INTRODUCTION

In his younger years, around the turn of the second century ad, the orator Dio Chrysostom was shipwrecked on the coast of Greece – so he tells us in his seventh discourse – where he found hospitality with two families of rustics, who led a simple, but happy life by tilling a small piece of land and keeping a few goats, a cow and a pig. In addition, the men hunted deer and boar in the wilderness that surrounded their humble dwellings, which consisted of two huts for themselves and one hut for their stores. The story emphasises the simplicity of their life: their clothes are plain and made by themselves from the products of their little farm and from the animals they hunt. The food they have in store consists of what they have cultivated on their land. They have no money and do not buy or sell at the town market. The meat they have they do not measure, implying that there is no need to do so and, hence, that they do not sell it. One of the two family heads had never been to town in fifty years. The other one had been, he tells us, when he was taken by a magistrate for trial before the town assembly on the charge of living off the public land without paying taxes or fulfilling the obligations of a citizen.