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The Political Economy
of Agricultural Booms
 Mariano Turzi

The Political
Economy of
Agricultural Booms
Managing Soybean Production in
Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay
Mariano Turzi
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
Buenos Aires, Argentina

ISBN 978-3-319-45945-5 ISBN 978-3-319-45946-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45946-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951447

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th century

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my wife Gladys, my one true love. Ab imo pectore
 PREFACE

This book studies the international political economy of agriculture, spe-

cifically of the global agroindustrial model of soybean production and the
domestic variations across three national case studies: Brazil, Argentina,
and Paraguay (the BAP countries).
Chapter 1 introduces agriculture and presents the analytical framework.
It begins with an empirical, historical background on soybeans and the
world soy market. It then proceeds to study agriculture and its linkages to
the economy, reviewing the main debates and recent contributions in the
political economy of agriculture literature. The final section studies the
several trends in global demand that have come together to intensify
competition for agricultural resources and food products. World demand
for agricultural commodities is driven by four factors (the “four f’s”):
food, feed, fuel, and finance.
The international political economy structure of agriculture is currently a
corporate-driven, vertically integrated system of global agricultural pro-
duction. This is the result of two mutually reinforcing traits: the technolo-
gical transformation into agrochemicals and genetically modified seeds and
the economic globalization of grain trading. The two sections review the
supply-side actors who have driven this international restructuring of pro-
duction and trade: chemical and trading multinational corporations
(MNCs). Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the international dimension from
the supply side. The growing importance of information technologies and
biotechnology has led to a dramatic increase in the power of the seeding
companies within the soybean chain. The strategic value of a unique asset—
genetically modified seeds with proprietary traits—has propelled these

vii
viii PREFACE

companies to a dominant position. The power of input suppliers in the new

soybean mode of production has given them overriding influence, allowing
them to appropriate a sizeable portion of the rents generated along the
chain. The importance of tracing the behavior of these multinational
corporate actors lays in the fact that they have exerted their power to create
the institutional structure to govern the new resource (genetically modified
soybeans). As such, the resulting institutional landscape is a “map” that
exhibits the marks of the power struggles between the actors in the chain in
their attempt to crystallize their power resources into the governing struc-
ture, objectifying their power (O’Donnell 1978). A mirror situation can be
found in Chapter 3 at the level of corporate actors in the trading and
industrial processing stage. Distributors and processors have taken advan-
tage of the grain trade liberalization of the last decade to leverage their
position in open markets. They concentrated on supply mechanisms
through the advantages derived from scale and vertical integration. Their
strategies for furthering their position within the soybean chain include
infrastructure development, financial leveraging, and flexible sourcing.
Transnationalization is increasingly eroding the relevance of national
frontiers. The mode of production in the soybean chain would be thus
regionalized according to corporate incentives operating in a global trend
toward relocation of the different stages of production. Soybeans are
harvested in Paraguay, sent by barge to Brazil or Argentina for processing,
and sold in Geneva to Asia after headquarter in the USA has authorized
the operation. The geoeconomic pull of the international-level corporate
strategies is reorganizing territorial boundaries, integrating the three
countries into a single regional production structure from the upstream
to the downstream: the “Soybean Republic” (2011). The international
model of agricultural production has empowered chemical and trading
multinational companies. The vertical integration of these two powerful
links of the globalized chain has generated a commanding production
structure. To consolidate this “soybean complex” of production, chemical
companies have used their scientific and technological superiority to
advance the sales of their agrochemical products. They have integrated
with traders and processors and leveraged scale advantages to establish
dominant buying positions. Further, they have drawn on their financial
strengths to dictate infrastructural developments, thus creating a pull force
to rearrange the economic geography through the BAP countries. Indeed,
the analysis of the trading link in the soybean chain evidences that national
borders were becoming increasingly irrelevant realities. The ascent of an
 PREFACE ix

international, corporate-driven model of organization of production is

reshaping territorial realities according to global production demands
and needs.
But—as Harris (2001) points out—modes of production evolve from
the contradiction between means (material forces) of production and the
(social) relations of production. A mode of production encompasses the
totality of the social and technical human interconnections involved in
the social production and reproduction of material life. The material
underpinnings of social cleavages (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967) in the
agricultural sector are different in each country. These cleavages have
impacted policy response, generating specific national political economy
configurations. The reality that international-level stimuli impacted
domestic institutional structures in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay is
the explanatory core of this book. The means of production changed for
the three countries in a similar way, but the relations of production did
not because conditions on the ground differ significantly in Argentina,
Brazil, and Paraguay. Despite uniformity of the international corporate
actors driving the process of soybean expansion, the end results were far
from homogeneous. They reinforced the existing structures of power
(concentrated landowners) in Paraguay but upset the balance of power
(between the urban/industrial/labor coalition and the agricultural inter-
ests) in Argentina, while they empowered local actors (municipalities and
state governments) in Brazil. Results are not preordained by economic
factors—as modernization theory would predict—nor is there evidence
of convergence of processes due to globalization. Each of the BAP
exhibits different patterns of institutional governance of the soybean
chain, and the level of centralization of resource management gives the
basis of comparison among the three case studies. The application of a
comparative political economy analysis reveals rather the ascent of
“Soybean Republic.” National coalitions have limited the convergence
and standardization associated with economic globalization (Guillén,
2009). The end result observed in the case studies of Brazil, Argentina,
and Paraguay—the BAP countries—demonstrates a key role of national
political economy arrangements in shaping the influence of the globaliz-
ing “pull” forces. Pressure groups and coalitions have been formed
around agricultural interests, and their relative strength has been the
determinant factor transforming natural endowments in these three
countries into competitive advantages in world markets. The preferences
and relative power of actors within these societies—economic and
x PREFACE

political, national and subnational, public and private—within certain

institutional and policymaking frameworks are giving way to differential
patterns.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 analyze the political economy of producers and
farmers throughout the three case studies. If the global structure condi-
tions explain the why, the comparative political-economic case-study ana-
lysis of domestic political economy structures in Brazil, Argentina, and
Paraguay accounts for the how. The diverse cleavages and institutional
forms throughout the BAP have resulted in specific, non-convergent
modes of production for the same natural resource. In each of the case
studies, the changes in the means of production have created different—
although not exclusive—relations of production. The focus is not on the
agronomic component of soybean production, but rather on the broader
set of sociopolitical and socioeconomic issues surrounding it. This book is
less concerned with the increasing physical space or economic weight of a
crop and more with the expansion and consolidation of control structures
and social relations. The analysis of soybean production is treated as a
heuristic device to expose the underlying balance of power of the actors in
the chain and the way in which they have adapted to and shaped the
institutional structure governing resource production and allocation.
Different institutional settings and governance rules will give rise to dif-
ferent forms of resource administration. This is the guiding question in
this book: what have been the effects of different governing institutions (in
Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay) on the management of a resource and
export product (soybeans). The Brazilian case is one in which local gov-
ernance is much stronger, which has allowed to effectively integrate state
institutions with the resource/sector (coordination). In Paraguay,
although the formal structure is that of a unitary state, the agricultural
sector has achieved de facto decentralization by state capture. Taking
advantage of power asymmetries and weak initial institutional conditions,
there has been colonization by particular and foreign interests. Finally,
Argentina is a case of centralized institutions exhibiting a conflictive
pattern of relations with the economic sector/resource (confrontation).
The concluding chapter reviews research findings and poses demanding
questions for future international political economy research, pressing
public policy dilemmas for nation-states.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Director of the Latin American Studies Program at

the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced
International Studies Riordan Roett for trusting in my subject study and
me. He is the “intellectual landowner” of the Soybean Republics. Norma
González and her support through the Fulbright scholarship were of key
importance as well.
For the past fifteen years, I have had the honor and privilege of a true
mentor like Sergio Berensztein. Among the countless personal and profes-
sional debts of gratitude I owe to him, “sowing the seeds” of this area of
study is the one most directly related to this book.
I have also had the guidance and permanent support of Roberto Russell.
I am very thankful to Torcuato Di Tella University Rector Ernesto
Schargrodsky and PoliSci/IR Department Directors Catalina Smulovitz
and Juan Tokatlian for giving their vote of confidence. A recognition is
also in order for former Business School Director Juan José Cruces and
MBA Director Sebastián Auguste.
To Palgrave editor Dr. Anca Pusca, who trusted in this project, and to
Juan Pablo Luna. in representation of REPAL (Network for the Study of
Political Economy in Latin America). They have delivered on the promise
of promoting new studies in the political economy of Latin America and
welcoming innovations that challenge the conventional wisdom on
socially relevant phenomenon in the region with an open and eclectic
approach.

xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the high-quality data and material from the
United States Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service
(FAS-USDA) and the generosity of the Production Estimates and Crop
Assessment Division (PECAD) to share them.
Finally, I am grateful to Lester Brown, Harry De Gorter, Gary Gereffi,
Jeffrey Sachs, Carlos Scartascini, Ernesto Stein, Johan Swinnen, Mariano
Tommassi, Steven Topik, and Tom Vilsack for their invaluable insights.
Also, Lucio Castro, Blairo Maggi, Gustavo Grobocopatel, and Fernando
Lugo for their interest, time, and comments.
 CONTENTS

