The Archaic Athenian ΖΕΥΓΙΤΑΙ

Classical Quarterly 31 (ii) 282-286 (1981) Printed in Great Britain

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ZEYFITAI

It seems to be widely agreed by modern scholars that when Solon created his four census-classes (rEAl) in early sixth-century Athens (Plut. Sol. 18. 1-2) he gave to at least three of them - the

17r7TEri,

the 5Evyirat

and the

OrTES'

- names which were in

pre-existing use there.2 But what, if so, did the names signify, before being assigned their new, official, quantitative (and semantically colourless) Solonic sense? The archaic Athenian Or7Teswere presumably recognizably akin to their Homeric and Hesiodic namesakes;3and despite the etymological obscurity of the word in any event, in practical terms it will have denoted men who by all relevant social, economic or military tests scored a negligible rating. In the case of higher scorers, however, it becomes important for us to discover precisely which criteria are being applied, and so it is the TrrTErr and the EvuyTrat who have always posed the main interpretative puzzle. For the SEvyiraL Ehrenberg put it succinctly enough: 'the zeugitai can be

explained either as those who owned a pair of oxen under the yoke (zeugos) or those who are joined to their neighbours in the ranks of the phalanx'.4 Both these explanations - for convenience I shall (for the moment) call them the agriculturaland the military - have indeed long had, and continue to have, their adherents. Most of the great nineteenth-century students of Staatsaltertiimer took the agricultural line, usually without argument;5 and the standard lexica still do.6 In 1894, however, Conrad Cichorius made out a strong case for the military explanation,7 and he has had many followers, both witting and (I should guess) unwitting.8 1 The problem of the rtevTaKoatoeLJ/8Lvot is a special and distinct one, and I leave it aside as such. 2 This is of course not the same as believing that the TrEA,themselves were pre-Solonic; here the modern consensus would be that the author of the Ath. Pol. (4. 3, cf. 7. 3) was led astray by his sources. (Aristotle, Pol. 1274a 18-21 proves nothing either way.) 3 e.g. Homer, Odyssey 4. 644; Hesiod, Works and Days 602; see M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (2nd ed. London, 1977), pp. 57-8 and 71; cf. Plato, Politicus 290A, Aristotle, Pol. 1278a 13. 4 V. L. Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates (2nd ed. London, 1973), p. 402 n. 33. Curiously, whereas in the text to this note (p. 65) E. chooses the second alternative - 'yoke-men... that is to say... phalanx of hoplites' - he goes on in the note itelf to allude, briefly, to evidence which 'might be significant' in favour of the first. I discuss this below. 5 A. Boeckh, The Public Economy of Athens (transl. G. C. Lewis, 2nd ed. London, 1842), p. 496; G. Gilbert, Handbuchder griechischen StaatsalterthiimerI (2nd ed. Leipzig, 1893), p. 143; G. de Sanctis, Atthis. storia della repubblicaateniese dalle origini alle riforme di Clistene (Rome, 1898), p. 225; G. Busolt and H. Swoboda, Griechische Staatskunde ii (Munich, 1926), 822-3. 6 e.g. LSJ (ninth edition, 1940), p. 753; E. Boisacq, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque (3rd ed. Heidelberg-Paris, 1938), p. 307; H. Frisk, Griechisches Etymologisches Worterbuch(Heidelberg, 1960), p. 610. 7 C. Cichorius, 'Zu den Namen der attischen Steuerklassen', in GriechischeStudien Hermann Lipsius zum sechzigsten Geburtstag dargebracht (Leipzig, 1894), pp. 135-40. His arguments extended to all four classes, but I restrict myself here (as explained below) to the ~evyTraL. 8 e.g. Ed. Meyer, Forschungenzur alten Geschichte II (Halle, 1899), p. 523 (cf. Geschichte des Altertums III(2nd ed. Stuttgart, 1937), p. 605); K. J. Beloch, GriechischeGeschichte I. 1 (2nd ed. Strassburg, 1912), p. 303; C. F. Lehmann-Haupt, in A. Gercke and E. Norden, Einleitungin die Altertumswissenschaft inI (2nd ed. Leipzig, 1914), p. 20; A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants (London, 1956), p. 87; H. Bengtson, GriechischeGeschichte(2nd ed. Munich, 1960), p. 108 n. 2; N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C. (2nd ed. Oxford, 1967), p. 160; H. Volkmann, RE x. A (1972), col. 249 (apparently); L. H. Jeffery, Archaic Greece: the city-states c. 700-500 B.C. (London, 1976), pp. 93 and 107 n. 6; 0. Murray, Early Greece (London, 1980), p. 186 (tentatively).

