We know very little about the management of farms and the arrangements for dividing land among large landowners or small cultivators, in the separate districts of Greece. Greek antiquity shows no traces of _latifundia_, such as gradually made way in Italy; there were some large estates with numerous slave-workers, but small farms were commonest. In some districts, as for instance in Arcadia, a small peasantry were the chief part of the population, and it is not surprising, therefore, that even the leaders of the State did not shrink from taking part in agricultural labour, though the larger landowners left this to their slaves and overseers. The Athenians, however, regarded the rough manners of these smaller farmers as coarse, and the citizens of the larger towns, accustomed to the refinements of ordinary life, mocked at their rustic manners; we scarcely ever find any recognition of the fact that a strong and healthy race of peasants together with an industrious middle-class is the best means for maintaining the life of a state.
In its technical aspects, ancient agriculture remained in much the same state throughout the whole of antiquity as it occupied in the heroic age, and probably this was the common inheritance of the Indo-Germanic race. In Homer, we find the custom, which always prevailed afterwards, of alternating only between harvest and fallow; even the succeeding ages seem to have known nothing of the rotation of crops. The implements used for the necessary farming occupations were of the simplest kind, in particular the primitive plough, which was not sufficient to tear up the earth, so that they had to use the mattock in addition; they had no harrow or scythe, in place of which they used the sickle, and their threshing arrangements were most unsatisfactory, since they simply drove oxen, horses, or mules over the threshing floor, and beat out the ears with their hoofs, by which means a great part of the harvest was lost. It was only the large number of labourers at the disposal of the farmers, in consequence of the numerous slaves, to which at times, when there was a press of work, they added hired labourers, and the great care taken in manuring and improving the ground, etc., that enabled them to earn a living at all. Great wealth was never attained in ancient Greece by agriculture, certainly not by growing corn; vines and olives supplied better profits, though here too the instruments used were of the simplest, but the ground was especially favourable to their cultivation. Oil, in particular, could be supplied by Greece to foreign countries, but corn did not grow in a quantity sufficient to provide their own population, and consequently they had to import a great deal from foreign countries, especially from the Black Sea, and afterwards too from Egypt.