1 The International Political Economy of Agriculture 1

Driving Demand: The Four F’s 1
Soybeans and the World Market 4
Agriculture in the Latin American Economies 8
Soybeans in the Southern Cone 11
Linkages, Commodity Chains, and the Political
Economy of Agriculture 14

2 A Super-Seeding Business 23
The Institutional Frameworks 28
The Political Economy of Seeds 31
Argentina 32
Paraguay 36
Brazil 40

3 Global Trading 49
The New Global Agricultural Trade 50
World Grain Trade and the Soybean Chain 55
Finance and Infrastructure as Political Economy 66
Financial Instruments 67
Taxes/Duties 70
Infrastructure 74

xiii
xiv CONTENTS

4 Coordination: Brazil 83
The Amazon: Political Economy in Brazil’s Far West 85
Land Struggles 91

5 Colonization: Paraguay 101

The Brasiguayos: An Intermestic Driving Force 105
The Far West 109

6 Confrontation ( . . . and Beyond): Argentina 117

A State Against the Campo? 118

Conclusion 127

Annex 1. Agricultural Forward

and Backward Linkages 131

Annex 2. Geographic Distribution

of Soybean Production in the Soybean Republics 137

References 141

Index 149
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.1 Soybean meal and farming industry, world, 1976–2015 7

Fig. 2.1 The seed production circuit 31
Map A.1 Brazil: soybean production by state 137
Map A.2 Argentina: soybean production by province 138
Map A.3 Paraguay: soybean production by province 139

xv
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1 Evolution of soybeans in Argentina, Brazil,

and Paraguay from 1985/1986 to 2015/2016 13
Table 1.2 World share, soybean exports of Argentina, Brazil,
and Paraguay from 1985/1986 to 2015/2016 14
Table 3.1 Tax rates for soybeans, Retenciones móviles (2008) 72

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

The International Political Economy

of Agriculture

Abstract Introduction of agriculture presents the analytical framework.

It begins with an empirical, historical background on soybeans and the
world soy market. It then proceeds to examine the literature on agriculture
and its linkages to the economy, reviewing the main debates and recent
contributions in the political economy of agriculture literature. The final
section studies the several trends in global demand that have come
together to intensify competition for agricultural resources and food
products. World demand for agricultural commodities is driven by four
factors (the “four f’s”): food, feed, fuel, and finance.

Keywords Agriculture
Soybeans
Agribusiness
International political

economy
Latin America
Commodity chains
Commodities

Development

DRIVING DEMAND: THE FOUR F’S

Several trends in global demand have come together to intensify competi-
tion for agricultural resources and food products. World demand for
agricultural commodities is driven by four factors (the “four f ’ s”): food,
feed, fuel, and finance.
The first factor, food, results from a demographic dynamic: the global
population grows by around 80 million people per year. The first billion
was reached in 1804. Owing mainly to technological advances in the fields

© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Turzi, The Political Economy of Agricultural Booms,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45946-2_1
2 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURAL BOOMS

of medicine and agriculture, from that point until 2014 the world popula-
tion grew more than 600 percent, to more than 7 billion. In 2009 the
renowned agronomist Norman Borlaug estimated that over the next fifty
years, the world would have to produce more food than it had in the past
10,000 years.1 The World Bank projected in April 2016 that food demand
would rise by 20 percent globally over the next fifteen years. The com-
pounded result: more people in the world, living longer, means a struc-
tural upward shift in food demand. Moreover, the world population is
changing not just quantitatively but also qualitatively. India and China
have the largest rural populations, 857 million and 635 million, respec-
tively. However, they are also expected to experience the largest declines
in rural residents, with a 300 million reduction in China and a 52 million
reduction in India anticipated by 2050. In 2010, for the first time, more
than half of the world’s population was urban. By 2014, the total urban
population had grown to 54 percent, and this share is expected to increase
to 66 percent by 2050. The UN’s Population Division 2014 projections
indicate that India is expected to add more than 11 million urban dwellers
every year and China more than 8 million.2
The second driver of agricultural demand, feed, is mostly attributable
to the rise of the emerging world, with a regional focus on Asia, particu-
larly on China and India. Global poverty rates started to fall by the end of
the twentieth century largely because emerging countries’ growth accel-
erated from average annual rates of 4 percent in 1960–2000 to 6 percent
in 2000–2010. Around two-thirds of poverty reduction within a country
comes from growth, and greater equality contributes the other third.
According to a World Bank estimate, between 2005 and 2012, India lifted
137 million people out of poverty.3 For China, the World Bank calculates
that, from the time market reforms were initiated in 1978 until 2004, the
figure rose to more than 600 million, and in more recent years (between
2005 and 2011), nearly 220 million people have been lifted out of
poverty.4 When living standards rise, so does the demand for meat and
dairy products. As people from China and India abandon poverty and
move into the burgeoning global middle class—in Asia alone, the figures
for 2014 were estimated at 500 million, and they are projected to surpass
3 billion by 2030—they diversify their diets to include more vegetable oils,
meat, and dairy products. Not only are there more people to feed, but
more people are eating pork, chicken, and beef.
Against this backdrop, soybeans become the most essential input in the
global food system. The bean contains 83 percent flour and 17 percent oil.
 1 THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURE 3

When oil is extracted, the remaining residue is known as soybean cake,

meal, or pellets; it is a vegetable protein concentrate (42–44 percent).
Meal has found its strongest application as fodder for the industrial raising
of farm animals, or “factory farming.” Soybeans can also be processed for
human consumption in a variety of forms: as soy meal, soy flour, soy milk,
soy sauce, tofu, textured vegetable protein (found in a variety of vegetarian
foods and intended to substitute for meat), lecithin, and oil. Soybean oil is
the world’s most widely used edible oil and has several industrial applica-
tions. Soybeans are thus a highly efficient crop: about 40 percent of the
calories in soybeans are derived from protein, compared to 25 percent for
most other crops. This means that the return per dollar spent is relatively
high compared to that for other oilseeds.
In the lower-income segments, soy is an essential component of any
dietary energy supply intended to inexpensively cover daily calorie require-
ments. For the better off, the crop is a cornerstone fodder component. As
livestock can be fed more efficiently with soybean-based feed, the massive
spread of the crop has made chicken, beef, and pork cheaper and more
readily available worldwide. According to estimates from the US
Department of Agriculture (USDA), China and India are the world’s
top importers of soybean oil and are projected to remain so in the coming
years.5 China tops current importing charts and projected scenarios as
soybean importer; its soybean imports were projected to reach 72 million
tons (MT) in 2014–2015, meaning that China alone was expected to
absorb 64 percent of total global soybean exports by that year.
The third factor pushing up demand for grain production is fuel. The
first explanation is that the price of oil has a direct impact on prices of
agricultural inputs such as fertilizers. When the price of fossil fuels rises,
then it becomes a rational economic alternative to divert food crops into
the production of biofuels. The debate about peak oil and the subsequent
expectations of oil price hikes—plus the risk of supply shortages—have
triggered a growing demand for energy from the biofuels industry.
Supported by policy mandates, countries are seeking to diversify their
energy sources by incorporating renewables. The Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) estimated in 2013 that biofuel prices would continue
to rise—16–32 percent higher in real terms compared to the previous
decade—over the next ten years, with expected high crude oil prices and
continuing biofuel policies around the world that promote demand.
The financial component of agricultural demand is more indirect and
more controversial, but nevertheless, it is equally important in light of the
4 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURAL BOOMS

speculation in food commodity markets, particularly by institutional inves-

tors such as hedge funds, pension funds, and investment banks. Since 2000
there has been a fifty fold increase in dollars invested in commodity index
funds. The number of commodity futures contracts outstanding nearly
doubled between 2004 and 2007. However, commodity prices crashed
with equities following the financial crisis and traded tightly in line with the
stock market over the nervous years that followed, providing no diversifica-
tion. After 2005 commodities did begin to move more closely in line with
other asset classes and with each other. This became especially close
during the financial crisis. After the 2008 financial crisis, global investors
seeking safe hedges for their portfolios in the face of depreciation of the
US dollar turned commodities into an asset class. The correlation between
commodities and stocks—negative before—became strongly positive.
But 2010 was the last year investors pumped net cash into commodity
index swaps. Outflows trickled, becoming an outpour in 2014, when the
value of commodity assets under management was reduced $24.2bn to a
total of $67bn from a pre-crisis high of more than $150bn. The financia-
lization of commodity markets is self-perpetuating: as new investment
products—food derivatives and indexed commodities—create speculative
opportunities in grains, edible oils, and livestock, prices for food commod-
ities increase. More money flows into the sector, and a new round of price
increase follows. Although food inflation and food volatility have increased
alongside commodity speculation, there is no conclusive evidence of the
impact of finance as a driver of price developments. The UN Conference on
Trade and Development 2009 Report stated that index traders “can sig-
nificantly influence prices and create speculative bubbles, with extremely
detrimental effects on normal trading activities and market efficiency,”
something supported by the research done by Tang and Xiong (2010),
who found that financialization made ostensibly different commodities
such as grains and oil more closely correlated after 2004, relating the
trend to “large inflows of investment capital to commodity index securities
during this period.” However, Bhardwaj et al. (2015) argue that the
impact of financialization was marginal.

