Ancient farmer
As an ancient farmer you would belong to the vast majority – the people whose harvests fed every pharaoh, senator and soldier, and who mostly left no written trace of their own.
Most people, most of the time
In every ancient civilisation the large majority of people – often estimated at 80 per cent or more – worked the land. Cities, temples and armies all depended on the surplus they produced. Farmers might be free smallholders, tenants paying rent in crops, or dependent labourers on large estates, and their position often worsened when wealthy landowners bought up land.
In Egypt, life followed the Nile. The year had three seasons: akhet, the flood, when fields lay underwater and many farmers were drafted for building work; peret, the growing season; and shemu, harvest. Officials measured the flood with nilometers to set taxes.
Grain, olives and vines
Around the Mediterranean you would grow the classic triad: wheat or barley for bread and porridge, olives for oil, and grapes for wine. Farmers added beans, lentils and chickpeas, kept a few sheep, goats or pigs and used oxen or donkeys for ploughing. Tools were simple: a wooden ard plough that scratched the soil rather than turning it, sickles and threshing floors where animals trampled the grain.
Hesiod’s poem Works and Days, from about 700 BCE, is essentially a Greek farmer’s handbook, advising when to plough, harvest and sail – and to work hard to avoid begging from neighbours.
Taxes, debt and hunger
Your margins would be thin. A failed harvest, a bad flood or an army passing through could mean famine, and debt could cost you your land or freedom. Skeletons from ancient farming communities often show signs of heavy labour and periods of childhood malnutrition. Yet farmers were also the ideal of Roman virtue: the legendary Cincinnatus was said to have left his plough to save Rome as dictator, then returned to it.
