XL. DION CHRYSOSTOM.
We have seen that there is no lack of evidence as to the lamentable condition of Italian agriculture in a large part of the country. But things were no better in certain Provinces, more particularly in Greece. Plutarch deplores[1200] the decay and depopulation of his native land, but the most vivid and significant picture preserved to us is one conveyed in a public address[1201] by the famous lecturer Dion of Prusa, better known as Dion[1202] Chrysostom. It describes conditions in the once prosperous island of Euboea. The speaker professes to have been cast ashore there in a storm, and to have been entertained with extraordinary kindness by some honest rustics who were living an industrious and harmless life in the upland parts, the rocky shore of which was notorious as a scene of shipwrecks. There were two connected households, squatters in the lonely waste, producing by their own exertions everything they needed, and of course patterns of every amiable virtue. The lecturer recounts the story of these interesting people as told him by his host. How much of it is due to his own imagination, or put together out of various stories, we cannot judge: but it is manifest that what concerns us is to feel satisfied that the experiences described were possible, and not grotesquely improbable, in their setting of place and time. I venture to accept the story as a sketch of what might very well have happened, whether it actually did so or not.
We live mostly by the chase, said the hunter, with very little tillage. This croft (χωρίον) does not belong to us either by inheritance or purchase. Our fathers, though freemen, were poor like ourselves, just hired herdsmen, in charge of the herds of a rich man who owned wide farm-lands and all these mountains. When he died, his estate was confiscated: It is said that the emperor[1203] made away with him to get his property. Well, they drove off his live-stock for slaughter, and our few oxen with them, and never paid our wages. So we did the best we could, taking advantage of the resources of the neighbourhood in summer and winter. Since childhood I have only once visited the city[1204]. A man turned up one day demanding money. We had none, and I told him so on my oath. He bade me come with him to the city. There I was arraigned before the mob as a squatter on the public land, without a grant from the people, and without any payment. It was hinted that we were wreckers, and had put together a fine property through that wicked trade. We were said to have valuable farms and abundance of flocks and herds, beasts of burden, slaves. But a wiser speaker took a different line. He urged that those who turned the public land to good account were public benefactors and deserved encouragement. He pointed out that two thirds of their territory was lying waste through neglect and lack of population. He was himself a large landowner: whoever was willing to cultivate his land was welcome to do so free of charge,—indeed he would reward him for his pains—the improvement would be worth it. He proposed a plan for inducing citizens to reclaim the derelict lands, rent-free for ten years, and after that rented at a moderate share of the crops. To aliens less favourable terms might be offered, but with a prospect of citizenship in case of reclamation on a large scale. By such a policy the evils of idleness and poverty would be got rid of. These considerations he enforced by pointing to the pitiful state of the city itself. Outside the gates you find, not a suburb but a hideous desert. Within the walls we grow crops and graze beasts on the sites of the gymnasium and the market-place. Statues of gods and heroes are smothered in the growing corn. Yet we are forsooth to expel these hard-working folks and to leave men nothing to do but to rob or steal.
The rustic, being called upon to state his own case, described the poverty of the squatter families, the innocence of their lives, their services to shipwrecked seafarers, and so forth. On the last topic he received a dramatic confirmation from a man in the crowd, who had himself been one of a party of castaways hospitably relieved three years before by these very people. So all ended well. The stress laid on the simple rusticity of the rustic, and the mutual distrust and mean jealousy of the townsfolk, shew in numerous touches that we have in this narrative a highly coloured scene. But the picture of the decayed city, with its ancient walls a world too wide for its shrunk population, is companion to that of the deserted countryside. Both panels of this mournful diptych could have been paralleled in the case of many a city and territory in Italy and Greece. The moral reflexions, in which the lecturer proceeds to apply the lessons of the narrative, are significant. He enlarges on the superiority of the poor to the rich in many virtues, unselfishness in particular. Poverty in itself is not naturally an evil. If men will only work with their own hands, they may supply their own needs, and live a life worthy of freemen. The word αὐτουργεῖν occurs more than once in this spirited appeal, shewing clearly that Dion had detected the plague-spot in the civilization of his day. But he honestly admits the grave difficulties that beset artisans in the various trades practised in towns. They lack necessary[1205] capital: everything has to be paid for, food clothing lodging fuel and what not, for they get nothing free but water, and own nothing but their bodies. Yet we cannot advise them to engage in foul degrading vocations. We desire them to live honourably, not to sink below the standards of the greedy usurer or the owners of lodging-houses or ships or gangs of slaves. What then are we to do with the decent poor? Shall we have to propose turning them out of the cities and settling them on allotments in the country? Tradition tells us rural settlement prevailed throughout Attica of yore: and the system worked well, producing citizens of a better and more discreet type than the town-bred mechanics who thronged the Assemblies and law-courts of Athens.
It may be said that Dion is a mere itinerant philosopher, who travels about seeing the world and proposing impracticable remedies for contemporary evils in popular sermons to idle audiences. But he knew his trade, and his trade was to make his hearers ‘feel better’ for attending his discourses. When he portrays the follies or vices of the age, he is dealing with matters of common knowledge, and not likely to misrepresent facts seriously. When he suggests remedies, it matters little that there is no possibility of applying them. Present company are always excepted, and the townsfolk who listened to the preacher would neither resent his strictures on city life nor have the slightest intention of setting their own hands to the spade or plough. That there was a kind of moral reaction[1206] in this period, and that lecturers and essayists contributed something to the revival of healthier public sentiment, I do not dispute; though I think too much success is sometimes[1207] ascribed to their good intentions. At any rate they cannot be credited with improving the conditions of rustic life. To the farmer the voice of the great world outside was represented by the collectors of rents and taxes, the exactors of services, not by the sympathetic homilies of popular teachers.