SOYBEANS AND THE WORLD MARKET

Soybeans (US) or soyabeans (UK) are the common denomination of the
Glycine max. The English word soy derives from the Chinese shu and
the Japanese shōyu (soy sauce), and soya comes from the word’s Dutch
 1 THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURE 5

adaptation. This legume was first cultivated in northern China and spread
into Japan, Korea, and the rest of Southeast Asia during the Chou
Dynasty. Known to the Chinese for 5,000 years, soybeans were one of
the five “sacred seeds,” together with barley, millet, rice, and wheat.
According to Chinese tradition, the first written record of the crop dates
from 2838 B.C., when Chinese emperor Sheng-Nung—The Heavenly
Farmer—writes in his Materia Medica about soy’s medicinal properties.6
Although soybeans remain a crucial crop in China, Japan, and Korea,
today only 45 % of world production is located in Asia. The other 55 %
percent of production is in the Americas, divided mainly between the
USA, Brazil, and Argentina. Soy was first researched in Europe in 1712
by Englebert Kaempfer, a German botanist who had studied in Japan. The
first seeds were planted in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris in 1740. Swedish
botanist Carl von Linne made the first scientific study of the soybean in the
West, giving it its scientific name due to its large nitrogen-producing
nodules on its roots. In the early nineteenth century, trading ships first
introduced soybeans in the Western Hemisphere, where it was considered
an industrial product. Even Henry Ford promoted the soybean, producing
auto body panels made of soy-based plastics.7
The plant is usually between 40 and 140 cm tall. The fruit is a hairy
pod of 3–8 cm that contains three to five beans. Cultivation is successful
in climates with hot summers, with optimum growing conditions in mean
temperatures of 20°–30°C (68°–86°F). The crop grows in a wide range
of soils, with optimum growth in moist alluvial soils. In symbiosis with
the bacterium Bradyrhizobium japonicum, the plant fixes nitrogen to the
soil, allowing for a beneficial biological cycle that slows down the soil
degradation. Nitrogen is found mainly in the stubble, which remains in
the ground after the harvest, making it as the crop’s own “green”
fertilizer.
Classified as an oilseed, soy is cultivated for its beans and to extract oil.
The bean is an important source of protein (35 %), which is why it has long
been considered the basis of the food pyramid for peoples with scarce
access to proteins from animal sources. The bean contains 83 % flour and
17 % oil. When oil is extracted, the remaining residue is known as soybean
cake, meal, or pellets—a vegetable protein concentrate (42–44 %). Meal
has found its strongest application as fodder for the industrial raising of
farm animals or “factory farming.” Soybeans can also be processed for
human consumption in a variety of ways: soy meal, soy flour, soy milk, soy
sauce, tofu, textured vegetable protein (found in a variety of vegetarian
6 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURAL BOOMS

foods intended to substitute for meat), lecithin, and oil.8 Soybean oil is the
world’s most widely used edible oil and has several industrial applications.
By mid-twentieth century, a combination of factors that included demo-
graphics, technology, economics, and international conflagration began to
alter the shape of rural production. Prior to World War II, most livestock
and poultry came from family farms. Cattle were usually grazed on range-
land or pasture and were fed hay, silage, and some corn during the winter.
Poultry flocks were small and ate barnyard scraps. Since open range graz-
ing9 was only possible in the great land extensions of the New World,
livestock farming experienced a drastic transformation. Cattle began to be
kept in large, insulated structures (stall barns and loafing barns) and were
fed a mix of root crops and grain. Although farmers had been using mixed
feeds—grains, oilseed meals, etc.—in small quantities since the late 1800s,
their use accelerated in the late 1930s with scientific feed formulation and
the discovery of essential amino acids, protein complementarity, and the
concept of animal nutrition. Scientific feed formulation designed to max-
imize animal growth at the least cost favored the use of soybean meal as a
protein source. During the 1940s and 1950s, the centralized, low-cost
feedlot infrastructure combined with (soybean-based) fortified and
balanced feeds produced more efficient and profitable livestock and poultry.
Feedlots also helped to allocate the feed grains surplus from the 1950s by
converting it into profitable meat products (Shurtleff and Aoyagi 2007;
Part 7). The chemical industry developed fertilizers that replaced animal
manures, so animals were no longer needed on the farm. Labor-saving
mechanization encouraged production centralization and automation, con-
verting the farms into “animal factories.” Soybeans became a key input for
this feedlot mode of production. Not only did soy have high protein
content, but soybean meal and surplus feed grains were also initially very
low in cost. In fact, the evolution of soybeans is intimately related to the
rise in animal protein consumption worldwide, which only became possible
with confined farming techniques, of which soybean is the cornerstone.
Soybeans are a highly efficient crop: the total cost of the crop is relatively
low compared to its unit proteic value. About 35–38 percent of the calories
in soybeans are derived from protein, compared to 20–30 percent in most
other beans. Indeed, according to the American Soybean Association
Soystats 2015 Report, soybeans represent 68 % of world protein meal
consumption, followed very distantly by rapeseed (14 %) and sunflower
(6 %). This means the “proteic return” per dollar spent is relatively higher
compared to other oilseeds or fodder components. As a result, soybeans
 1 THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURE 7

played an increasingly important role as a food source for an even larger

segment of a changing farm animal population. Poultry is more efficient
than swine or beef in converting feed to meat, in terms of cost and time.
On average—depending on the composition of the feed, which technolo-
gical advances modify almost monthly—it takes about 3 kg of feed protein
to produce 0.45 kg of broiler protein. To produce the same amount of
pork protein requires 3.77 kg and for the equivalent beef protein 6.5 kg of
feed are required.10 Integration and automation led to scale returns, and
overall efficiency gains lowered poultry prices by mid-1970s. This sustained
rise in consumption has been a major source behind the steady rise of
soybean production, as the following figure shows Fig. 1.1.
On the supply side, the initial takeoff of soybean demand coincided with
the collapse of a major substitute—the Peruvian anchovy—in the early
1970s, due to El Niño and over-fishing.11 This depletion led to a major
decline of high-protein feedstock and to a decision to switch to the more
cost-efficient soymeal as a protein source. The European Community
(EC), a major soybean importer since World War II, lifted trade restric-
tions. In the 1960 Dillon Round of the GATT, the EC had agreed to a
zero tariff binding on soybeans and to low tariffs on soy-derived products,
increasing the international demand for soybeans and soy cake. These new
market conditions in Europe also acted an incentive to production in
South America. At the same time, the USA, Australia, Canada, and the
USSR experienced production shortfalls due to adverse weather condi-
tions, which persisted for several years. Although the boom period would

Soybean meal and farming industry, world, 1976–2015

500,000
400,000
1000MT

300,000
200,000
100,000
0
76 978 980 982 984 986 988 990 992 994 996 998 000 002 004 006 008 010 012 014
19 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
Meat, Beef and Veal Meat, Swine Poultry, Meat, Broiler Meal, Soybean

Fig. 1.1 Soybean meal and farming industry, world, 1976–2015

Source: Author’s calculation based on USDA data. MT = Metric Tons

8 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURAL BOOMS

not be for another fifteen years, the combination of these factors stimu-
lated oilseed production in the Southern Cone.
On the demand side, during the 1970s the Soviet Union and other
centrally planned economies entered into the global grain markets, with a
significant effect on the grain and oilseed trade. Abundance of oil revenues
(petrodollars) meant availability of credit to help finance global trade
growth. By 1980s, China was opening up to world trade, and the
export-led Asian model of development, epitomized in the four tigers,12
was being showcased as a model of success. With the improvement in
living standards throughout Asia, the demand for meat and dairy products
grew as well. The demand for agricultural food commodities has been
steadily growing in emerging economies, as bourgeoning middle and
upper classes diversify their diets to include more vegetable oils, meat,
and dairy products. As a result, developing countries’ demand for grains
and oilseeds for livestock feed has risen disproportionately, rising more
quickly than overall demand for food. According to USDA data, domestic
worldwide consumption for soybean oil increased 531 % for the period
1975/1976 to 2015/2016. For the same period and product, the percent
increase in Southeast Asia rose to 1511 %, in East Asia 1866 %, and in
South Asia 2908 %. While for the same period the world domestic con-
sumption of soybean meal increased 441 %, in China alone the increase
was 5676 %.

