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.

This is not to say that they were uninterested in agriculture—which, after all, was the foundation upon which wealth rested in the period and, overwhelmingly, the source of subsistence for all levels of society. There survive a relatively robust number of works devoted to agricultural matters, including the Works and Days of the eighth-century BCE Greek poet Hesiod; Xenophon's Oeconomicus, a Socratic dialog on household management and agriculture written in the first half of the fourth century BCE; and agronomic treatises by Roman authors such as Cato (second century BCE), Varro (first century BCE), Columella (first century CE), and Palladius (fourth/fifth century CE). But, while these authors lovingly describe animal husbandry, plowing, care of vines and the like, they have little to say about the employment and organization of the labor force responsible for carrying out the work itself. When we turn to other genres of written evidence, the Roman state, in particular, produced an extensive and sophisticated legal apparatus, including not only laws themselves but also expansive and subtly argued commentaries upon those laws. The jurists whose writings were collated under the rubric of the Digest in the mid-sixth century CE, for example, explore the legal intricacies of tenancy and contracts for labor in great detail. But it is difficult to determine the relationship between legal ideals and the collections of differential power dynamics, customs, mores, and expectations that together constituted the exploitation of labor in the period. Moreover, while slavery receives considerable attention in these and other texts—and continues to be the subject of much modern scholarly debate—it is not at all clear that, as a source or structure of labor, slaves were either employed in markedly different ways or, indeed, disproportionately involved in agriculture in the period.Footnote ¹

“Popular” or “folk” literature—sayings and songs, aphorisms, and so on—confirm how deeply embedded the seasonal rhythms of the labor cycle were in the collective consciousness of these ancient societies, but offer tantalizing glimpses only of continuities and changes, similarities and differences in the modalities of that labor cycle across time and space. Meanwhile, with only an infinitesimally tiny number of exceptions (one of which, the so-called Maktar Harvester inscription, sits at the center of Brent Shaw's masterly study of reaping in Roman North Africa), there is nothing even approximating a first-hand account of the experience of rural laborers in the period. Consequently, as Shaw observes (2):

None of the works under review here could be described as focused on agrarian labor relations in antiquity tout court. In The Romano-British Peasant, Mike McCarthy confronts what was, at the time of writing, a near-total absence of textual materials and a paucity of archaeological evidence for “the farmers, shopkeepers, labourers and others” of Roman Britain (x) by constructing a speculative theoretical model based on evidence for the lives and experiences of “peasants” (a category that he defines in a deliberately broad manner) in other societies and at other times (6–8).Footnote ² Paul Halstead's Two Oxen Ahead is a work of ethnoarchaeology, the fruits of a lifetime spent working as an archaeologist in the Mediterranean and asking questions about ancient agricultural practices. Halstead's aim is to outline “how Mediterranean farmers grew crops and raised families before mechanization and industrialization,” (viii) and his account is drawn primarily from personal observation and conversations transacted with a raft of elderly inhabitants of the contemporary countrysides of Spain, southern France, Italy, Cyprus, and Greece (3).

In Triangular Landscapes, Katherine Blouin concentrates on a rather more marginal landscape: the marshy delta of the Nile river in the Mendesian nome of Upper Egypt, the inhabitants of which—in the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman past as today—combined farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering in a multidimensional, flexible set of strategies for maintaining subsistence and meeting the demands of outsiders. Significantly for both the history of the region and our understanding of how agrarian labor relations functioned in this micro-region in antiquity, in the eyes of the state and its wealthy, aristocratic agents, these marsh-dwelling populations were (and are) regarded as alien, uncontrollable, and therefore dangerous. In this work of “new environmental history” (6), Blouin's focus is not simply on how the particularities of this landscape constrain the economic decision-making of its residents, but also on how human decision-making and, especially, the demands of the state for tax revenues might, in turn, have had marked and visible impacts upon the landscape. Finally, Shaw's Bringing in the Sheaves is a series of connected soundings into the centrality of reaping in the lived experience, temporal rhythm, collective consciousness, and metaphorical vocabulary of the ancient Mediterranean—a centrality that, like Halstead, Shaw explicitly acknowledges as lost to an early-twenty-first-century audience.

