projected through naval empire was not completely dominant, but it was antithetical to the agrarian tradition of Athenian politics, which located the polis in ancestral homes on the soil of Attica.

Pericles and the Evacuation of Rural Attica

These powerful trends driving urban and rural Athenians apart—the relocation of political power to the city, the rise of grain importation and naval imperialism, and cultural conflict—might, under normal circumstances, have been successfully mitigated by Athenian institutions designed to ease the urban/rural divide. But Pericles’s strategy of sacrificing the land of Attica forced a collision between urban and rural citizens that exacerbated the divide. Pericles’s plan was to withdraw rural citizens behind the walls of Athens, allowing the Spartans to ravage the countryside while the city safely imported grain through its fortified port. If the Athenians did not seek to expand their empire, Pericles argued, they could triumph by attacking enemy territory with their powerful navy and outlasting the Spartans (I.143–4). Nonengagement was a radical departure from the traditional “agonal” system of phalanx warfare (Ober Reference Ober1996, 74–5). Greek farmers did not let other Greeks ravage their fields, which were considered inviolable (Hanson Reference Hanson1989, 4; Ober Reference Ober1985, 34–5). Pericles’s plan would not have been possible without the decline in Athenian grain production, the rise in imports, and the supremacy of the naval ethos over traditional hoplite values.Footnote ¹⁴ His strategy depended on the sacrifice of rural homes and interests, causing rural citizens extreme grief, anxiety, and resentment about imperialism.

A rural citizen’s home (oikos) embodied his economic, religious, and political status, and the destruction of his rural farm epitomized his alienation from Athenian society. Beyond providing for farmers economically, the rural home was the locus of a farmer’s pious attachment to place, facilitating his devotion to his ancestors and the gods (II.16.1–2). The physical oikos also largely defined the political, social, and military roles of rural Athenians. Although urbanites probably used wealth as a proxy for the agricultural quotas of Solon’s class divisions, the political status of a rural citizen likely remained tied to the productive capacity of his physical landholdings. The destruction of a rural citizen’s home threatened his political status and self-conception as a valuable Athenian citizen. Indeed, destruction of someone’s home was sometimes used as punishment for particularly heinous crimes, likely seeking, according to Connor, “the extirpation of the individual and his immediate kin from the society” (Reference Connor1985, 86).

Ancient sources show that the evacuations of the countryside were psychologically devastating for the rural Athenians who, according to Thucydides, saw themselves as giving up “their way of life and leaving behind what each of them felt to be the equivalent of their native city” (II.16.1–2). Each time the Spartans invaded, rural citizens evacuated their ancestral homes and moved into shanty towns in the city as the enemy burned farms, homes, and shrines in the countryside (II.16.1–2, II.52.2; Knights 792–95). To these rural citizens, living in the city was foreign and strange. Urbanites often scorned and mocked them for their rustic language and shabby clothing (Ehrenberg Reference Ehrenberg1962, 86–7; Jones Reference Jones2004, 170–4). With no place to stay, Thucydides tells us, rural refugees even slept in temples filled with the corpses of plague victims (II.52.2–3).

This rural presence changed Athenian politics. The sudden influx of rural people caused a dramatic shift in the composition of the participating demos, for the first time including rural citizens at comparable rates to urbanites (see Cornford Reference Cornford1907, 15). Rural citizens had few means of earning money inside the walls beyond remuneration for political participation or military service as marines or rowers (Ath. Pol. 27.2–3). They also had less experience in government than their urban counterparts (Finley Reference Finley1985, 52; Hansen Reference Hansen1987, 9; see also Politics 1319a30), as their dispersal over the countryside worked to neuter their collective capacity as a political force (Ludwig Reference Ludwig2002, 362–3).Footnote ¹⁵

Some have argued that the economic damage of the Spartan invasions was insignificant, as they only invaded for an average of thirty days at a time (Foxhall Reference Foxhall, Rich and Shipley1993, 141–2; Hanson Reference Hanson1998, 151–2). Others have argued that it was more significant (Thorne Reference Thorne2001). Regardless of economic impact, ancient sources indicate that the invasions left a deep psychological imprint on the Athenians (II.16.1–2; Acharnians 32–5, 233; Andocides 3.8; Clouds 5). These same scholars have argued that crop destruction was intended to inflict psychological or political, not economic, damage (Foxhall Reference Foxhall, Rich and Shipley1993, 142; Hanson Reference Hanson1998, 152, 179). The psychological and political toll of the Spartan invasions—not their economic impact—are decisive for my argument. Foxhall (Reference Foxhall, Rich and Shipley1993) argues that crop devastation served a political purpose; the resulting pain would mostly be felt by the rural segment of the population, putting their interests directly at odds with their fellow citizens’ and the polis as a whole: “The risk of the Periklean strategy was that it depended on loyalty to the polis taking precedence over household and family loyalties. The failure of that strategy was not that it left Athens exposed to economic damage, but that it left Athens exposed to envy, suspicion, and social disunity… . The threat perceived by individual households to their own subsistence was the enemy’s most powerful weapon” (142–3). In this respect, the Spartan strategy was not unsuccessful, especially after the fortification of Deceleia.