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Can the matter be definitively settled? The existence and long duration of the problem is of course chiefly attributable to the fact, all too familiar to ancient historians, that the contemporary sources give us no firm lead: when SevyiTat are mentioned they are simply the third Solonic census-class.9 Yet only Cichorius (and, on the other side and to a lesser extent, Busolt) has bothered to cite and discuss such evidence as can, in point of fact, be found to illuminate the problem; the doxography is otherwise mere assertion one way or the other, evidently on the basis of general (implicit) assumptions about the character of seventh-century Athenian society and economy. This is surely the reverse of proper method: we must attempt, at least, to settle the technical, etymological issue first. And I believe that it can indeed be settled, as Cichorius' arguments are not only well worth re-working but can be appreciably strengthened. I confine myself, here, to the ?EvyTrat, in the belief that they present a less intractable problem than the I7rrels;but should my case carry conviction it may be admitted to constitute some support, a priori, for a military interpretation of the t7TrElS also.

I First, the negative side of the argument - to show that the agricultural explanation rests upon thoroughly unsatisfactory foundations. (i) Ehrenberg's tentative contribution to the problem is readily discountable, first of all. His suggestion was that an agricultural origin for the term SevylraL might find some support in 'the description in comedy of the small farmer as the "two-oxen man" '.' As with a good many of his statements about the People of Aristophanesthe in Ach. 1022-36 generalization turns out to be somewhat flimsy: the ycEpy7os CPvAdaLto has a pair of oxen (Tcr flE), as does Euelpides in Birds 582-5 (ra gEvyapLa, Tr and we find preserved such comparable phrases as Boltapwv... fiotapio); Efi,yos (fr. 82), 4Evyaplov fBOELKOV (fr. 109; cf. Thuc. 4. 128. 4), and KEKT7r-LEVOVEVydpLov OiKELov fooZv (fr. 387). But more to the point, even granted the ownership of a yoke of beasts by every Attic farmer of the zeugite census, what follows? The etymological

connection

of 4EvyirTs with 4E6yos is self-evident - but no possible proof in itself

that the 4EvyiTaL were originally so called by virtue of their possession, or use, of a 4evyos. On the contrary, we shall find later that usage of the word 4EvyL'T7sseems always to imply a person or thing itself yoked to one or more of its fellows." (ii) Meanwhile, though, we must confront the one solid item of ancient evidence which appears, prima facie, to support the agricultural explanation. Pollux, Onomasticon 8. 129 ff., gives the quantitative (i.e. Solonic) definitions of the four classes. The passage is quite clearly derived from Ath. Pol. 7. 4, even down to quotation of the Anthemion dedication, but it also has additional material, throughout, from another source: thus, after and in addition to the quantitative definition of the zeugite census (ol 86 TrO EUvyalov reAoivres

in 8. 132, that

Ka4

Trr38taKoalCwvLVETrpwV KareAEyovro) we are also told, EUvy?TatLvTL rTAoS ot evyorpofxiOrVTreS EreAovv. Hence, since