AGRICULTURE IN THE LATIN AMERICAN ECONOMIES

The role of the agricultural sector has been to some extent overlooked in
the macroeconomy of the BAP countries for the last fifty years. Instead of
capitalizing on a relatively abundant natural resource endowment and its
resultant competitive advantage, policymakers have used the sector as a
cash cow to be milked in order to subsidize relatively more inefficient—yet
politically more attractive—domestic industrial sectors. This “bias against
agriculture” has explanations at many different levels. After the first third
of the twentieth century, a consensus began to emerge among economists:
countries who positioned themselves as exporters of primary products
would perpetuate their peripheral role of suppliers to the industrial coun-
tries. Depending on a few agricultural export, commodities implied
binding import capacity to those export commodities’ prices on the inter-
national market, exposing the country to boom-bust cycles (Williamson
2005). Export-led strategies were consecrated a “commodity lottery”
 1 THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURE 9

(Bulmer-Thomas 2003: 14), since the agricultural sector was slower to

respond to market signals. Agricultural products also have a more inelastic
demand, both with respect to prices and to income. To make matters
worse, by the mid-1920s, the BAP food commodities’ prices plunged and
remained low for the several following years.
Intellectually, the 1930s served as a basis for the emergence of Paul
Rosenstein-Rodan’s “big push theory” and Ragnar Nurkse’s “balanced
growth theory,” which later became dominant paradigms for Latin
American economic policymaking. With equivalent insights, both theories
predicted that growth in developing economies would never be achieved
through increased exports of primary commodities. They argued that
development strategies should place greater emphasis on industrialization,
laying the theoretical foundations for what would later be the import-
substituting industrialization (ISI) model. This theoretical rejection of
dependence on agricultural exports translated into economic growth stra-
tegies that relegated only marginal importance to agricultural exports,
seen primarily as a source of foreign exchange for capital-scarce econo-
mies. Instead of pursuing productivity gains in the export sector, the
policy orientation was to replace imports with domestic-made products.
Structuralism and dependency theory (Prebisch, Cardoso and Faletto,
Singer, Myrdal) cemented these economic conjectures into policy. The
ISI strategy that followed from this school’s prescriptions implied
high-import tariffs and soft credit lines favoring industry, while low-
import tariffs and price controls were imposed on agricultural products.
Resources were channeled away from agriculture and into the non-farm
sector. ISI’s key operative principle was the idea of a “leading sector,”
capable of becoming the “engine of growth” (Nurkse 1962). In the
context of a self-sufficient system, this sector would supply the necessary
flow of capital to jumpstart the economic activity. The agricultural sector
was perceived as having little and weak linkages with the rest of the
economy, thus rendering it unfit to become this engine of growth.
Moreover, because the process of growth demanded capital accumulation
in its early stage, resources had to be reallocated away from the labor-
intensive agriculture sector to the capital-intensive industrial one.
Agriculture in this view was to serve simply as a resource base.
In the post-war context of increasing independence and nationalism,
developing countries regarded agrarian-based societies as both economic-
ally and socially backward. This perception was congruent with the climate
of ideas at that time in the social sciences, dominated by modernization
10 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURAL BOOMS

theory and its evolutionary account of social process as a linear trend of

structural differentiation and an increasing formal rationality of social
action. Latin American rural structures were perceived as quasi-feudal,
highly stratified, and essentially governed by tradition. The sector was
dominated by a generally absentee, landowner elite, which concentrated
wealth and resources at the expense of exploiting rural labor subject to
serfdom conditions. The source of economic dynamisms was urban, and
thus huge swaths of internal and international migrants flocked to the
cities, where former peasants became the urban labor force that would fill
the ranks of the mass political parties and labor unions (Germani 1965).
Even culturally, the zeitgeist dictated that the farm was the past; modernity
was in mechanization and heavy industry, in the chimneys of modern
factories, in the industrial unionized urban worker. Throughout the
region, a new socioeconomic and political blueprint consolidated the
bias against agriculture. This model of growth, income distribution, and
political survival inherently impinged on the agricultural sector, for the
state had to be financed with agricultural rents. Once appropriated, these
rents would finance the urban-based mass political parties.
By the 1960s and 1970s, the ideological consensus against agriculture
began to crack in the face of the lack of sustainability of the ISI model.
Export-led alternatives gained a momentum that would become the
dominant paradigm in the region between the 1980s and 1990s.
However, the conceptualization of the rural sector in the Latin
American social sciences was not revised. Only economics challenged the
assumptions and empirical evidence supporting the interpretive framework
for the rural sector. Balassa (1971), Krueger (1978), and Bhagwati (1978)
questioned the role of the state in agricultural trade policy, pointing out
the failures of protection in terms of inefficiency and social cost. In a more
open economy, the place for agriculture was again at the forefront due to
its intrinsic comparative advantage. However, neither sociology nor poli-
tical science carried out a re-evaluation of the assumptions about the rural
sector in their explanatory models.
The agro-export model of international trade insertion resembles the
one historically known to Latin America: Peruvian gold and Bolivian
silver monetized the European economies from the fifteenth to the seven-
teenth centuries, while Brazilian coffee and Caribbean tobacco stimulated
aristocrats and revolutionaries alike in the old continent (Topik et al.
2006: 25). Paraguay’s prime export, cotton, was wiped out from
the international markets with the creation of US surpluses in 1952.
 1 THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURE 11

The same happened with Argentine wheat. Brazil suffered a succession of

busts of its leading commodities: the dominant position the country
enjoyed in the rubber market was crushed in 1914 under the weight of
more than 70,000 tons (tn) of Malaysian and Ceylonese (now Sri Lankan)
production (Galeano 1970). A striking parallel can be drawn with the
decline of the sugar producing nordeste under the competition from the
Antilles. Indeed, Latin American economic history offers a humbling
lesson in placing too much hope on these “salvation commodities.”
The mesmerizing effect of the 2006 to mid-2008 price hike has clouded
the obvious increase in market instability. Although that recent spike is
unprecedented in magnitude, it was not unique. There were at least two
other periods of major rapid run-ups in prices occurring in 1971–1974
and 1994–1996. Though frequent price hikes and drops are to be
expected in agricultural commodity markets as a result of their intrinsic
high degree of volatility (Williamson et al. 2009), the impacts of that
volatility in domestic markets and social conditions may be more difficult
to manage.

SOYBEANS IN THE SOUTHERN CONE

Through experimental and small-scale operations, the first soybean plan-
tations in Brazil date from 1882 and in Argentina from 1898. Expansion
began much later in the twentieth century, while commercial exploitation
of the crop did not take place until the 1940s. The late expansion had an
economic rationale: previously underdeveloped oil processing techniques
rendered lower extraction levels for soybeans vis-à-vis its edible (peanut
and sunflower) and industrial (linoleum) alternatives. As oil extraction
developed further and investment flowed—albeit slowly—into the sector,
soybean demand began to grow. However, neither Argentina nor Brazil
had big domestic markets for this product. In the case of Brazil, the pre-
eminent position of the landed gentry of Minas Gerais under the café com
leite Old Republic (1889–1930) and their powerful dairy interests pre-
cluded further development of a market for soybean products.
International markets were not open, for the USA was self-sufficient
soybean producers and Europe had a steady provision of soy cake from—
in a surprising reversal trend compared to present date—China. Last but
not the least, fish flour (mainly the Peruvian anchovy mentioned in the
previous section) was a cheaper substitute to be used as fodder for cattle. It
was the drastic reduction of this protein source in the 1970s that
12 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURAL BOOMS

jumpstarted soybean production in the Southern Cone. In the beginning,

only Brazil and Argentina entered the market. Later, Paraguay (as well as
Uruguay and Bolivia) began its soybean production.13
After the debt crisis of the 1980s, the region underwent agricultural
liberalization as part of the stabilization and structural adjustment pro-
grams. From 1985 through the mid-1990s, agricultural sectors were
transformed: rural credit, producer price supports, and marketing services
virtually disappeared. With the removal of regulations on prices and infla-
tion spreading, the cost of land soared. In the same period, the return of
democracy helped deactivate the longstanding “war hypothesis” between
Argentina and Brazil. This bilateral relationship had the potential of driving
most of the other political, strategic, and economic arrangements in the
Southern Cone. Confidence-building measures were linked to schemes for
economic and political integration. The positive cycle began in 1985 with
the signature of the Argentina–Brazil Integration and Economics
Cooperation Program (PICE) by Presidents Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina
and José Sarney of Brazil. The shift in strategic geopolitical thinking gave
rise to infrastructure development to connect both nations. Previously
discarded plans for roads, bridges, ports, and other infrastructure projects
were revived. Once perceived as a points of vulnerability in the event of
armed conflict, the neoliberal moment recast them as an opportunity to
increase bilateral trade.14 During the next decade, investment started to
flow back to the region, and a proportion of the new capital flows were
channeled into the competitive agricultural sector. Paraguay underwent
basic oilseed industrialization in the 1930s of mbocayá, which continued
with peanut, soybean, and more recently, sesame.15 Between 1985 and
1987, soybeans displaced cotton as Paraguay’s top export product16 and
today represent more than 50 % of the country’s exports. Geographically,
production has flowed from east to west, from eastern departments of
Itapúa, Alto Paraná and Canindeyú to Caaguazú, Caazapá and the fast
growing San Pedro and Amambay. In Argentina, soybeans originated in
the southern part of Santa Fe and north of Buenos Aires. The “nucleus
zone” covers southeastern parts of Córdoba and southwestern Entre Ríos.
In the last decade, it has expanded to the northern provinces of Santiago
del Estero, Chaco, and Salta. Brazilian soybean production at first
belonged to the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul (where it started),
Santa Catarina, and Paraná. During the 1970s and 1980s, immigrants from
other regions of the country moved into Mato Grosso and gradually
consolidated this state’s position as the leading producer. From the center
 1 THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURE 13

west region (includes Mato Grosso do Sul and Goiás), the soybean frontier
has been making its way into the north, toward the east and the more
protected Amazonian west into southern Piauí, Maranhão, western Bahia
and Rondônia to the west.
For the last thirty years, the BAP countries experienced dramatic
increases in the area harvested, production, total supply, and exports of
soybeans, as shown in Table 1.1.
The three countries’ share in the international soybean market has
grown for the three main forms in which the product is retailed: seed,
oil, and meal. For the 2015/2016 harvests, the three countries combined
accounted for over 76 % of world exports of soybean meal and 68 % of
world exports of soybean oil. The BAP’s fast growth in exports in the last
two decades—comparing the 1995/1996 campaign to the 2015/2016
one—reveals dramatic increase: 285 % increase for Argentine soybean oil
exports, 487 % for Paraguayan soybean meal exports, and a whopping
1621 % increase in Brazilian soybean seed exports (Table 1.2).