Pericles’s evacuation of Attica marked the culmination of a crisis among rural Athenians, whose status in Athenian society, I have argued, had been steadily undermined in the pursuit of naval empire. Repeatedly dislocated from their homes, farms, and traditional cultural and religious practices, rural citizens could literally no longer find their home in Athenian society—“with people dying inside the city and their land ravaged outside it,” as Thucydides puts it (II.54.2). They were vulnerable on their ancestral farms but hated the city, traumatized by the evacuations and the devastating plague, which hit rural refugees particularly hard (II.52.1–3). Their distress was compounded by the Spartan fortification of Deceleia, which forced rural Athenians to live within the city walls all year round. The rural experience during the war was marked by a profound sense of loss and resentment accompanied by the desire to return to a bygone era of antebellum agrarianism.

Aristophanes’s comedies, particularly Acharnians (425 BCE), Clouds (423 BCE), and Peace (421 BCE), help us see how rural Athenians responded to the threats to their farms. Although Aristophanes was an urbanite, his wartime plays often focused on rural characters and thus provide more evidence about rural Athenians than perhaps any other source, portraying them as nostalgically lamenting the separation from their homes and desperate to restore their antebellum lifestyles. As interpreters like Strauss (Reference Strauss1993, 154) and Ehrenberg (Reference Ehrenberg1962, 86) have recognized, Aristophanes’s humor depends on being topical and relevant to his audience, so his plays likely illustrate hopes and fears held by many rural citizens, albeit exaggerated for comedic effect. As Ehrenberg writes, “the poet has to keep close enough to real facts in order to be understood and to evoke the right kind of laughter” (86). So although evidence from Aristophanes should be approached with caution, it should not be dismissed out of hand.

At times, Aristophanes depicts rural citizens clamoring to fight the Spartans, like the elderly Acharnian chorus, who insist that “our hatred demands implacable war because of our lands” (Acharnians 233). At other times, Aristophanes depicts his rural protagonists longing for peace, like Dikaeopolis (“I watch the countryside and yearn for peace, I hate the city and want to see my farm, my village,” Acharnians 32–35), Strepsiades (“Perish, then, O war, because among many other things, now I can’t even punish my servants,” Clouds 5), and Trygaeus (“the hour has come to throw away our troubles [pragmatōn] and our wars, and, ere another pestle [hawkish leader] rise to stop us, to pull out Peace, the joy of all mankind,” Peace 292–94, 500–15). Rural longing for a peaceful ideal of home also emerges in the surviving fragments of Farmers (ca. 424–22): “Peace deep in wealth and little team of oxen, would it were mine to have an end of the war, and delve and dress the vines” (fr. 111). One farmer is so desperate to return to his country life that he proposes donating a large sum to escape his duties in the city: “A: I want to farm! B: And who’s stopping you? A: You all are. So I’m contributing a thousand drachmas if you free me from my duties” (fr. 102).

Amidst these feelings of loss, the mood also turned to resentment directed at urbanites whom rural citizens saw as responsible for their suffering. In Peace, Aristophanes depicts the chorus of farmers complaining that they are treated unfairly by military officers, who privilege urbanites (asteiōs) (1185). Peace is achieved only after Hermes orders the Athenians to edge a little closer to the sea—perhaps causing those living by the coast in the Piraeus and city of Athens to fall in—until the “farmers pull alone” and rescue Peace (505–10). Along with Peace, the farmers rescue Harvest and Festival, suggesting a rural perception that urban imperialism also threatened traditional piety and agrarianism. Finally, Clouds ends with Strepsiades burning down Socrates’s schoolhouse (1480–1510), a symbolic instance of popular justice possibly embodying traditionalist anger at a newfangled culture undermining Athenian society (Forsdyke Reference Forsdyke2008, 28, 33n101; Connor Reference Connor1985, 88n29). Given the political context of Clouds, the burning of Socrates’s schoolhouse may have had the additional meaning of revenge against urbanites. There is evidence suggesting that Strepsiades’s attack was meant to have a particularly rural dimension; he attacks the burning schoolhouse with a mattock (sminuē, Clouds 1486, 1500), which Aristophanes explicitly identifies as a symbol of farmers at Peace 546.