These four works offer eloquent testimony to the current diversity in studies of peasants, agriculture, and agrarian labor in antiquity. That diversity is, in large part, due to the particular evidentiary constraints alluded to at the start of this review. But it is also an indication that in rural contexts especially, labor—its mobilization and control, its intimate relationship with subsistence needs, its rich metaphorical vocabulary—matters. It is inextricably enmeshed with both large- and small-scale political and socio-economic networks within and beyond the boundaries of a specific community, locale, or micro-region. It is, moreover, fundamentally embedded in realities and rhythms of everyday life, and, by extension, the collective cultural, intellectual, and ideological apparatus that communities use to structure and explain their worlds. It should therefore come as no surprise that, for each of our authors, the exploration of labor and the various structures and institutions that collocate and revolve around it, leads to the consideration of other phenomena and other questions. In antiquity—as in the other contexts that these authors consider—labor, expressed in hours or days, could be a measure of productivity or the magnitude of an agricultural task (e.g., Halstead 21). The delicate webs of communal expectations, gender roles, reciprocity, and exchange that it represents were centrally implicated in decisions to adopt, develop, or, indeed, reject novel technologies—far more so, it would seem, than the availability of those technologies or even considerations of “rational” productivity (e.g., Shaw 38–40; 131–6; Halstead 100–2). It functioned as a source of power, influence, and no little wealth for the men who were able to mobilize and control it (e.g., Shaw 48–92, esp. 78–9). Similarly, the individuals involved in rural labor themselves evoked fear, distrust, and even moral and legal censure from the populations that they putatively served (e.g., Blouin 263; 286–90). On a multitude of levels, physical, literal, and metaphorical, labor was implicated in the enduring structures of socio-economic and political inequality that characterized ancient societies (e.g., McCarthy 124–6; Halstead 60; 176; Shaw 119–20).

Those inequalities are intrinsic to definitions of the peasantry in the theoretical literature, and it is with that literature that McCarthy begins. At base, his intention is to establish a framework for analyzing and evaluating the strategies for survival available to Romano-British peasants, and the extent to which they were able to move beyond that fundamental need in their daily existence. He makes good use of the extensive literature on “hierarchies of needs,” which emerges from A. H. Maslow's influential Theory of Human Motivation (1943) and Clayton P. Alderfer's Existence-Relatedness-Growth (ERG) Theory (1974). In this way, McCarthy orients his study away from a narrowly economic focus on the peasantry, an orientation which also allows for consideration of the full complexity of Romano-British society. Building on approaches pioneered principally by Scandinavian social scientists, he begins with the land itself: its physicality, micro-topographies, and regional distinctiveness; its manifold climatological and environmental particularities; and the resulting proliferation of unique ecosystems.Footnote ³

Into those ecosystems, McCarthy places the populations of Roman Britain, their socio-economic behaviors constrained by environmental factors, but, equally, able to consciously influence, modify, and manipulate those environments. He argues, rightly, that understanding changes in demographic factors such as population numbers and distributions, age at marriage, diet, and nutrition has implications “not just for settlement density and distribution, but for economics as well, especially the size of the labour market, and the price of land and commodities,” although he is also quick to acknowledge the almost complete lack of data which would allow us to offer anything more than broad approximations (38–9). Nevertheless, the exercise in defining the limits of our knowledge is a useful one, for it establishes a set of baselines from which a reconstruction of Romano-British society—in all its undoubted complexity and heterogeneity—can proceed.

In the face of the relatively scant ancient evidence for Roman Britain, McCarthy ranges far into the medieval period and beyond in pursuit of comparative materials that will assist in that reconstruction. The result is a richly textured evocation of both agricultural and non-agricultural labor in the period, resting upon the conviction that it is the rhythm of the seasons that not only determines the agricultural cycle, but also frames belief systems, social interactions, and economic and fiscal transactions. In terms of agricultural practices, tool-use, and sowing and harvesting of cereals, the evidence is diffuse and diverse, and mandates against neat generalizations—but, in the light of Halstead's extensive survey of early twentieth-century farming practices in the Mediterranean, this heterogeneity rings true. Moreover, it is likely that—in addition to the liens of dependence that, we must imagine, enmeshed them in ongoing relationships with more powerful figures and, through them, the state—Romano-British peasants maintained webs of reciprocity, cooperation, and connectivity with their fellow-agriculturalists, and with other sectors of the non-aristocratic population. McCarthy frames those connections in terms of management, noting that, “as today, the economy comprised a variety of components—raw materials, labour and distribution—that would have needed coordination” (92).