Table 1.1 Evolution of soybeans in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay from 1985/
1986 to 2015/2016
1985/ 1995/ 2005/ 2015/ Percent change
1986 1996 2006 2016 (1985–2015)
(%)

Area Argentina 3316 5980 15,200 19,700 494

harvested
(1000 ha)
Brazil 9450 10,950 22,229 33,300 252
Paraguay 550 960 2426 3400 518
Production Argentina 7300 12,480 40,500 59,000 708
(1000 MT)
Brazil 14,100 24,150 57,000 100,000 609
Paraguay 600 2,408 3,641 8,800 1367
Total supply Argentina 9165 18,042 56,549 90,748 890
(1000 MT)
Brazil 19,445 32,753 74,565 119,803 516
Paraguay 600 2408 3734 8870 1378
Exports Argentina 2541 2103 7249 11,400 349
(1000 MT)
Brazil 1187 3458 25,911 59,500 4913
Paraguay 475 1587 2380 4600 868

Source: Author’s calculations based on USDA data

14 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURAL BOOMS

Table 1.2 World share, soybean exports of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay from
1985/1986 to 2015/2016
World share of exports
Country 1985/1986 1995/1996 2005/2006 2015/2016

Meal Argentina 14 27 46 49
Brazil 32 40 25 23
Paraguay 0.2 1.7 1.5 4.4
USA 24 18 14 15
Oil Argentina 20.2 33.5 57.2 50.2
Brazil 14.4 33.7 25.2 11.4
Paraguay 0.0 2.4 1.9 6.1
USA 18.1 9.5 5.3 7.8
Seed Argentina 9.8 5.3 5.3 5.3
Brazil 4.6 17.0 17.0 17.0
Paraguay 1.8 0.1 0.1 0.1
USA 77.3 38.2 38.2 38.2

Source: Author’s calculations based on USDA data

LINKAGES, COMMODITY CHAINS, AND THE POLITICAL

ECONOMY OF AGRICULTURE
Everywhere, but especially in developing countries, agriculture plays an
important role in the broader economic context. The macroeconomics of
agriculture operate through transmission mechanisms or linkages.
According to Albert Hirschman, linkages are at play when ongoing activ-
ities induce agents to take up new activities. Backward linkage effects are
related to derived demand, while forward linkage effects are related to
output utilization (Hirschman 1958: 100). Forward linkages are those
that run from the domestic macroeconomy and the international economy
to agriculture. It goes without saying that agriculture’s ability to compete
for resources domestically and globally is directly affected by economy-
wide policies. Sectoral growth is affected by resource flows between sectors,
which adjust to the relative opportunities offered by the different sectors
over time. Examples of forward linkages are inflation, exchange rates,
interest rates, government taxing and spending levels (fiscal policy), and
international markets. Backward linkages are transmitted from the agricul-
tural sector to the rest of the economy. Agriculture generates a series of
linkages that have economy-wide effects, the most straightforward being
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ATHENS AS DESCRIBED BY THUCYDIDES ***
 Primitive Athens
as described by Thucydides

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 Primitive Athens
as described by Thucydides

by
JANE ELLEN HARRISON,
HON. D.LITT. (DURHAM), HON. LL.D. (ABERDEEN),
STAFF LECTURER AND SOMETIME FELLOW OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE,
CAMBRIDGE.

Cambridge
at the University Press
1906

Cambridge:
PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
VILHELMO DOERPFELD
HUNC QUALEMCUNQUE LIBELLUM
ANIMO SALTEM NON INGRATO
DEDICAT
J. E. H.
Πηγὴν μὲν πολύκρουνον Ἀθηναίης ἀνέφηνας
πηγὴ δ’ αὐτὸς ἔφυς καλλιρόου σοφίης.
 PREFACE.
My Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens has been for
some time out of print. I have decided to issue no second edition. A
word of explanation is therefore needed as to the purport of the
present pages.
Since my book on Athens was published Dr Frazer’s great
commentary on Pausanias has appeared, and for scholars has made
a second edition, so far as my book was a commentary on
Pausanias, superfluous. The need for a popular handbook has been
met by Professor Ernest Gardner’s Ancient Athens. It happens
however that, on a question cardinal for the understanding of the
early history of Athens, I hold views diametrically opposed to both
these writers. These views I have felt bound to state.
This cardinal question is the interpretation of an account given by
Thucydides of the character and limits of ancient Athens. Both Dr
Frazer and Professor Ernest Gardner hold by an interpretation which
though almost universally prevalent down to recent times has been,
in my opinion, disproved by the recent excavations of the German
Archaeological Institute at Athens and the explanation of their
results by Professor Dörpfeld. An adequate examination of the new
theory could perhaps hardly be expected in such a book as Professor
Gardner’s, and it will not be found there. Dr Frazer, it is needless to
say, stated Professor Dörpfeld’s view with fulness and fairness, so far
as was then possible or consistent with his main purpose. But the
passage of Thucydides deserves and requires a more full
consideration than it could receive incidentally in an edition of
Pausanias. Moreover at the time when Dr Frazer visited Athens the
excavations were only in process, and the results had not been fully
developed when his book was published. It was therefore impossible
for Dr Frazer to give in one place such a connected account of the
new evidence and theory as in a question of this magnitude seems
desirable.
The view I set forth is not my own but that of Professor Dörpfeld.
In the light of his examination of the passage of Thucydides what
had been a mere ‘Enneakrounos Episode’ interesting only to
specialists, became at once a vital question affecting the whole
history of primitive Athens. Professor Dörpfeld’s views convinced me
even before they were confirmed by excavation. I expressed my
adhesion in my Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, but I
did not then see their full significance. For English readers these
views have been so far stated as heresies to be combated, or as
rash speculations needing danger-signals. The danger seems to me
the other way. To my mind this is a case where adherence to
traditional views can only leave us in straits made desperate by the
advancing tide of knowledge. I have therefore set forth Prof.
Dörpfeld’s views, not apologetically, but in full confidence, as
illuminating truths essentially conciliatory and constructive.
Save in the Conclusion, on the question of the metastasis, I have
added to the topographical argument nothing of my own. If here
and there I have been unable to resist the temptation of wandering
into bye-paths of religion and mythology, I trust the reader will
pardon one who is by nature no topographer. For topography all that
I have done is to set forth as clearly and fully as I could a somewhat
intricate argument.

This task—not very easy because alien to my own present work—

has been lightened by the help of many friends. Professor Dörpfeld
has found time while excavating at Pergamos to go over my proofs
and to assure me that his views are correctly represented. The
German Archaeological Institute has generously placed at my
disposal the whole of their official publications, from which my
illustrations are mainly drawn. The like facilities in the matter of the
Acropolis excavations have been kindly accorded me by Dr
Kabbadias. Other sources are noted in their place. In the matter of
re-drawing, in restorations and the modification of plans I have
again to thank Mrs Hugh Stewart for much difficult and delicate
work, work which could only be done by one who is archaeologist as
well as artist.
My debt, by now habitual, to Dr Verrall will appear throughout the
book. Mr Gilbert Murray has written for me the Critical Note and has
made many fruitful suggestions. Mr F. M. Cornford has helped me
throughout, and has revised the whole of my proofs. And last, for
any degree of accuracy that may have been attained in the printing,
I am indebted to the skill and care of the University Press.
JANE ELLEN HARRISON.
Newnham College, Cambridge.
18 January, 1906.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTORY. pp. 1-4

CHAPTER I.
THE ANCIENT CITY, ITS CHARACTER AND LIMITS.
Account of Thucydides. Its incidental character and its object. The
scattered burghs. The Synoikismos. The definition of the
ancient city. The fourfold evidence of its small size. The ancient
city was the Acropolis of the times of Thucydides with an
addendum ‘towards about South.’ Excavation of the plateau of
the Acropolis confirms the statement of Thucydides. Natural
features of the Acropolis. The ‘Pelasgic’ circuit wall. Analogy
with other ‘Mycenaean’ burghs or fortified hills. Evidence of
excavations North of the Erechtheion and South of the
Parthenon. Mythical master-builders. Giants and Kyklopes.
Pelasgoi and Pelargoi. The storks of the poros pediment.
Pelasgikon and Pelargikon. The addendum to the South. The
Enneapylai and the approach to the citadel. pp. 5-36