9 e.g. IG i2 45, lines 40-1; Raubitschek, DAA no. 372; the nomos in Demos. 43. 54. Cf. Aristot. Pol. 1274a20; Ath. Pol. 4. 3, 7. 3-4, 26. 2. 10 loc. cit. (note 4, above) - with the documentation taken from his People of Aristophanes (Oxford, 1943), p. 76. For the it will not be irrelevant to note (as did the lexicographers, e.g. moment, therefore, 1 Photius, Evoyos)that Ev6yos need not invariably, even if it does normally, signify a pair of yoke-mates: witness ,Evyos rpiovovo (Aristoph. fr. 576), Ef3yos Trp7TrdpOvov(Eurip. fr. 357) and 416yosTEeOpt7Tro(Aesch. fr. 346; cf. Isoc. 16).

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other lexicographers echo the point,12 we would seem to be forced to the conclusion that (in Busolt's words)13'die Alten erklarten Zeugitai als Bauern, die ein Gespann unterhielten'; the 17rTr7Twere the LrTroTPooiOVTrES (Tro 8vvap,uvovs, Ath. Pol. 7. 4), and the SEvyiZat the ~evyoTpoboUrV7E.

Ochsen

l7TroTpoE?iv

In fact, however, there are several hidden problems and unexamined assumptions here, and one can go a good deal further than Cichorius (who simply dismissed the passage as an attempt, by Pollux' source, to furnish an explanation for 5evy7ZTat analogous to l7rrEC/l"7r/TorpokEZv) in questioning the standard interpretation of this

datum and the conclusions drawn from it. What, for instance, is the justification

for a translation of ol

lEVyoTpObOoVTEvS

as

'Bauern, die ein Gespann Ochsen unterhielten'? The participle is a hapax legomenon, but usage of the noun ,EVyoTrp6Obos raises doubts and difficulties straight away. In Plut. Per. 12. 6-7 there is a list of technitika of persons involved in the 'Periklean' building programme- occupations, or crafts (n.b. rEXVrq, 12. 7) which include ' '... aaLao7Tr7qyol KalLevyoXYOLTpOL KaL7qLOXOL... . Even if the general value of this

section of the Perikles is as low as Andrewes has recently maintained,14we can still tryto learn from the terminology used here. In this context, ofcartwrights (a&a4orr7Tyoi) and drivers (7vt'oXt), it was not unreasonable of Perrin in the Loeb edition to render ?EVyOTp6O'OL

as 'trainers of yoked beasts'. Against that one must set the conclusion

of Alison Burford, in her general study of heavy transport in classical antiquity, that 'there is no evidence that draught-animals were maintained either publicly or privately for heavy transport 'alone, and there is no likelihood that this was so... Transport contractors depended on local oxen, brought along by the farmers when work was slack'.15 And if Plutarch's 'evyorpo&ot were in fact (whether or not he realized it) temporarily unemployed farmers, this is something which would open out our agricultural/military distinction into something rather broader: one would have to speak of an economic connotation of, and connection between, the ?evyiLat and 5evyoTpobLa. Yet it hardly seems likely that building work could progress only when

agricultural work fell off sufficiently to permit it, and even Dr Burford does not suppose, in her later study of the Parthenon project, that no other personnel besides small farmers were hired to carry the building materials for it: 'the carters will most of them have been small farmers owning one or two yoke of oxen or mules, bringing their plough-animals to work out of season, or carriers used to small-scale transport between the port and the city'.16 In the realm of 'small-scale' (as opposed to 'heavy') transport, then, we may envisage evuyoTpo00otin classical Attika who had no connection with agriculture whatsoever; and evidence is added to probability by IG ii2 1576, lines 73-4, where a phiale exeleutherike is dedicated by 'CKa,Lav8pos evyo7O I p6oos

TItHeLpal oL'OKv'- a freedman-metic SevyoTp6oos0,

in other words. We

have no means of knowing whether this was the occupation that he had pursued as a slave or whether (perhaps more likely) it was his newly chosen livelihood as a free man; but in either case he was ex hypothesi no peasant farmer. So the indications are that 5evyoTpoOua was, and is, no sort of analogy at all to and Pollux' 5evyoTpobovvresg nothing to do with the levyirat. And 12 Photius, Hesychius, Suda, E?vyratov; Etym. Mag., tevylatov; Bekker, Anecd. Gr. I (= Lex.

trTroTpoTla,

Seg.), 260. 33. 13

op. cit. (note 5, above), p. 823 n. 1.