The management and coordination of resources is also fundamental to Halstead's study. Halstead, too, stresses the inescapable rhythm of the seasons, while also acknowledging the almost infinite variability in strategies of field preparation, sowing, maintenance, harvesting, threshing, and storage. That variability was a product not only of the multitude of micro-regions in the Mediterranean, but also the particular circumstances of the households and families within those micro-regions. After all, “individual farmers often do things differently, because they are more or less industrious, conservative, proud, burdened with dependents to feed, or blessed with “hands” to help” (32). This is not to say that there are not patterns, merely that the analytical level at which those patterns can be discerned might not correspond to the evidence that is available to scholars interested in agrarian practices in antiquity.

Time and again Halstead's informants return to two fundamental considerations. The first is the ever-shifting, labile and highly individualized evaluation of the costs and benefits that attend decisions around which labor to employ and how. This calculus extends beyond the resources available from within the family itself to include kin, neighbors, and contracted laborers. It also encompasses animals. Plowing one's fields with a team of oxen, for example, is more efficient than doing so with cattle, and represents a considerable improvement over relying solely on human labor. But the animals also demand a significant investment: They are more expensive to purchase, constitute a considerably less flexible source of labor, and have higher caloric needs. Ownership of oxen is also implicated in the second fundamental consideration, namely reputation, self-representation, and relative status within the community. As Halstead notes (294):

Halstead's finely-grained study reminds us that to simply focus on labor relations impoverishes our understanding of agriculturalists in antiquity.

And yet interactions with more powerful figures remain the most visible dimension of the lives of ancient peasants. Further, Blouin's detailed exploration of agriculture in the deltaic marshes of the Nile reminds us that the hand of the state is never very far away, for she skillfully mines the extant papyrological evidence to demonstrate that local agrarian regimes developed in response to both the peculiarities of the physical landscape and the fiscal demands of the Egyptian, Ptolemaic and, finally, Roman state (192). For Blouin, “alimentary risk management” underpins the economic regimes of the inhabitants of this micro-region, involving above all a pragmatic attitude towards the exploitation of land that might, at first blush, appear agriculturally marginal (189–90; 208). She provides an illuminating catalog of the economic activities that marsh-dwellers undertook as part of their customary subsistence regimes: cultivation of cereals and pulses both for subsistence and for sale; cattle-breeding; domestic gardening; hunting, fishing, and fish farming; maintenance of vineyards and olive trees; harvesting of flax and fodder crops; husbandry of castor-oil; boat making. The deliberately jumbled list here evokes the sense of overlapping, complementary, and fluid economic strategies uncovered by Blouin's systematic treatment of the available evidence, informed engagement with comparative literature, and measured recourse to literary sources from both before and after the period that is the principle focus of her investigation. It also hints at the careful processes of evaluation that attended decisions to plant and cultivate particular types of crops on particular types of land (209). While scholars have long been content to identify risk management as the fundamental objective of all small-scale agriculturalists, Blouin's account reminds us forcefully that other demands also intrude. As a consequence, both specialization and diversification can coexist as part of the same regime (192–3).

This focus upon the interconnectivity between agriculturalists’ internal risk management needs and the external demands to which they were subjected—with particular reference to the deleterious effects of a breakdown in the relationship between the two—serves also to inform Blouin's explication of a lengthy period of crisis through the second and third centuries. The period appears to have been characterized by unprecedented levels of taxpayer default and flight from fiscal obligations, generally labeled anachoresis. It also witnessed the Boukoloi Uprising, a rebellion among some, at least, of the inhabitants of the region, and the Antonine Plague, an episode of pestilence—usually interpreted as a virulent outbreak of smallpox—that swept through the eastern Mediterranean and is generally dated to the period between ca. 165 and ca. 180 CE. In Blouin's presentation, these events are mutually interconnected, with the key element binding them together being the drying up of the Mendesian branch of the Nile River over the middle decades of the second century CE. Thus, flight of these marsh-dwelling agriculturalists from their fiscal obligations, as well as concerted, collective resistance to the demands of the tax officials and soldiers of the Roman state should be understood as resulting from a perfect storm, involving both “long-term socio-hydrological pressures and Roman-period agro-fiscal dynamics” (296).

