The Greek and Roman Agrarian Tradition

The Greek and Roman Agrarian Tradition

Fleming distinguishes agrarianism from rural nostalgia, arguing that its real subject is property and the social order. Through Homer, Hesiod, Xenophon, Cato and Virgil, he examines the household, the farmer-soldier and the destruction of smallholdings by expanding empires. He follows these arguments into Jefferson, John Taylor and the Southern Agrarians, asking whether a people can preserve its independence when ownership and power pass out of its hands.

1. 0:00 — What agrarianism means
2. 5:00 — The Southern Agrarians and property
3. 10:52 — Community rather than rural nostalgia
4. 13:24 — Homer: home, land and belonging
5. 16:52 — Hesiod: work, justice and the gods
6. 24:29 — Aristophanes: farmers, war and empire
7. 26:01 — Xenophon: the household and the citizen
8. 31:51 — Property, taxation and republican independence
9. 33:25 — Rome and the farmer-soldier
10. 36:56 — Cato and the agrarian republic
11. 42:34 — Virgil and the Georgics
12. 54:02 — Byzantium and the military frontier
13. 56:03 — Slavery and the servile economy
14. 57:38 — Jefferson and the American agrarian tradition
15. 1:01:41 — John Taylor against concentrated power
16. 1:05:43 — Edmund Ruffin and agricultural decline
17. 1:09:04 — Who owns the means of production?

Thomas Fleming — 1 recording in the archive.

Related reading: The Politics of Human Nature by Thomas Fleming.

The first problem I have to face, and you have to face, is the very word agrarian. It's used in the subtitle of I'll Take My Stand, essays in the agrarian tradition. The phrase would appear to be Donald Davidson's, but Ransom uses the term several times in the introductory statement of principles, where it seems to mean something like pertaining to the life of the farm or the South's rural way of life. John Crowe Ransom is content to say that the agrarian way is opposed to the industrial way of life. And then he dismisses the word agrarian with a disingenuous remark that it, quote, does not stand in any particular need of definition. Disingenuous is a mild way of saying it's dishonest. It's simply not true. It's a very complex and difficult word. Either Ransom and Davidson were ignorant of the English language, or else they were deliberately pulling a fast one on readers and reviewers. The word agrarian, as you all know, comes from the Latin word ager, meaning a field or land that is owned and cultivated, as opposed to campus, which means field in the sense of a level place of unforested ground, not under cultivation. The adjective, agrarius, was applied to anything having to do with the possession and management of cultivated land, but it acquired a very particular meaning in the period after the Punic Wars. You all remember the Punic Wars, you're not quite old enough I am, but I remember the Punic Wars. The wars between Carthage and Rome, when land-hungry Roman veterans were demanding a share of the lands that have been conquered by the Roman Republic. The Gracchus brothers who led this insurgency, which by the way more than once turned violent and led to the assassination of both Gracchus brothers, hoped to gain power and influence by passing agrarian legislation, that is laws which would restrict the amount of public land that wealthy senators could own or lease or use, and to redistribute land to the poor. Both brothers were killed to the uprisings that they helped to foment, but the issue did not go away. Back in the sixties, when I was studying this stuff, we used to say that the Gracchus brothers were like the Kennedy brothers, you know. They tried to foment a revolution which would bring them to power and they both got…