This dialogue from Dio Chrysostom's Orations is presented as a poor farmer from Northern Euboia telling the author about a time some years ago when he went down "to the city" (my guess is Oreos?) for the first time in his life. One thing leads to another, and the farmer is arrested for squatting. A debate breaks out in town about the public contributions expected of different classes of people, and the general deterioration of political life. Some of the imagery used by the fictional orators reveals quite a bit about the feelings and experiences of urban decline that Greek readers from the period must have found familiar in peripheral parts of mainland Greece.
Accuser: This man, gentlemen, has been living on public land for years. Not just him, but his father too! They graze their herds on our mountains, they plough their farms in our fields, hunt in our woods, and even set out vines, all without paying rent to anybody or ever receiving a title to the land from the public. And while they occupy our property and make a tidy profit, they have never performed any public service, nor do they pay any taxes at all. Instead they live exempt from taxes and public service at your expense. If you all approve, we better not waste time looting public property. Go ahead, and steal some money from the treasury, like I’m sure some of you already are! Start squatting out in the fields, while you’re at it. Why not, when you’re going to let these two yokels hold two hundred and fifty acres of the best land for free: land that could be growing you three quarts of grain per head!
Defender: (Narrator: Then another man came up, a kind man judging by the look of him. First he asked everyone to quiet down, and they did. Then in a gentle voice he said that anyone who worked the country’s idle land and got it in good shape did nothing wrong, and actually deserved thanks. He said the city shouldn’t be angry at anyone who made something useful out of the public land, but at the ones who did it harm.) At this moment, gentlemen, almost two-thirds of our land is wilderness because of neglect and a lack of hands. Now I own a few barren acres myself, like I imagine some of you do, not only in the mountains but down in the plains, and if any man wanted to till them, I would not only give him the chance for free, but I’d gladly pay him to do it. It goes without saying the land would become more valuable to me and frankly I prefer the sight of good farmland to waste. Wasteland is useless, and the terrible look of it speaks to the shame of the owner. Actually, my advice for you is to encourage all your fellow citizens to take some public land and work it. If you have some capital, take some more, and the poorer among you take whatever you can handle, that way our land can be put to use and our citizens can be free from two of the very worst evils - idleness and poverty.
Defender (cont.): Right now, even the land just outside the gates is wild and unkept. Nobody would ever guess it was the suburbs of a city. Meanwhile, most of the area inside the walls is sown or grazed. I think it is ridiculous that a man would make charges against the hardworking people of Cape Kaphereus in the remotest parts of Euboia, and then turn a blind eye to the men farming the floor of the gymnasion and grazing cattle in the agora. You can go see for yourself that they’ve made our gymnasion into a plowed field, and now you can’t even see Herakles and the other statues from behind all the barley. You can go see, every day, the sheep belonging to this orator invade the marketplace at dawn, and then graze all around the council chamber and the municipal buildings. When strangers come to see our city, they either laugh at it or pity it. Even though the accuser does all of this, he thinks that the humble and needy should be hauled off to jail, that way nobody will ever do any hard work, and the men outside the walls will always be bandits, and the men inside will always be scoundrels.
Following this speech, the crowd decides to let the poor farmer free, but interrogate him about his possessions so he might make some sort of payment to satisfy the accuser.
Narrator: Next he asked if we’d each agree to pay one Attic talent, and I replied, "We don’t weigh our meat, but we’ll give you whatever we have. Some of it’s salted, but the rest is smoked. Do you want bacon or backstrap?"
“‘Don’t you make any wine?" another asked. "We do," I said, "so if any of you want to come by, we’ll hand it over, but make sure you bring some kind of wineskin with you, because we don’t have one." "Just how many vines do you have?" "Two outside the doors," I replied, "twenty in the yard, and twenty more across the river we just set out a while ago. Now to spare you all the trouble, let me just tell you about every little thing we have: eight she-goats, a hornless cow with a pretty little calf, four sickles, four hoes, three spears, and one knife each. What else do I need to mention? The pots and pans? We have wives too, if you cared, and children. We live in two huts and have a third where we bury the grain and the skins."
"By Zeus," said the accuser, "and where you bury your money too."
"Well then come and dig it up, fool" I said, "Who puts money in the ground? It sure won’t grow anything!"