The explication of specific events by recourse to the dialectical relationship between longer-term physical processes and societal structures evokes the tripartite division of time developed by Fernand Braudel and employed by members of the Annales School. In line with the most recent adaptations of the schema, Blouin eschews simple one-way chains of cause-and-effect, instead arguing throughout for mutual feedback between these different temporal levels (6).Footnote ⁴ A comparable collection of mutual influences underpins Shaw's collection of meditations upon reaping, emerging (as he explicitly acknowledges) from a loosely aggregated series of oral presentations, and retaining both the occasional repetition and the rhetorical charm of their original form. Shaw notes that agricultural labor, as encapsulated in the person of the reaper, is the most fundamental, emblematic, visceral element of daily life. Therefore, it is also a rich source for metaphor: It is metonymic for legal claims to ownership and the perpetual cycle of birth-life-death; it functions as an analogy for both the logistics and the violence of warfare; it expresses the power and position of the ruler (in non-Roman, Near Eastern contexts, at least); it becomes, in the hands of Christian preachers of the late Roman period, a vehicle for communicating messages of charity and virtue, struggle, martyrdom, and divine judgment.

Hence, while ostensibly focused on reapers and reaping, Shaw's work encompasses “work, mobility and migration, contracts and disputes, expectations and fears, and… the ideas generated out of these behaviours and sentiments” (10). The harvest serves both as a periodic rhythm of life with (more or less) consistent inter-annual labor demands and a collective undertaking of truly immense proportions, involving the transfer of huge quantities of labor from labor-rich to labor-poor regions, their mobilization, management and provisioning, and the episodic dislocation, social uncertainty, and violence that such uprootings inevitably entail. In short, he cuts a broad cross-section through both the everyday lives and the individual and collective consciousness of the majority of the population of the ancient world.

Moreover, by making the interplay between everyday experiences and the imaginary the principal focus of his study, Shaw reminds us of the multitude of factors that combine to produce, perpetuate and perturb particular agrarian labor regimes: topography, landscape, and soil, of course; the economic requirements of the household and the fiscal demands of the state; relations of power, both established and contested; but also gender norms around labor and the complex intra-familial and intra-communal interactions between younger and older members. In a detailed discussion of the episodic backwards-and-forwards between the employment of sickles and scythes in northwestern Europe, for example, Shaw notes that the scythe is, by almost all objective measures, a more efficient tool. But it is also more wasteful, and the greater physical strength and skill required to wield it results in marked disruptions to the balance between men and women, old and young, insiders and outsiders in the labor force engaged in the harvest (131–6). This leads to consideration of the various factors surrounding the adoption of new technologies—only one of which is a purely rational consideration of the efficiency and labor-saving potential of that technology. As Shaw notes, “[t]he interdependence of human communities, environmental forces, and exploitative technologies produced continuous recursive chains of effects” (148).

For each of our authors, then, agrarian labor relations, the collection of smaller- and larger-scale decisions made by individuals, households, communities, their leaders, and the state, were intimately and dialectically connected to one another. They were also inextricably implicated in ecological, environmental, and climatological conditions. However, while a dynamic and multidimensional account of the many and varied individual instantiations of labor regimes is surely to be preferred over the deeply unsatisfying “history of ranks, statuses, rights, and obligations” identified by Shaw as the default subject of most contemporary labor history of antiquity, we must not be content merely to craft a loose aggregation of micro-regional descriptions. What tools exist to stitch these descriptions together into a coherent analytical program? How might we move effectively from micro-regional analysis to general principles, without smoothing out and homogenizing the particularities of those specific contexts? Reading these monographs in dialog with one another suggests that it might be useful to adopt two interlinked mechanisms for comparison and analysis. The first, seasonality, has already woven in and out of this review as a tool for understanding and structuring the annual cycle of labor and, by extension, life. The second, scale, has been evoked sparingly, but, for each of our authors, it informs analysis of the relationship between textual, archeological, comparative, and theoretical components of their interpretative paradigms.

