Of course, farming had its difficulties and dangers too. The farmer was just as likely to have his crops ruined by drought or by heavy rains as he is today. Also just as today, prices were only high when there was little to sell. When the yield was plentiful and the farmer’s storerooms were full, prices went down and so even if you sold a lot, you didn’t get much in return. There were also wild beasts to contend with. The Balkans and Asia Minor were far more covered with waste and woodland than they are now, and you did not have to go to the steppes of Russia to find ravening wolf packs. No Byzantine herdsman dared go out without a sheepdog as savage as a wolf itself. Sheepdogs were so important that a man who killed one was given 100 lashes and had to pay double the dog’s value to its owner. Life was often hard for the Byzantine farmer. We must never think of the world in those days being like it is today. Boundary lines were not rigidly fixed with customs officials at every point, and even when the Byzantine Empire was strongest, savage bands and even nations crossed the Danube and other rivers, roving to their hearts’ content. They never captured Constantinople, and the big cities of the empire—from Thessalonica and Athens to Antioch and Berytus (modern Beirut)—were often safe. But a farmer who came back from his fields was just as likely to find his farmhouse a smoking ruin and his wife and children murdered or carried off, as a settler in our own wilderness days was to find them scalped by Indians. The conditions were about the same. Nevertheless, at least in most periods, and in a great many parts of the empire, the Byzantine farmer did prosper and was not only able to feed the empire but to ship some of his surplus abroad as well. This Byzantine farmer was very versatile. He grew wheat, olives, every kind of fruit, and even flax and cotton. He maintained herds of goats and sheep and cattle and horses. In his “more or less self-governing” villages, there was not only uncleared woodland, scrubby wastes, and unfenced pastures, but vineyards and garden patches protected by deep ditches and palisades of pointed stakes. The very existence of a special farmer’s law shows how important he was. This law took care of everything from stealing or killing livestock to accidentally plowing someone else’s land. The man who did this lost his crop and also the time he had spent. Another thing that shows how important the farmer was to the Byzantine Empire is the size of a medium-sized farm: 100 yoke of oxen, 500 grazing oxen, 80 horses or mules, 12,000 sheep. That was what could be found on a typical farm!