Abstract
Unlike its contemporary form, agriculture in the ancient Greek world was alien to scientific knowledge, i.e. abstract and theoretical knowledge aimed at rationalizing and improving agricultural production. In this sense, the scarcity of surviving ancient texts on agronomy, either in their entirety or in fragmentary form, can be explained not only by the usual contingencies involved in the transmission of ancient artifacts, but also by the fact that production in this major sector of the ancient Greek economy was based almost exclusively on empirical knowledge, passed down from generation to generation. However, the few ancient theoretical texts that examine the epistemological status of agriculture in Greece do not present it solely as an accumulation of experiences, sometimes summed up in general recommendations, as in Hesiod’s Works and Days. Or, to put it another way, the fact that experience played a decisive role in ancient Greek agriculture is not enough to define the type of knowledge that constitutes it. In Xenophon’s Economics – a Socratic dialogue that is one of the most important sources for examining the epistemological status of agriculture in ancient Greece – the discussion in which Socrates tells Critobulus the importance of agriculture, and the discussion in which Ischomachus teaches agriculture to Socrates in the second part of the work, reveal the complexity of agriculture’s epistemological status. This passages have lent themselves to two main reductive readings: one makes agriculture a simple matter of experience, while the other sees in it only the opportunity to exercise an ethical or political code of conduct. Against these interpretations, which reduce agriculture to a single epistemological dimension, my claim is that Xenophon invites us instead to consider agriculture as the object of a multidimensional rationality or at the crossroad of different kinds of rationalities. These rationalities are at once technical, empirical, ethical and political, in the sense that the key concepts Xenophon mobilizes to account for agricultural processes and their results belong to different theoretical and practical spheres. If Xenophon presents agriculture in this way, it is not just to differentiate it from the « banausic » manual arts that weaken and uglify body and soul. It is because the oikos, as the central domestic place of economic activities, articulates practices aimed at living and practices aimed at living well, that is, a dimension rooted in necessity and another one of a moral nature, in harmony with a world thought of as both natural and political.
Codes JEL: A13, B1, B11, Q0.