14 A. Andrewes, JHS 98 (1978), 1-5.

15 A. Burford, Econ. Hist. Rev. series 2, 13 (1960-1), 1-18, at p. 16. A. Burford, in Parthenos and Parthenon, suppl. to Greece and Rome 10 (1963), 23-35, at p. 33. The italics are mine. 16

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this is confirmed, I maintain, when we re-examine Pollux 8. 129-32 with proper care. The lemma at the beginning of 8. 129 is rTLt,ara, and it introduces in 8. 130 the quantitative definitions of the four Solonic classes - including, as stated above, the declaration that oL' O r6 Evy7jUtOV TEAOVVTESadroTOLaKoaLov cETrpov KaTEA7'OVTO; and it is obvious enough that in this context 5evy'7aLov (or SEvyaL'ov, Ath. Pol. 7. means 'to be of the zeugite census'. In 8. 131 and 132, however, after the 4) rTEAELV Anthemion dedication, Pollux turns to another matter entirely - the public vT7rqpETaL,

including the Skythian archers - until, in 8. 132, we come upon another lemma: rE7q. And what follows it needs quotation in full: TE'Xr8' rjvra trapa roiL 7revrTqKOaToAyoLS

i

EAAtJLEVLaraL' Tara ira

RTOTEKaTEraT7r

av,

S'

KaATO

AAP

K.a OSEKdLT]7 rT) rEAoS 'v.

Katl

Kal ta

Kal 8EKaTEVTqrrpia e L7TTOpLKa.

EVyraLatv 'rT rTAos' ol

evyoTpoTorOVVTE

1reAouv.Deferring translation for the moment, it will be seen that the subject, explicitly, is now TErAas indirect taxes and dues. There is admittedly an inherent ambiguity in the whole TrEAO/TrEAEV concept, a semantic overlap between (a) being a member of a class and (b) being liable to the taxation appropriate to that class, but at each extremity of the spectrum - beyond the area of overlap, so to speak, on either side - there remain meanings and usages that are purely the one or the other: thus, for example, in cases such as Herodotus 2. 51. 2 or 6. 108. 5 the fiscal connotation of -EAElv is entirely absent, while conversely it is perfectly common and natural - not least in the lexicographers - for TEAoSTrEAlvsimply to mean 'to pay a tax'.17 And this is demonstrably what it

does mean in Pollux 8. 132, where the context and content of a completely new area of discussion and definition - added to what we now see as the likely connotation of - seem clearly to call for a translation which does not hark back, to 8.130 but accepts the logic of its own position: Kal 5evya7Ltov mistakenly, Tr rTEOS Ol ?EVyoTpotovvTEs ETEArovv does not, I contend, mean 'those of zeugite census were men who farmed with a yoke of beasts' but rather 'the trainers (or suppliers, or users, or whatever) of yoked beasts paid a yoke-tax'.18 <EvyoTpo>/La

II The positive case for the agriculturalexplanation of the name EUvylTraseems therefore to be seriously flawed - to dwindle, indeed, to nothing on close examination; so to cite the evidence in support of the military explanation should put the matter beyond further dispute. Nouns with the -qT7r/ suffix, as is clear from Chantraine's lists,19fall into one of two broad semantic categories: either (a) to have something (e.g. TEXVLrTrS,to have a TEXvr-) or (b) to be a member of something (e.g. 'ApEo7rayiTyr, to be a member of the

