The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.187

c9.s1.187

But toward the peasantry⁵ the attitude of the Seleucid kings, to their honour, was rather different. Speaking generally, the peasantry throughout the Persian empire were serfs, tied to the soil, bought and sold with the land, living in their own villages without any corporate organisation, a class which rarely changed though conquerors might come and go; much of the peasantry must have been there long before the Persians, though they probably received an Iranian admixture. The peasants in the Persian homeland of Persis itself may have been free men belonging to the ruling Persian race, just as the Macedonian peasants were free men, for otherwise the Persian foot-archers, the mainstay of their early armies, cannot be accounted for;¹ Babylonia too may have had some system of its own; but the actual cultivation of most of the soil of the empire was done by the serfs, whether for king or landowner or city. Even before Alexander some of the Greek cities of Asia Minor had begun to improve the condition of their serfs: there were places where they were ceasing to be serfs and becoming catoeci (κάτοικοι), hereditary settlers.² The Seleucids carried on the work. They could not free the serfs in the mass, even had they wished to; for one thing, Greek civilisation itself was based upon and made possible by slavery, and for another the whole land system of Asia would have fallen to pieces. But something really was done. The system of special judges for the peasants on the King’s land,³ though only mentioned in Aeolis under Attalus I, must have been Seleucid. The Seleucid foundations and sales of land turned King’s land into city land on a considerable scale, and, once land became city land, the peasant had a fair chance of ceasing to be a serf. But, apart from the cities, the unorganised native village began to approximate to the organised and quasi-autonomous settlement,⁴ and the large walled village, with all that it implied, began to appear. Consideration of these walled villages and what they meant may be deferred till we come to Bactria (p. 121), but it may be noted here that the growth of the native village into the settlement shows the same features as the growth of the military colony into the polis; under Greek rule the level of Asia was slowly but steadily tending to rise.