Pleonexia, Sicily, and Coups

Pericles’s urban-centric defensive strategy deepened structural trends driving rural and urban Athenians apart, and Aristophanes portrays how these tensions manifested through the distress and resentment of his rural characters. But the divide between urban and rural Athenians did not merely result in hard feelings. Thucydides shows that the urban/rural divide had significant political consequences over the course of the war, particularly in the rise of Athenian imperialism, the Sicilian Expedition, and the coups of 411. We can find indications in Thucydides’s narrative that each of these had deep roots in Athens’s urban/rural divide.

Interpreters of Thucydides generally attribute imperial expansion (and the Sicilian Expedition in particular) to the material greed, eros, or pleonexia of the demos (Balot Reference Balot2001; Forde Reference Forde1989, 17; Kallet Reference Kallet2001, 45; Strauss Reference Strauss1964, 226; Wolin Reference Wolin2008, 246–8). Yet Thucydides is not silent about the factors that enflame or moderate pleonexia. If we keep the conflict between the Periclean ideal of imperial Athens and the agrarian ideal of Athens rooted in the land of Attica in mind, we see Thucydides repeatedly link imperialism and the Sicilian Expedition to the Athenians’ attenuating attachment to the land of Attica. Attachment to place is not necessarily politicized along urban/rural lines, nor is it a uniquely rural phenomenon. However, in the context of Thucydides’s narrative and Athenian politics during the war, attachment to the land of Attica was a highly politicized issue. For Pericles and the imperialists, Attica was a trifle (II.62.3)—there was “plenty of land both in the islands and on the mainland” (I.143.4)—whereas for a traditional agrarian Athenian, his politeia patria in the countryside was the heart of his political, social, and religious identity (II.16.2).

Several scholars have explored the link between Athenian imperialism and declining attachment to the land of Attica. Forde traces Athenian imperial daring to the evacuations during the Persian invasions, which he argues led to a diminution of Athenian piety (Reference Forde1989, 22–5). However, Forde speaks of “the Athenians” in toto losing their attachment to Attica; we must remember that this effect was not universal but was a partisan attitude held mostly by urbanites and resisted by rural citizens who remained deeply attached to Attica. Foster (Reference Foster2010) also argues that the Periclean imperial project depended on undermining rural Athenians’ attachments to their ancestral lands. Just as Thucydides juxtaposes the ideal of Pericles’s funeral oration with the bleak reality of the plague, Foster argues, he also juxtaposes Pericles’s second speech urging the abandonment of Attica with the reality of the distress of the evacuations of Attica (Reference Foster2010, 174; II.13–15). Thucydides not only dramatically describes the rural citizens’ evacuation of their homes but also gives an excursus on the Athenians’ relationship with Attica. He emphasizes that rural Athenians had a particularly close attachment to their land, having cultivated it longer than any other Greeks (II.15.1, c.f. I.2.5–6), and, in doing so, vindicates the farmers mourning the loss of their homes (Foster Reference Foster2010, 181). The Periclean imperial project and the pleonexia that fueled it demanded the sacrifice of Athenian land to the Spartan invaders. Satisfying the demands of empire therefore required the attenuation of rural Athenians’ attachment to Attica; they had to be convinced that it was preferable to potentially lose their homes for the sake of naval empire.Footnote ¹⁶ By creating an opposition between attachment to place and pleonexia and anchoring it in the difference between urban and rural attitudes toward Attica, Thucydides highlights the urban/rural divide as one of the most consequential cleavages of the war.