CHAPTER II.
THE SANCTUARIES IN THE CITADEL.
The sanctuaries of the ‘other deities.’ The later Erechtheion built to
enclose a complex of cults. Prof. Dörpfeld’s elucidation of its
plan. The hero-tomb of Kekrops. Kekrops and the Kekropidae.
The hero-snake. The snakes of the poros pediment of the
Hecatompedon. The Pandroseion. Pandrosos. The ‘Maidens.’
The semeia. The sacred olive. The ‘sea.’ The trident-mark. Its
primitive significance and connection with Poseidon. Poseidon
and Erechtheus. Athena. Herakles. pp. 37-65
 CHAPTER III.
THE SANCTUARIES OUTSIDE THE CITADEL.
Meaning of the words ‘towards this part.’ The four sanctuaries (1)
the Sanctuary of Zeus Olympios, (2) the Pythion. Their position
interdependent. The site of the Pythion certain. Evidence from
the Ion of Euripides. The Long Rocks. Evidence of Pausanias.
Evidence of recent excavations. The cave of Apollo. Votive
tablets dedicated by Thesmothetae. Apollo Patroös and
Pythios. The two sanctuaries of Zeus Olympios. Deucalion and
Zeus Meilichios. Zeus and Apollo. Ion and the Ionians. The
cave of Pan. The Sanctuary of Aglauros. (3) The Sanctuary of
Ge. (4) The Sanctuary of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes to be
distinguished from the Sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus. The
two festivals of Dionysos at Athens. The two theatres and
precincts. The orchestra in the agora. Evidence of excavations.
The Iobakcheion and the earlier Dionysion. The earlier
Dionysion a triangular precinct—containing wine-press, altar,
temple. The Lenaion and the Lenaia. The Chytroi. The ‘other
sanctuaries.’ The Amyneion. Amynos and Asklepios. Dexion.
The sanctuary of the Semnae Theai. The sanctuary of
Aphrodite Pandemos. Evidence of inscriptions. Oriental origin
of the worship. pp. 66-110

CHAPTER IV.
THE SPRING KALLIRRHOË-ENNEAKROUNOS ‘NEAR’ THE CITADEL.
The spring Kallirrhoë. The water-supply of Athens. Geological
structure of the Limnae. Site of Kallirrhoë fixed in Pnyx rock.
Efforts to reinforce water-supply before time of tyrants. Water-
works of the tyrants. Polycrates at Samos. The conduit of
Peisistratos from the upper Ilissos to the Pnyx. Comparison
with conduit of Polycrates. The great reservoir. The Fountain-
House. Water-works of Theagenes at Megara. Analogy
between his Fountain-House and Enneakrounos. Evidence of
vase-paintings. The central square in front of Enneakrounos.
 The Panathenaic way. The agora and its development.
Argument resumed. pp. 111-136

CONCLUSION. pp. 137-158

Critical Note p. 159

Bibliography pp. 160-163
Indexes
1. General pp. 164-167
2. Of Classical Authors pp. 167-168

Statue of ‘Maiden’ from the Acropolis Frontispiece

Map (Fig. 46) between pp. 136 and 137
 INTRODUCTORY.
The traveller who visits Athens for the first time will naturally, if he
be a classical scholar, devote himself at the outset to the realization
of the city of Perikles. His task will here be beset by no serious
difficulties. The Acropolis, as Perikles left it, is, both from literary and
monumental evidence, adequately known to us. Archaeological
investigation has now but little to add to the familiar picture, and
that little in matters of quite subordinate detail. The Parthenon, the
Propylaea, the temple of Nike Apteros, the Erechtheion (this last
probably planned, though certainly not executed by Perikles) still
remain to us; their ground-plans and their restorations are for the
most part architectural certainties. Moreover, even outside the
Acropolis, the situation and limits of the city of Perikles are fairly well
ascertained. The Acropolis itself was, we know, a fortified sanctuary
within a larger walled city. This city lay, as the oracle in Herodotus[1]
said, ‘wheel-shaped’ about the axle of the sacred hill. Portions of this
outside wall have come to light here and there, and the foundations
of the great Dipylon Gate are clearly made out, and are marked in
every guide-book. Inside the circuit of these walls, in the inner
Kerameikos, whose boundary-stone still remains, lay the agora.
Outside is still to be seen, with its street of tombs, the ancient
cemetery.
Should the sympathies of the scholar extend to Roman times, he
has still, for the making of his mental picture, all the help
imagination needs. Through the twisted streets of modern Athens
the beautiful Tower of the Winds is his constant land-mark; Hadrian,
with his Olympieion, with his triumphal Arch, with his Library,
confronts him at every turn; when he goes to the great Stadion to
see ‘Olympian’ games or a revived ‘Antigone,’ when he looks down
from the Acropolis into the vast Odeion, Herodes Atticus cannot well
be forgotten. Moreover, if he really cares to know what Athens was
in Roman days, the scholar can leave behind him his Murray and his
Baedeker and take for his only guide the contemporary of Hadrian,
Pausanias.
But returning, as he inevitably will, again and again to the
Acropolis, the scholar will gradually become conscious, if dimly, of
another and an earlier Athens. On his plan of the Acropolis he will
find marked certain fragments of very early masonry, which, he is
told, are ‘Pelasgian.’ As he passes to the south of the Parthenon he
comes upon deep-sunk pits railed in, and within them he can see
traces of these ‘Pelasgian’ walls and other masonry about which his
guide-book is not over-explicit. To the south of the Propylaea, to his
considerable satisfaction, he comes on a solid piece of this
‘Pelasgian’ wall, still above ground. East of the Erechtheion he will
see a rock-hewn stairway which once, he learns, led down from the
palace of the ancient prehistoric kings, the ‘strong house of
Erechtheus.’ South of the Erechtheion he can make out with some
effort the ground plan of an early temple; he is told that there exist
bases of columns belonging to a yet earlier structure, and these he
probably fails to find.
With all his efforts he can frame but a hazy picture of this earlier
Acropolis, this citadel before the Persian wars. Probably he might
drop the whole question as of merely antiquarian interest—a matter
to be noted rather than realized—but that his next experience brings
sudden revelation. Skilfully sunk out of sight—to avoid interfering
with his realization of Periklean Athens—is the small Acropolis
Museum. Entering it, he finds himself in a moment actually within
that other and earlier Athens dimly discerned, and instantly he
knows it, not as a world of ground-plans and fragmentary Pelasgic
fortifications, but as a kingdom of art and of humanity vivid with
colour and beauty.
As he passes in eager excitement through the ante-rooms he will
glance, as he goes, at the great blue lion and the bull, at the tangle
of rampant many-coloured snakes, at the long-winged birds with
their prey still in beak and talon; he will pause to smile back at the
three kindly ‘Blue-beards,’ he will be glad when he sees that the
familiar Calf-Carrier has found his feet and his name, he will note the
long rows of solemn votive terra-cottas, and, at last, he will stand in
the presence of those Maiden-images, who, amid all that coloured
architectural splendour, were consecrate to the worship of the
Maiden. The Persian harried them, Perikles left them to lie beneath
his feet, yet their antique loveliness is untouched and still sovran.
They are alive, waiting still, in hushed, intent expectancy—but not
for us. We go out from their presence as from a sanctuary, and
henceforth every stone of the Pelasgian fortress where they dwelt is,
for us, sacred.
But if he leave that museum aglow with a new enthusiasm,
determined to know what is to be known of that antique world, the
scholar will assuredly be met on the threshold of his enquiry by
difficulties and disillusionment. By difficulties, because the
information he seeks is scattered through a mass of foreign
periodical literature, German and Greek; by disillusionment, because
to the simple questions he wants to ask he can get no clear,
straightforward answer. He wants to know what was the nature and
extent of the ancient city, did it spread beyond the Acropolis, if so in
what direction and how far? what were the primitive sanctuaries
inside the Pelasgic walls, what, if any, lay outside and where? Where
was the ancient city well (Kallirrhoë), where the agora, where that
primitive orchestra on which, before the great theatre was built,
dramatic contests took place? Straightway he finds himself plunged
into a very cauldron of controversy. The ancient agora is placed by
some to the north, by others to the south, by others again to the
west. The question of its position is inextricably bound up, he finds
to his surprise, with the question as to where lay the Enneakrounos,
a fountain with which hitherto he has had no excessive familiarity;
the mere mention of the Enneakrounos brings either a heated
discussion or, worse, a chilling silence.
This atmosphere of controversy, electric with personal prejudice,
exhilarating as it is to the professed archaeologist, plunges the
scholar in a profound dejection. His concern is not jurare in verba
magistri—he wants to know not who but what is right. Two
questions only he asks. First, and perhaps to him unduly foremost,
What, as to the primitive city, is the literary testimony of the ancients
themselves, and preferably the testimony not of scholiasts and
second-hand lexicographers, but of classical writers who knew and
lived in Athens, of Thucydides, of Pausanias? Second, To that literary
testimony, what of monumental evidence has been added by
excavation?

