Comment by thaumasiotes

> I think that's a bit of a myth.

Why do you think that? It's definitely true. You can observe it today if you want to visit a country where peasants are still common.

From Bret Devereaux's recent series on Greek hoplites:

> Now traditionally, the zeugitai were regarded as the ‘hoplite class’ and that is sometimes supposed to be the source of their name

> but what van Wees is working out is that although the zeugitai are supposed to be the core of the citizen polity (the thetes have limited political participation) there simply cannot be that many of them because the minimum farm necessary to produce 200 medimnoi of grain is going to be around 7.5 ha or roughly 18 acres which is – by peasant standards – an enormous farm, well into ‘rich peasant’ territory.

> Of course with such large farms there can’t be all that many zeugitai and indeed there don’t seem to have been. In van Wees’ model, the zeugitai-and-up classes never supply even half of the number of hoplites we see Athens deploy

> Instead, under most conditions the majority of hoplites are thetes, pulled from the wealthiest stratum of that class (van Wees figures these fellows probably have farms in the range of ~3 ha or so, so c. 7.5 acres). Those thetes make up the majority of hoplites on the field but do not enjoy the political privileges of the ‘hoplite class.’

> And pushing against the ‘polis-of-rentier-elites’ model, we often also find Greek sources remarking that these fellows, “wiry and sunburnt” (Plato Republic 556cd, trans. van Wees), make the best soldiers because they’re more physically fit and more inured to hardship – because unlike the wealthy hoplites they actually have to work.

( https://acoup.blog/2026/01/09/collections-hoplite-wars-part-... )

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> Many of the most renowned Romans in the original form of the Olympics and in Boxing were Roman Senators

In the original form of the Olympics, a Roman senator would have been ineligible to compete, since the Olympics was open only to Greeks.