Thucydides connects pleonexia to the declining attachment to Attica in another famous episode: the Sicilian Expedition. Thucydides repeatedly emphasizes the role of homeland in the Athenian decision to invade Sicily, highlighting, in Taylor’s words, “the Athenians’ inability to distinguish between home and away” (Reference Taylor2009, 140). Thucydides thereby subtly critiques the expedition as another consequence of the Periclean disregard for traditional attachments to Attica. Thucydides’s account of the Sicilian Expedition, which he calls “the longest voyage from home [oikeias] ever attempted” (VI.31.6), is framed as a meditation on the importance of place.Footnote ¹⁷ He begins Book 6 with a catalog of all the different peoples who have called Sicily home, and his final words on the Athenian defeat are “few out of many returned home” (VII.87.6). The theme of “home” versus “faraway” also repeatedly emerges in the Sicilian debates. One major disagreement between Nicias and Alcibiades is over whether Athens’s borders can or cannot be fixed (VI.13.1, 18.3)—which is to say, whether attachment to homeland is possible at all, for love of homeland cannot exist unless it can be distinguished from foreign land. Similarly, the two disagree about whether the Sicilians are attached to their own land, Nicias assuming that they are rooted in their homeland and Alcibiades asserting they are not (VI.13.1, 17.2–3). Perhaps most famously, Nicias calls the passion to sail for Sicily a “perverse craving for what is beyond reach [dyserōtas … tōn apontōn]” (VI.13.1) and acknowledges that “there is an aura of respect attaching to what is most distant” (VI.11.4). We need not take this dyserōs to be an infinite longing with no definite object (see Nichols Reference Nichols2015, 125); it also makes sense to understand Thucydides as commenting on the importance of place for the stability of a political community, critiquing Pericles and further displaying his sympathy with rural Athenians. Had they not been dispossessed of their homes, many Athenians might have been unexcited by Alcibiades’s incitement for gain (Ludwig Reference Ludwig2002, 362).

Thucydides also links the Sicilian Expedition to Pericles’s attenuation of attachment to place by remarking that young Athenians in 415 had a “yearning to see these far-off sights and spectacles” (VI.24.3). Although this passion might be attributed to the enthusiasms of youth, we can also learn something from the immediate chronology; the Sicilian debates took place 16 years after the first evacuations of Attica. Assuming Thucydides had men aged 20 to 30 in mind, they would have ranged from 4 to 14 years old at the time of the first evacuations of Attica. These young people, unlike any other generation, had been raised at a time when Athenian policy toward their homeland was nearly one of official disregard and when their homes in Attica were disparaged by the first man of Athens as “gardens” and “ornament[s]” (II.62.3, see also II.21.2). When Alcibiades argued that “a city which is accustomed to activity would be very quickly destroyed by a change to inactivity” (VI.18.7), we can imagine he is speaking to these young people in particular, who only knew a life of kinēsis divorced from the demands of attachment to homeland. To be clear, Thucydides does not explicitly say that rural Athenians were a potent political force in the debates of 415.Footnote ¹⁸ Still, the arguments he presents reveal his sympathies with the concerns of rural Athenians, and the Athens he depicts is one which appeared to have forgotten the importance of homeland and thus became lost.

Theorizing the Urban/Rural Divide after the War

Recognizing the divisions between urban and rural Athenians during the Peloponnesian War years, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle developed strategies to manage interactions between urban and rural people. These theorists advanced three primary ways to handle the urban/rural divide: (1) segregation, through the exclusion of rural people from any business in the city, (2) the erasure of the urban/rural divide by making each citizen equally urban and rural, and (3) the employment of a preclusive frontier defense system to protect the countryside and thus avoid the issues that Athens faced during the war.

One approach taken by ancient theorists to the urban/rural divide was to embrace the cleavage and separate urban and rural people as much as possible. Like Pesistratus, who tried to keep rural citizens out of the city center (Ath. Pol. 16.3–5; Zatta Reference Zatta2010), Plato and Aristotle developed ways to keep rural people away from the city. For Plato, this was mainly done through a strict division of labor (sustained by institutions like the Noble Lie), which meant the exclusion of farmers and other manual laborers (banausoi) from the urban precincts of the ruling class (see Critias 112b–d; Rep. 541a).Footnote ²⁴ Rural people would not even visit the city for purposes of trade; farmers should not sell their own wares in the agora lest they “sit idly in the marketplace” (Rep. 371c). Farmers should be farmers “in the true sense of the word and … [devote] themselves to this single occupation” (Critias 111e). Aristotle also recognized that geography could be a significant source of stasis (1303b) and thought that farmers should be kept away from the public square unless summoned (1331a34–5). For him, the ideal citizen could not be a farmer “since leisure is needed both to develop virtue and to engage in political actions” (1328b40). In the ideal city, farmers would be slaves or foreigners, excluding them from citizenship entirely (1329a25, 1330a25).

Beyond exclusion from public affairs, these thinkers sought to keep rural people out of the city through administrative decentralization. Plato (Laws 763c, 848e–849a, 881c, 913d–14a) and Aristotle (1321b25–30) both created separate magistracies for the country, agora, and asty, with the effect that rural and urban areas would be administered separately, reducing opportunities for cross-contamination. This shows not only their belief that farmers, like other manual laborers, should be kept away from positions of power but also that they should stay in the countryside, among their own kind, precluding any potential confrontations between rural and urban citizens.