It is to answer these two questions that the following pages are

written. It is the present writer’s conviction that controversy as to
the main outlines of the picture, though perhaps at the outset
inevitable, is, with the material now accessible, an anachronism; that
the facts stand out plain and clear and that between the literary and
monumental evidence there is no discrepancy. The plan adopted will
therefore be to state as simply as may be what seems the
ascertained truth about the ancient city, and to state that truth
unencumbered by controversy. Then, and not till then, it may be
profitable to mention other current opinions, and to examine briefly
what seem to be the errors in method which have led to their
acceptance.
 CHAPTER I.
THE ANCIENT CITY, ITS CHARACTER AND
LIMITS.

By a rare good fortune we have from Thucydides himself an

account of the nature and extent of the city of Athens in the time of
the kingship. This account is not indeed as explicit in detail as we
could wish, but in general outline it is clear and vivid. To the scholar
the remembrance of this account comes as a ray of light in his
darkness. If he cannot find his way in the mazes of archaeological
controversy, it is at least his business to read Thucydides and his
hope to understand him.
The account of primitive Athens is incidental. Thucydides is telling
how, during the Peloponnesian War, when the enemy was mustering
on the Isthmus and attack on Attica seemed imminent, Perikles
advised the Athenians to desert their country homes and take refuge
in the city. The Athenians were convinced by his arguments. They
sent their sheep and cattle to Euboea and the islands; they pulled
down even the wood-work of their houses, and themselves, with
their wives, their children, and all their moveable property, migrated
to Athens. But, says Thucydides[2], this ‘flitting’ went hard with
them; and why? Because ‘they had always, most of them, been used
to a country life.’
This habit of ‘living in the fields,’ this country life was, Thucydides
goes on to explain, no affair of yesterday; it had been so from the
earliest times. All through the days of the kingship from Kekrops to
Theseus the people had lived scattered about in small communities
—‘village communities’ we expect to hear him say, for he is insisting
on the habit of country life; but, though he knows the word ‘village’
(κώμη) and employs it in discussing Laconia elsewhere[3], he does
not use it here. He says the inhabitants of Athens lived ‘in towns’
(κατὰ πόλεις), or, as it would be safer to translate it, ‘in burghs.’
It is necessary at the outset to understand clearly what the word
polis here means. We use the word ‘town’ in contradistinction to
country, but from the account of Thucydides it is clear that people
could live in a polis and yet lead a country life. Our word city is still
less appropriate; ‘city’ to us means a very large town, a place where
people live crowded together. A polis, as Thucydides here uses the
word, was a community of people living on and immediately about a
fortified hill or citadel—a citadel-community. The life lived in such a
community was essentially a country life. A polis was a citadel, only
that our word ‘citadel’ is over-weighted with military association.
Athens then, in the days of Kekrops and the other kings down to
Theseus, was one among many other citadel-communities or
burghs. Like the other scattered burghs, like Aphidna, like Thoricus,
like Eleusis, it had its own local government, its own council-house,
its own magistrates. So independent were these citadel-communities
that, Thucydides tells us, on one occasion Eleusis under Eumolpos
actually made war on Athens under Erechtheus.
So things went on till the reign of Theseus and his famous
Synoikismos, the Dwelling-together or Unification. Theseus,
Thucydides says, was a man of ideas and of the force of character
necessary to carry them out. He substituted the one for the many;
he put an end to the little local councils and council-houses and
centralized the government of Attica in Athens. Where the
government is, thither naturally population will flock. People began
to gather into Athens, and for a certain percentage of the population
town-life became fashionable. Then, and not till then, did the city
become ‘great,’ and that ‘great’ city Theseus handed down to
posterity. ‘And from that time down to the present day the Athenians
celebrate to the Goddess at the public expense a festival called the
Dwelling-together[4].’
One unified city and one goddess, the goddess who needs no
name. Their unity and their greatness the Athenians are not likely to
forget, but will they remember the time before the union, when
Athens was but Kekropia, but one among the many scattered
citadel-communities? Will they remember how small was their own
beginning, how limited their burgh, how impossible—for that is the
immediate point—that it should have contained in its narrow circuit a
large town population? Thucydides clearly is afraid they will not.
There was much to prevent accurate realization. The walls of
Themistocles, when Thucydides wrote, enclosed a polis that was not
very much smaller than the modern town; the walls of the earlier
community, the old small burgh, were in part ruined. It was
necessary therefore, if the historian would make clear his point,
namely, the smallness of the ancient burgh and its inadequacy for
town-life, that he should define its limits. This straightway he
proceeds to do. Our whole discussion will centre round his definition
and description, and at the outset the passage must be given in full.
Immediately after his notice of the festival of the ‘Dwelling-together,’
celebrated to ‘the Goddess,’ Thucydides[5] writes as follows:
‘Before this, what is now the citadel was the city, together
with what is below it towards about south. The evidence is
this. The sanctuaries are in the citadel itself, those of other
deities as well[6] (as the Goddess). And those that are outside
are placed towards this part of the city more (than
elsewhere). Such are the sanctuary of Zeus Olympios, and
the Pythion, and the sanctuary of Ge, and that of Dionysos-
in-the-Marshes (to whom is celebrated the more ancient
Dionysiac Festival on the 12th day in the month Anthesterion,
as is also the custom down to the present day with the Ionian
descendants of the Athenians); and other ancient sanctuaries
also are placed here. And the spring which is now called Nine-
Spouts, from the form given it by the despots, but which
formerly, when the sources were open, was named Fair-Fount
—this spring (I say), being near, they used for the most
important purposes, and even now it is still the custom
derived from the ancient (habit) to use the water before
weddings and for other sacred purposes. Because of the
 ancient settlement here, the citadel (as well as the present
city) is still to this day called by the Athenians the City.’
In spite of certain obscurities, which are mainly due to a
characteristically Thucydidean over-condensation of style, the main
purport of the argument is clear. Thucydides, it will be remembered,
wants to prove that the city before Theseus was, because of its
small size, incapable of holding a large town population. This small
size not being evident to the contemporaries of Thucydides, he
proceeds to define the limits of the ancient city. He makes a
statement and supports it by fourfold evidence.
The statement that he makes is that the ancient city comprised
the present citadel together with what is below it towards about
south. The fourfold evidence is as follows:
1. The sanctuaries are in the citadel itself, those of other deities as
well as the Goddess.
2. Those ancient sanctuaries that are outside are placed towards
this part of the present city more than elsewhere. Four instances of
such outside shrines are adduced.
3. There is a spring near at hand used from of old for the most
important purposes, and still so used on sacred occasions.
4. The citadel, as well as the present city, was still in the time of
Thucydides called the ‘city.’
We begin with the statement as to the limits of the city. Not till we
clearly understand exactly what Thucydides states, how much and
how little, can we properly weigh the fourfold evidence he offers in
support of his statement.
‘Before this what is now the citadel was the city, together with
what is below it towards about south.’ The city before Theseus was
the citadel or acropolis of the days of Thucydides, plus something
else. The citadel or acropolis needed then, and needs now, no
further definition. By it is clearly meant not the whole hill to the
base, but the plateau on the summit enclosed by the walls of
Themistocles and Kimon together with the fortification out-works on
the west slope still extant in the days of Thucydides. But the second
and secondary part of the statement is less clearly defined. The
words neither give nor suggest, to us at least, any circumscribing
line; only a direction, and that vague enough, ‘towards about south.’
It is a point at which the scholar naturally asks, whether archaeology
has anything to say?
But before that question is asked and answered, it should be
noted that from the shape of the sentence alone something may be
inferred. That the present citadel is coextensive with the old city is
the main contention. We feel that Thucydides might have stopped
there and yet made his point, namely, the smallness of that ancient
city. But Thucydides is a careful man, he remembers that the two
were not quite coextensive. To the old city must be reckoned an
additional portion below the citadel (τὸ ὑπ’ αὐτήν), a portion that, as
will later be seen, his readers might be peculiarly apt to forget; so he
adds it to his statement. But, by the way it is hung on, we should
naturally figure that portion as ‘not only subordinate to the acropolis,
but in some way closely incorporated with it. In relation to the
acropolis, this additional area, to justify the arrangement of the
words of Thucydides, should be a part neither large nor
independent[7].’
Thus much can be gathered from the text; it is time to see what
additional evidence is brought by archaeology.
Thucydides was, according to his lights, scrupulously exact. It
happens, however, that in the nature of things he could not, as
regards the limits of the ancient city, be strictly precise. The
necessary monuments were by his time hidden deep below the
ground. His first and main statement, that one portion of the old city
was coextensive with the citadel of his day, is not quite true. This
upper portion of the old burgh was a good deal smaller; all the
better for his argument, had he known it! Thanks to systematic
excavation we know more about the limits of the old city than
Thucydides himself, and it happens curiously enough that this more
exact and very recent knowledge, while it leads us to convict
Thucydides of a real and unavoidable inexactness, gives us also the
reason for his caution. It explains to us why, appended to his
statement about the city and the citadel, he is careful to put in the
somewhat vague addendum, ‘together with what is below it towards
about south.’
To us to-day the top of the Acropolis appears as a smooth plateau
sloping gently westwards towards the Propylaea, and this plateau is
surrounded by fortification walls, whose clean, straight lines show
them to be artificial. Very similar in all essentials was the appearance
presented by the hill to the contemporaries of Thucydides, but such
was not the ancient Acropolis. What manner of thing the primitive
hill was has been shown by the excavations carried on by the Greek
Government from 1885-1889. The excavators, save when they were
prevented by the foundations of buildings, have everywhere dug
down to the living rock, every handful of the débris exposed has
been carefully examined, and nothing more now remains for
discovery.
When the traveller first reaches Athens he is so impressed by the
unexpected height and dominant situation of Lycabettus, that he
wonders why it plays so small a part in classical record. Plato[8]
seems to have felt that it was hard for Lycabettus to be left out. In
his description of primitive Athens he says, ‘in old days the hill of the
Acropolis extended to the Eridanus and Ilissus, and included the
Pnyx on one side and Lycabettus as a boundary on the opposite side
of the hill,’ and there is a certain rough geological justice about
Plato’s description. All these hills are spurs of that last offshoot of
Pentelicus, known in modern times as Turkovouni. Yet to the wise
Athena, Lycabettus was but building material; she was carrying the
hill through the air to fortify her Acropolis, when she met the crow[9]
who told her that the disobedient sisters had opened the chest, and
then and there she dropped Lycabettus and left it ... to the crows.
A moment’s reflection will show why the Acropolis was chosen and
Lycabettus left. Lycabettus is a good hill to climb and see a sunset
from. It has not level space enough for a settlement. The Acropolis
has the two desiderata of an ancient burgh, space on which to
settle, and easy defensibility.
The Acropolis, as in neolithic days the first settlers found it, was, it
will be seen in Fig. 1, a long, rocky ridge, broken at intervals[10]. It
could only be climbed with ease on the west and south-west sides,
the remaining sides being everywhere precipitous, though in places
not absolutely inaccessible. For a primitive settlement it was an ideal
situation. Two things remained for the settlers to do: first, they had
to level the surface by hewing away jagged rocks and filling up
cracks with earth and stones to make sites for their houses and their
sanctuaries; and second, they had to supplement what nature had
already done in the way of fortification; here and there to make the
steep rocks steeper, build a wall round their settlement, and, above
all, fortify that accessible west and south-west end and build an
impregnable gateway. Kleidemos[11], writing in the fifth century b.c.,
says, ‘they levelled the Acropolis and made the Pelasgicon, which
they built round it nine-gated.’ They levelled the surface, they built a
wall round it, they furnished the fortification wall with gates. We
begin for convenience sake with the wall. In tracing its course the
process of levelling is most plainly seen. The question of the gates
will be taken last.

