SS: I posted this to s/DebateAltRight a couple of months ago but now I've discovered this sub I'll cross-post it here.

My father always maintained that Rome declined when the aristocracy, disillusioned with the complexities of civic life, retired to their country estates to live out lives largely devoted to self interest.

This article, largely a review of Victor Davis Hanson's The Other Greeks, The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, provides a useful corrective and shows how homesteading, from the Greek period onwards, played an important role in forming Western identity.

Euro Canadian:

It was the phenotypically white Greeks in ancient times who originated "the idea of a privately held plot of land attached...in perpetuity to a single farm-family or oikos." Independent farmers were the ones who brought (at the beginning of the polis period) "a transformation in the mind, a radical change of attitude, as farmers learned to invest their efforts in the land in an entirely novel way."

It was the yeomen farmers who brought an "alteration in the Greek mentality [which] involved a new ideology of work derived from land ownership... an idea that manual labor, time spent on the soil, was both intrinsically ennobling... [in contrast] to the well known aristocratic dislike of manual labor and widespread presence of chattel slavery." Having ownership and control over one's land encouraged individualism and free will in the sense that farmers were responsible for making their own decisions and initiating through trial and error new methods of farming. [Cont...]

As my country (New Zealand) is transformed through immigration, civic engagement becomes less and less appealing. I can see the attraction (felt by the Romans) of retreating to the hinterland.