ABSTRACT
IN spite of the economic progress which the Peisistratid administration had made possible, its authority rested on decidedly insecure foundations. The direct taxation levied on the farming population could hardly fail to alienate its sympathies even if, as seems likely, the rate was reduced by Hippias. Those settlers who had received government loans were faced with a bitter struggle to meet their obligations of capital repayment, together with interest and taxation; the majority were probably working newly planted land, and the waiting period before the farms became fully productive was a critical one. However, we are hardly justified in assuming that rural conditions were aggravated by depressed food prices due to foreign imports. While this may be true of certain local areas, especially those near city and port, it was not true of the farming area as a whole. Much of Attica's grain land was too far from the city market to be seriously affected, and the increasing number of non-subsistence farmlets producing wine and oil assured the grain farmers of an expanding local market for their product. But the future of the non-subsistence farmer was a precarious one. Those on the land who were opening up new agricultural areas, or were turning marginal grain land into vineyards, were in effect building up their own capital and the capital of Attica as a whole; their efforts were directed into investment in the future of the country rather than into present consumption. Yet amid their harsh conditions they had, unless specially exempted, to pay taxes for the development of the city, and to them it must often have seemed that their main efforts went to feed the tax-collector and the middleman.