Fig. 1.

In the plan in Fig. 2 is shown what excavations have laid bare of

the ancient Pelasgic fortress. We see instantly the inexactness of the
main statement of Thucydides. It is not ‘what is now the Citadel’ that
was the main part of the old burgh, but something substantially
smaller, smaller by about one-fifth of the total area. We see also that
this Thucydides could not know. The Pelasgic wall following the
broken outline of the natural rock was in his days covered over by
the artificial platform reaching everywhere to the wall of Kimon. At
one place, and one only, in the days of Thucydides, did the Pelasgic
wall come into sight, and there it still remains above ground, as it
has always been, save when temporarily covered by Turkish out-
works. This visible piece is the large fragment (A), 6 metres broad,
to the south of the present Propylaea and close to the earlier
gateway (G). In the days of Thucydides it stood several metres high.
Of this we have definite monumental evidence. The south-east
corner of the wall of the south-west wing of the present Propylaea is
bevelled away[12] so as to fit against this Pelasgic wall, and the
bevelling can be seen to-day. This portion of the Pelasgic wall is of
exceptional strength and thickness, doubtless because it was part of
the gateway fortifications, the natural point of attack.

Fig. 2.

Save for this one exception, the Pelasgic walls lie now, as they did
in the day of Thucydides, below the level of the present hill, and
their existence was, until the excavations began, only dimly
suspected. Literary tradition said there was a circuit wall, but where
this circuit wall ran was matter of conjecture; bygone scholars even
placed it below the Acropolis. Now the outline, though far from
complete, is clear enough. To the south and south-west of the
Parthenon there are, as seen on the plan, substantial remains and
what is gone can be easily supplied. On the north side the remains
are scanty. The reason is obvious; the line of the Pelasgic
fortification on the south lies well within the line of Kimon’s wall; the
Pelasgic wall was covered in, but not intentionally broken down. To
the north it coincided with Themistocles’ wall, and was therefore, for
the most part, pulled down or used as foundation.
But none the less is it clear that the centre of gravity of the
ancient settlement lay to the north of the plateau. Although the
north wall was broken away, it is on this north side that the remains
which may belong to a royal palace have come to light. The plan of
these remains cannot in detail be made out, but the general analogy
of the masonry to that of Tiryns and Mycenae leave no doubt that
here we have remains of ‘Mycenaean’ date. North-east of the
Erechtheion is a rock-cut stairway (B) leading down through a
natural cleft in the rock to the plain below. As at Tiryns and
Mycenae, the settlement on the Acropolis had not only its great
entrance-gates, but a second smaller approach, accessible only to
passengers on foot, and possibly reserved for the rulers only.
Incomplete though the remains of this settlement are, the certain
fact of its existence, and its close analogy to the palaces of Tiryns
and Mycenae are of priceless value. Ancient Athens is now no longer
a thing by itself; it falls into line with all the other ancient
‘Mycenaean’ fortified hills, with Thoricus, Acharnae, Aphidna, Eleusis.
The citadel of Kekrops is henceforth as the citadel of Agamemnon
and as the citadel of Priam. The ‘strong house’ of Erechtheus is not a
temple, but what the words plainly mean, the dwelling of a king.
Moreover we are dealing not with a city, in the modern sense, of
vague dimensions, but with a compact fortified burgh.
Thucydides, though certainly convicted of some inexactness as to
detail, is in his main contention seen to be strictly true—‘what is now
the citadel was the city.’ Grasping this firmly in our minds we may
return to note his inexactness as to detail. By examining certain
portions of the Pelasgic wall more closely, we shall realize how much
smaller was the space it enclosed than the Acropolis as known to
Thucydides.

Fig. 3.

The general shape of the hill, and its subsequent alteration, are
best realized by Dr Dörpfeld’s simple illustration[13]. A vertical
section of the natural rock, it is roughly of the shape of a house (Fig.
3) with an ordinary gable roof. The sides of the house represent the
steep inaccessible cliffs to north and south and east; the lines of the
roof slope like the lines of the upper part of the hill converging at
the middle. Suppose the sides of the house produced upwards to the
height of the roof-ridge, and the triangular space so formed filled in,
we have the state of the Acropolis when Kimon’s walls were
completed. The filling in of those spaces is the history of the gradual
‘levelling of the surface of the hill, the work of many successive
generations.’ The section in Fig. 4 will show that this levelling up had
to be done chiefly on the north and south sides; to the east and
west the living rock is near the surface.
 Fig. 4.

It has already been noted that on the north side of the Acropolis
the actual remains of the Pelasgian wall are few and slight; but as
the wall of Themistocles which superseded it follows the contours of
the rock, we may be sure that here the two were nearly coincident.
The wall of Themistocles remains to this day a perpetual monument
of the disaster wrought by the Persians. Built into it opposite the
Erechtheum, not by accident, but for express memorial, are
fragments of the architrave, triglyphs and cornice of poros stone,
and the marble metopes, from the old temple of Athena which the
Persians had burnt. Other memorials lay buried out of sight, and
were brought to light by the excavations of 1886. The excavators[14]
were clearing the ground to the north-east of the Propylaea. On the
6th of February, at a depth of from 3-4½ metres below the surface,
they came upon fourteen of the ‘Maidens[15].’ The section[16] in Fig.
5 shows the place where they had slept their long sleep. We should
like to think they were laid there in all reverence for their beauty, but
hard facts compel us to own that, though their burial may have been
prompted in part by awe of their sanctity, yet the practical Athenian
did not shrink from utilizing them as material to level up with.
The deposit, it is here clearly seen, was in three strata. Each
stratum consisted of statues and fragments of statues, inscribed
bases, potsherds, charred wood, stones, and earth. Each stratum,
and this is the significant fact, is separated from the one above it by
a thin layer of rubble, the refuse of material used in the wall of
Themistocles. The conclusion to the architect is manifest. In building
the wall, perhaps to save expense, no scaffolding was used; but,
after a few courses were laid, the ground inside was levelled up, and
for this purpose what could be better than the statues knocked
down by the Persians? Headless, armless, their sanctity was gone,
their beauty uncared for. In the topmost of the three strata—the
stratum which yielded the first find of ‘Maidens’—a hoard of coins
was found: thirty-five Attic tetradrachms, two drachmas, and twenty-
three obols. All are of Solon’s time except eight of the obols, which
date somewhat earlier. Besides the ‘Maidens,’ on this north side of
the Acropolis other monuments came to light, many bronzes, and
among them the lovely flat Athena[17], the beautiful terra-cotta
plaque[18] painted with the figure of a hoplite, and countless votive
terra-cottas.

Fig. 5.
 The excavations on the south side of the Acropolis have yielded
much that is of great value for art and for science, for our
knowledge of the extent of the Pelasgian fortification, results of the
first importance. The section in Fig. 7, taken at the south-east corner
of the Parthenon, shows the state of things revealed. The section
should be compared with the view in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6.
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