Ramsay MacMullen (1928-2022),
Roman Social Relations. 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (1974; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 26:
[T]he peasant too seldom speaks for himself. We would like to hear him say, "Here is where I fit
in, these are my feelings toward my neighbors or toward
outsiders, such-and-such are the groups in which I feel at
home, or depend on, or compete against; my prospects,
my condition, my social heritage, are thus-and-so." Instead, either he has left us only brief mentions of the externals of his life, or appears through the eyes of observers
quite alien to him: the literate, or rather the literary,
classes. They are not likely to have understood the peasant. Though he supported their own ease and cultivation,
he was as silent, motionless, and far below them as the
great tortoise on which, in Indian mythology, the whole
world ultimately rests.
Id., p. 27:
That returns us to the central characteristic of villages—their conservatism. They
and their population hovered so barely above subsistence
level that no one dared risk a change. Conservatism in its
root sense, simply to hang on to what one had, was imposed by force of circumstances. People were too poor,
they feared to pay too heavy a price, for experiment of
any kind. So the tortoise never moved, it never changed
its ways.