To take scale first: Scholars of agrarian labor in antiquity recognize a fundamental distinction between large-scale cash-crop-producing latifundia-style estates, on the one hand, and small-scale subsistence-level agricultural holdings, on the other. While we can, indeed should, quibble at the acute binary opposition that this distinction suggests, we cannot escape the very strong impression that our evidence provides, of agricultural holdings—or, perhaps, individual fields or collections of fields—operating under two quite different sets of economic imperatives. Both Halstead and Shaw emphasize the differences that might exist between the two: ards and hoes with largely human or cattle-driven plowing technologies on smaller holdings as against oxen and metal plows on larger; sickle-based harvesting on the former, scythes or even animal-assisted technology on the latter; household- and reciprocity-based labor regimes compared with large-scale hiring of skilled or semi-skilled labor at harvest time; and so on.

Our textual evidence is, largely, concerned with operations at the upper end of the scale, but the rules of thumb offered by Halstead's informants for productivity on smaller-scale holdings, together with imaginative reconstruction of the farm implements and resources that we might expect to find on different kinds of estates provide scholars with the opportunity to ask more, and more searching questions about archaeological assemblages and osteological finds on sites where the scale is, perhaps, not quite so obvious: To take one example, the size and age at death of cattle bones might be taken as an indication not only of the caloric needs of the household but also of its labor regime, and hence the relative size of the agricultural holding. In the aggregate, in a particular region or micro-region, insights about the relative scales of individual sites might, in turn, provide indirect evidence for the degree of socio-economic inequality and, hence, illuminate structures of power, dominance, and inter-communal cooperation.

At the current state of the evidence, these possibilities remain pipe dreams. But, to take another example, Blouin's detailed treatment of the papyrological evidence for tax registers at the level of the community reminds us that determining the appropriate scale at which to approach the evidence may allow scholars to more effectively explore interactions between the aggregate of individual household decision-making—infinitely varied, at least in principle—and the expectations of the state—which inevitably amount to an exercise in simplification and systematization.Footnote ⁵ Both the variety and the potential for pattern are important if we are to understand the particular forms that power dynamics, labor relations, socio-economic structures, and subsistence regimes took in different places and at different times. While our evidence may only allow for detailed reconstruction in a small number of contexts, placing those reconstructions in dialog with one another—as well as with the comparative contexts that underpin each of these monographs—promises to thicken and deepen our understanding of both the individual circumstances and the aggregate of those circumstances.

Both individually and collectively, agrarian regimes were fundamentally subject to the intra-annual rhythm of seasonal change. Seasonality not only determined the agricultural cycle, it also governed societal and communal rhythms: ritual and religion, communal festivals and feasting. Harvest time represented the most intensive and urgent period of the year, entailing a massive spike in labor requirements and corresponding movements of money, resources, and people. But the harvest occurred at marginally different times of the year according to the latitude and particular micro-climatic conditions. It is also likely that the large-scale climatic variability that scholars have posited with increasing granularity and certainty for the period between the second and seventh centuries CE impacted, in some ways, the length and timing of the harvest.Footnote ⁶ It is here that seasonality and scale intersect. For, as Shaw has evocatively sketched from comparative evidence, we should, perhaps, imagine reaping teams moving vast distances in the wake of the changing seasons. One wonders what the impact of perturbations in climatic conditions might have been upon these movements, and, as a consequence, upon the entire edifice of socio-economic structures, inter- and intra-familial interactions and expectations.

Recent work in ancient agrarian history has taken us a considerable distance from statuses and obligations, opening up new fields and proffering new questions for consideration. These questions might not be answerable, at least in a fashion that will satisfy all. Most particularly, scholarly debate will, rightly, continue to revolve around the most effective and analytically responsible way to employ comparative data—accessed, to varying degrees and with varying objectives, by all of the books under review here—in our project. But the questions that such data provokes must be posed, for in posing them, scholars of agrarian labor relations in antiquity are forced to consider both the factors that render our studies so very different from those of our fellow labor historians in other periods and regions; and the contributions that our field can make to the study of labor history precisely because we are required to develop new methodologies and theoretical frameworks as we seek connections between phenomena and proxies for relations and structures that are much more readily perceived in those other historical and geographical contexts. Both separately and together, the tentative yet sophisticated roadmaps laid out in these four monographs provide the beginnings of an atlas for our field to collectively construct.