Campesinos en la ciudad. Bases agrarias de la pólis griega y la infantería hoplita

JULIÁN GALLEGO

Ediciones del Signo/Universidad de Buenos Aires

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2005 p. 211

978-987-1074-33-4

To speak of peasants in the city can seem a paradox, not only because, as it is logical, the obliged location of the agriculturists would have to be in the countryside, but mainly because one of the most famous models about the peasantry has postulated an insurmountable distance between the agrarian life and the urban world. Of course, we do not say here that there is no relation between the peasants and the city. But in fact, what this model affirms, it is the subordination of the peasantry to the urban system, and it is even possible to stand out that it is due to this submission that the peasants as such make their historical appearance. So, from this perspective the city is a center of power that defines the peasant. This one establishes different relations with that center, beginning from the possibility of selling his surplus stuffs. Under certain conditions, the city can also allow him to unfold a set of relations linked to status considerations. Cultural forms or values derived from the urban civilization can serve as references for the definition of peasants. But beyond the interactions between the rural world and the urban one, the model tends to emphasize that the peasant is not comprised within the city but defined by a necessary contrast with it. However, which is the singular aspect that the history of ancient Greece can show to us with respect to this perspective? Certainly, in the Greek world there were also differences between the urban values and the rural ones, as well as similarly humiliating points of view with regard to the peasants. Nevertheless, we do not have to forget that, in spite of the urban elite culture, the polis as a society was built fundamentally on its agrarian bases. In most of the classical Greek communities, to be a peasant implied to participate in the political decisions and to take part in the hoplite army. In some cases, the peasants could live in the urban center, from which they went daily towards their fields to carry out the agricultural tasks. In other cases, like those analyzed in this book, most of the agriculturists lived in the countryside. But the important point of peasants in the city is not only their presence or their residence there, but mainly the fact that throughout the Archaic Age they could become citizens, since the city was generally a state, that is to say, the center of a political community which included the urban sphere as well as the rural one. The idea of peasants in the city supposes the political and institutional dimensions of all those who were defined in accordance with their agricultural way of life. In this sense, the possible residence of the peasants in the urban center does not interest so much ?beyond the fact that this could happen?, but the central theme is their capability to be part of the political process that was developed in the city. Like in other societies, the Greek peasants could be related to the urban population in the way denoted by the model above. But unlike the factors habitually associated to that bond, the Greek peasants were linked to the city integrating themselves into the decision process. It is this essential aspect of the connection between the peasants and the city which organizes the central axis of reflection that this book proposes. So, the inclusion of the peasants in the Greek city was a complex historical phenomenon which did not occur in a similar way in all the cases. But it exhibits some general elements around three fundamental aspects: landownership by independent peasants, without taxes or rents; military integration of the peasants in the hoplite phalanx determined by their economic conditions; peasant political participation in variable degrees, in all or in some features of the city-state government. In this sense, the examples studied in this book should be taken as indicators of the possibilities that the peasant communities could have throughout the Greek world: complete inclusion into the citizen body with an effective political performance; full citizenship but with a passive role; politically restricted insertion with or without citizenship right, being the hoplite function the way of integration of the peasants. These possibilities conditioned the ways of space unification of every polis and, at the same time, the specific models of union between the village communities and the framework of state. The Greek peasants in the city were not an economically exploited or a politically dominated class, beyond the fact that in precise circumstances these elements could be present. The unusual character of the peasant institutional inscription (in political affairs, in military services, in the economy, in the religious field, etc.) constituted a unique event, whose effects were imprinted in the very structure of the Greek state.