Areiopagos). And attested usage of the word

Evyir'TS

puts it incontestably into the

second of the categories: thus of horses (Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo 48, gevyi'rtLas TC)V 7TrA7Oo, ErpEeev [TrrTovs),of mules (Diod. 17. 71. 2, ErE7TrewL4aTro.. .tltOvwV IJYv aXOoco6pwcv, Trv 8e EUvyLrTv), and of the double reed of a flute or oboe

mouthpiece (Theophr. Hist. Plant. 4. 11. 3; cf. Pliny, Nat. Hist. 16. 169). The key passage, though, is clearly Plutarch, Pelopidas 23. 4, on the battle of Leuktra: the Spartans, in confusion, try desperately to regroup in phalanx formation - rrpOsoviev 7TAavda( atLJrL7SETapadrrEOat eoVcofS 7TalSEvov aiVToV Kal avveLOtlov, cSs TO 1Li 17 e.g. Plato, Laws 847B; Pollux 3. 55-7 (the metoikion). 18

The tevy'7alov/<evytatov discrepancy might possibly be more significant than it looks, i.e.

euvylcLovmight be the census (as in Ath. Pol. 7. 4) and tEUvy7atov the tax; but obviously it would

be foolish to press the point. 19 P. Chantraine, La formation des noms en grec ancien (Paris, 1933), p. 311.

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, aAAaXp ,uevoL*raral 7TrV-rs OrTOL r6EsWO 8taAUvOelars. c*rorL'Tas Kal ,E,uyrrars, TOTE Kal

avvlarrTalv

6 KlvSvvos,

KaraXaa,/3dvElv

rrapaTrAr-qa'ws.'Using anyone and everyone as

KCa avvapLLoTTEIv ETrLarTaTaL

and

Kal

fiaXeaOat

evyi-ral.' It may be

doubtedwhetherPlutarchwas employingthe actualmilitaryterminologycurrentin the firsthalf of the fourthcentury,or evenin his own day, but his meaningis obvious enoughwhen comparedwith the languageand phraseologyof otherswriting(both before and after him) on the hoplite phalanx: he is substituting SEvyrTaL for the more regular TrapardaTaL - the 7rapaaTarT-rabeing the man beside one in the rank, and the EciTTarr's behind one in the file.20 The evidence suggests, then, that EVuy7Trswas the term - distinctly archaic, no doubt, by Plutarch's day (and perhaps never in any period part of official or technical terminology) - for the individual members of a rank of hoplites, which one often indeed finds referredto as the yvy6vor uvy6s.21Whether it originated in Athens or elsewhere I should not really care to surmise. But I would suppose that it arose at some time in the seventh century, once hoplite warfare had become the norm amongst the Greek poleis,22 and once, in consequence, it had come to be appreciated by the farmers who made up the phalanx that their paramount duty to move and fight in close formation as Tyrtaios put it)23 effectively yoked them all together, (rap' aAA7jAoLLILE`VOVTES,

oxen-like, in collective endeavour. University of Manchester 20

21

D A V ID W H IT EH EA D

e.g. Hdt. 6. 117. 3; Xen. Cyr. 3. 3. 59; Polyaen. 2. 10. 4; Aelian, Tact. 11. 4.

e.g. Thuc.5. 68. 3; Polyb.1.45. 9, 3. 81. 2, 18.29. 5; Pollux1. 126-7.It is never,admittedly,

called a ,Evyos,but the v/ev shift, here as elsewhere, is of no importance. The best possible proof of this (if proof were needed) is of course the vyiriTs, one of the three mysterious categories of roweron boarda trireme(OaAaiL,ratVi,vyTrai, Opavia); such, at any rate,is the spelling of their name in the various scholia on Aristoph. Frogs 1074 - but the scholiast on Thuc. 6. 31. 3 has 22

?EVyiT71S.

See most recently on this P. A. Cartledge, JHS 97 (1977), 18-24. 23 Tyrt. fr. 10 line 15, fr. 11 line 11. For the actual distances between one man and the next see W. K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War I (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), pp. 144-54.