Wilamowitz-Moellendorf interprets σῖτος as wheat.[619] The free inhabitants of Athens, which received not less than 10,000 medimni of the total consignments, habitually ate wheat, as did most of the Greek cities with the exception of Sparta,[620] which was not among the recipients. Barley in the 4th century had become the food of slaves and animals, except in times of extreme scarcity.[621] It is probable, therefore, that most of the consignments were wheat, though certainty is impossible.
As regards the time occupied by the consignments, it is clear that the items on the list have been recorded not in chronological order, but in the order of the amounts sent, beginning with the largest. It is further evident that each city did not receive more than two consignments; Chios received four, but each was sent to a different settlement of the island. Segré[622] remarked that there is no need to assume that all were sent simultaneously, as the list seems to be a summing up at the end of the undertaking.[623] He considered that they had been despatched throughout the period of scarcity (331-325). Yet if we suppose that the price was normal (and nothing to the contrary is mentioned), and that the consignments were spread over five years — why should the trouble have been taken to commemorate them? The argument that the exports were a special concession, as Greek cities normally prohibited the export of corn,[624] does not apply here, since such prohibitions did not hold good in states producing grain in large quantities, Cyrene being one of them. The stele then had no point unless it commemorated a special effort, that is, a maximum consignment in the shortest possible time during a period of special stress. Here therefore we must agree with Oliverio[625] and Zebelev[626] when they date the consignments between the years 331 and 328, and it is even more probable, since no city received grain more than twice, that the whole project occupied two years. If this conclusion is correct, the total export in one of the two years concerned could not have been less than 402,000 medimni, or 221,420,41 hectolitres on Oliverio’s calculation.
Can the area of cultivation necessary to produce this quantity be estimated? Any calculation must be rendered more doubtful by the possibility that part of the consignments came from stocks stored from the previous year. But in order to arrive at some notion of the area concerned we have no alternative but to assume as a hypothesis that all the grain came from one year’s harvest. The possibility of despatch from the granaries is at any rate less probable in the second year. Jardé[627] estimated the maximum yield in ancient Greece at 16.80 hectolitres per hectare, on a basis of a yield of seven to one. The Cyrenean yield was certainly higher — the Arabs estimate their yield in the plain of Bengazi as 35:1, that in the wadis of the southern plateau at 50/60:1; in Marmarica, at 8:1.[628] The yields would not have seemed to have changed much in Marmarica from ancient times; the Vatican Payrus of the late 2nd century A.D. cites for Marmarica barley yields of 7-12 to 1 and wheat yields of 4.5-10 to I.[629] Barley yields of 30 hectolitres the hectare and 180:1 have been cited from the wadis south of Bengazi.[630] Bertarelli[631] ascribes yields of 30/40 to 1 to some years, although the average, he admits, is 5/7. Scaetta[632] has estimated Arab crops on the plateau between 12.5 and 25 hectolitres the hectare, at 25/40 to 1. The Italian farms, however, seem to have obtained less impressive crops, their averages being 10 hectolitres the hectare.[633] There is no doubt that yields vary greatly from year to year with the variations of the annual rainfall, but taking into account the Greek average of Jardé, Cyrene’s ancient reputation for plentiful crops, and Scaetta’s figures for wheat on the Jebel, it may be permissible to put the ancient yield at 20 hi. the hectare in a good year. On this assumption, and adding the fallow area, we may evaluate the area reflected by the consignments of 331-328 at 21,124 hectares. The Cyreneans, however, would not have exported their total year’s crop, as they needed to keep enough for their own consumption and for seed in the coming autumn. If so, we are faced with the task of estimating the size of the population of 4th-century Cyrene.
This is rendered easier by one factor at least; the stele says explicitly: “To which (cities) the city gave wheat”, meaning, that we have to consider only Cyrene and her territory, excluding the other cities of the Pentapolis. It is said that 7,000 Cyreneans fell at the battle of Leukon in the middle of the 6th century.[634] The city recruited 10,000 foot, 600 horse and 100 chariots for Ophelias;[635] 8,000 infantry and 500 horse against Euergetes II.[636] These figures point to a citizen population of not less than 50,000 souls. The citizens with the franchise in the city at the end of the 4th century B.C. (not long after the grain consignments under discussion) numbered, as we have seen, 10,000, at a time when the city was apparently approaching its peak population; but this body was limited to men of a minimal annual income of 20 minae. As already noted, workmen were supporting themselves in fourth-century Athens on 180 drachmas a year, and even if this income was inadequate in the face of steadily rising prices,[637] prices in Cyrene had not then risen considerably and were generally lower than those of mainland Greece. If then we estimate the electorate of 10,000 as representing 30,000 souls (a very modest estimate), we can hardly add fewer than three times that number to account for free Greeks with incomes lower than the minimum census, metics, slaves and Libyans.[638] And in this connection it were well to recall that when Antipater in 312 restricted citizen-rights in Athens to 9,000 inhabitants, 12,000 Athenians remained without them.[639] There was also a considerable number of Greeks permanently resident at Cyrene who were not born in the city:[640] these constituted, according to Strabo,[641] a well-defined community in the ist century B.C. The proportion of metics at Athens in the 4th century has been estimated at 30-40 percent, of the Athenians;[642] this percentage is doubtless too high for Cyrene, and 25 percent, might be a more realistic guess. The number of slaves can hardly be estimated at less than one for each of the 10,000 with incomes of 20 minae per annum or more; this is obviously too low a figure. The number of Libyans, by contrast, is much harder to evaluate, since there were among them many nomads and most of the natives would have lived dispersed over the city territory, the boundaries of which cannot be determined with confidence. But evidence will presently appear suggesting that the Cyrenian territory embraced not less than 80 percent, of the country in the hellenistic period, excluding chiefly the coastal areas of Ptolemais, Teucheira and Berenice. Accordingly the Libyan population associated with Cyrene may be seen as identical with the Jebel al-Ahdar, which today contains the tribes of al-Dorsa, al-Braasah, al-Hassa, the Ailat Fayyid, and al-Abiad, numbering 77,250 souls in 1923.[643]
633
638
Most of the poorer citizens may be identified with the Cyreneans who followed Ophelias in his African adventure.
639
642
V. Ehrenberg,