A second way ancient theorists approached the urban/rural divide was to try to erase it completely. Unlike Socrates in the Republic, the Athenian Stranger does not separate a class of propertyless guardians from the rest of the population. Instead, he develops a sophisticated property-distribution system to homogenize the population and make each citizen equally urban and rural. Each citizen will have two houses, one urban, one rural (745c–e), and the plots will be paired to produce an equal average: the plot closest to the city will be paired with the plot closest to the border, the second-closest to the city with the second-closest to the border, and so on. The overall effect is the homogenization of the citizenry into one that is equally urban and rural; land will be indivisible and inalienable to fix this arrangement permanently, and any violators will have their names carved in the temples to be shamed forever (741b–c).

Aristotle develops a similar dual-allotment property system for citizens—one plot on the border, another in the city—and provides a detailed line of reasoning: “This not only accords with justice and equality, but ensures greater unanimity in the face of wars with neighbors. For whenever things are not this way, some citizens make light of feuds with bordering city-states, while others are overly and ignobly concerned about them” (1330a14–24). Aristotle likely has in mind the lessons from the Peloponnesian War. Rural citizens cannot be trusted to see beyond their attachments to their homes and can be set against urbanites, who have less to lose from land wars. The just and equal solution is to eliminate the urban/rural distinction entirely and give every citizen an equal stake in both. The dual-allotment systems formulated by Plato and Aristotle represent the ideal option for cities that allow private property, in which attachments to place and property can lead to factional loyalties along urban and rural lines.Footnote ²⁵ Whereas Pericles sought to overcome the divide by sacrificing rural interests and agrarian ideals for urban and imperial ones, Plato and Aristotle sought to make each citizen equally urban and rural.

The third and most widely accepted approach to mitigating urban/rural tensions was a preclusive frontier defense system to protect the chōra from invasion and keep the sheltering of rural people behind city walls a last resort. Frontier defense defused tensions in several ways. First, it would protect the local rural economy, reducing the need for foreign grain importation and naval empire. Second, if the countryside was protected, rural citizens would not need to be confined in the city center for long periods, thus avoiding the collisions of urban and rural citizens like those in the Archidamean and Deceleian evacuations. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it would show rural citizens that the entire polis would fight to protect their homes and property, eliminating a significant source of stasis. This new defensive theory became popular among postwar theorists and Athenian political figures (Ober Reference Ober1985, 69–86). Countryside defense was accompanied by a renewed emphasis on the rural economy; as Ober writes, the “new (or renewed) emphasis on rural resources … is of particular importance, since this interest marks a significant departure from the city-centered policies of Pericles” (Reference Ober1985, 19). The border-defense approach was also the most practicable for the nonideal world, as it could be implemented in existing polities.

Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle each advocated frontier defense, a major rejection of the Periclean strategy. In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger develops a plan for the defense of the chōra; a rural force (agronomoi) would be tasked with preventing enemies from crossing the borders and harming people or property (760e–63b, 778e–79b; see also Menexenus 238b). Aristotle also saw countryside defense as crucial; the ideal city must be easy to defend, all parts of its territory must be easily accessible by troops, and agronomoi should be established (1321b26–32, 1326b39–1327a6). Xenophon heavily stressed the rural economy and its protection, writing that the “chōra is by its nature capable of furnishing an ample revenue” (Ways and Means 1.1–2). In the Memorabilia, Xenophon’s Socrates recommends the use of Attica’s mountainous borders and interior to harass invaders and “furnish the citizens with a great bulwark for the land” (3.5.25–27). Although frontier defense may seem banal to modern readers, it was a significant and innovative departure from prior Athenian military thinking, and the careful attention postwar theorists paid it reflects its importance.

All in all, postwar philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, held conflicted views of rural citizens. On the one hand, they admired their traditional values, especially compared with the urban rabble of sailors, whom they saw as dangerous and untrustworthy (see Laws 704b–05d). On the other hand, they still saw rural people as rustics and inferiors, excluding them from government and keeping them outside the city as much as possible. Ideally, as Plato’s and Aristotle’s land distribution schemes show us, the urban/rural distinction would not even exist among the citizenry. Yet short of the absolute embrace or erasure of the urban/rural divide, these thinkers rejected Pericles’s strategy of abandoning rural assets and recommended a refocus on the rural economy and its defense.