Chapter 14

Home and Family

In This Chapter

Organising the Greek household

Appreciating the role of women

Understanding marriage and divorce

Raising and educating children

Looking at slaves

Parts I and II of this book cover some of the most brutal battles in all history, but this chapter looks at something you may find just as shocking – the everyday interactions of ancient Greek families. So prepare yourself: Ancient Greek attitudes about women, sex, death, and violence were very different to those held today.

This chapter (as well as Chapter 15) looks at what life was like in Greek towns and cities. For the most part, I concentrate on Athens because it was the biggest and most successful city at the time, and because of the huge amount of archaeological and documentary evidence it’s the one that historians know most about.

Much of what I describe in this chapter is what you can call social standards. Ancient Greek social standards were very high, and an awful lot of people did not – indeed, could not – live up to them the whole time. You discover the Greeks’ frame of mind and how they viewed the world. In a perfect world these are the standards that people expected themselves and others to live up to. However, comic plays and novels from ancient Greece indicate that people lived their lives far beneath the standards of what was supposedly acceptable. Think of it this way: Nowadays most people consider speaking with your mouth full to be rude – but many people still do it!

Appreciating the Household: The Oikos

The oikos was the basic unit of Greek society. In modern terms, oikos would probably translate to ‘household’, but the word meant much more than just your home. The oikos included:

The physical building itself (see the following section ‘Touring the typical Greek house’).

The people within it (see the later section ‘Meeting the extended family’).

All property associated with the family and building.

The Greeks considered the oikos to be one entity, like a very small version of the polis or ‘state’ (see Chapter 4). Best to keep your hands off another man’s oikos, or big trouble lay ahead.

An Ithacan’s oikos is his castle

In The Odyssey by Homer, Odysseus is delayed on his return home to the island of Ithaca from the war at Troy (see Chapter 21 for more on Homer). While Odysseus is away, various local nobles turn up at his house and try to persuade his wife, Penelope, to marry them, claiming that her husband is obviously dead. Penelope is no doubt very attractive, but what these would-be suitors really want is Odysseus’s land and property – his oikos – that come with Penelope’s hand in marriage.

In the recent TV adaptation of The Odyssey (2000), Odysseus returns home and kills the suitors who invaded his house. He justifies killing them by saying, ‘They tried to steal my world.’ That’s a great way of expressing what the oikos really meant.

Touring the typical Greek house

As Figure 14-1 shows, the average house in an ancient Greek town wasn’t very big. Floor plans were simple and similar:

All the rooms opened onto a rectangular courtyard, which featured a doorway to the street on one side.

Each house had a main living room where family members spent most of the day.

A secondary room, called the andron (which literally means the ‘men’s room’) was used to receive visitors. As the name implies, this room was primarily the domain of men. Men slept in quarters adjacent to the andron.

Women’s quarters were located elsewhere in the house – usually well away from the andron, often on the upper level. The women would work and sleep here.

Figure 14-1: Plan of a standard Greek house.

The building itself was fairly basic with walls made of mud brick or rubble and the floors most likely of beaten earth. Houses usually included a ladder (or an external stairway in wealthier houses) that family members used to access the roof, which they used as another living space.

A Greek house didn’t have a specific bathroom or kitchen. Cooking would often be done outside. Washing was done with cold water in the privacy of the sleeping quarters.

No matter how much money you had, the style of house would be mostly the same. Luxury was represented by the size of the property and the quality of decoration or finish.

Meeting the extended family

In general, the concept of family was very strong. A lot of people lived within the small space of a Greek house. In addition to the modern ‘nuclear family’ (man, woman, and probably between two and five children), other relatives often formed part of the household. Unmarried or widowed females lived under the protection of their nearest male relatives, and grandmothers, nieces, and sisters were often legally obliged to seek shelter in an already busy household. Add to this mix several slaves, and the average household usually numbered between 9 and 12 people.

But within the family, however, equality didn’t exist. Men were the absolute rulers, and women had very little status at all.

Kurios: Man about the house

The dominant male in the oikos was its absolute ruler. He was known as the kurios, which means ‘the man in charge’. The kurios literally had the power of life and death over everybody within, including his wife and children. A man who killed his wife could be legally challenged by her relations but if she was proved to have been unfaithful he had acted legally. He carried out all the financial and legal transactions of the oikos. Nobody else interacted with the oikos in any way without his consent. A husband in a new home would automatically become kurios and stay in this position until he died, although in some households the eldest son would take charge if the father became too old or ill to cope.

Beyond oikos

Although the oikos itself was an independent unit, the concept of family was very strong and extended beyond the oikos to other groups:

The ankhisteia was a wider network of relatives to which Greek families belonged. This network usually went as far as second cousins and comprised people’s wider family.

If a woman was widowed, her first move was to look for a new husband within the ankhisteia. This group also played a very big role in the inheritance process. Inheritance law was hideously complex but basically followed the rule that the nearest male relative inherited. If there wasn’t an obvious heir then a male relative from the ankhisteia would step in and marry the widow, so inheriting the property.

The phratiai were religious associations that are probably best described as brotherhoods because all the members were male, representing their oikos. Although the members may not have all been related, their families normally had some kind of association through marriage or business in the past.

Like the oikos, these other associations were very powerful. Men were expected to give absolute loyalty to them. If a man fell out with either his ankhisteia or phratiai, he was shunned by the rest and open to attack.

With all these loyalties life could become very complicated. A man’s ultimate loyalty would be to his oikos and then his ankhisteia but the phratiai interests were strong too because they usually had a strong business or financial element. Fortunately the interests of these groups wouldn’t really clash because they were all representing the same thing – the furtherance of the oikos and those involved in it on a wider basis.

Spending Time with the Women of Ancient Greece

Ancient Greek women were second-class citizens at best – or even less in many cities. For example, Athenian women didn’t count as citizens; they were instead classed as ‘Women of Attica’ (Attica was the region of eastern Greece that Athens belonged to). The point was to separate the women from the city – they were associated with it but not part of its ruling class.

Women had very little liberty in ancient Greece. They were expected to spend the vast majority of their time within the oikos (see the section ‘Appreciating the Household: The Oikos’ earlier in the chapter) and were discouraged from interacting with anybody else. For example, if male guests came to the home and visited the andron, women were unlikely to be asked to join them. In more traditional households if women were invited, they were required to wear a veil at all times or even to sit behind a screen.

The poet – and marital advice-giver – Hesiod (see Chapter 13) had a bit of a downer on women. In his long poem Works and Days he’s scathing about the problems that women can bring:

For a man acquires nothing better than a wife – a good one, but there is nothing more miserable than a bad one, a parasite, who even if her husband is strong singes him with the torch and brings him to a raw old age.

The ancient Greeks saw women as something to be controlled and they limited the type and amount of property a woman could own. For example:

Women weren’t technically allowed to own property above the value of one medimnos of barley, which was about as much as it cost to feed a family for a week.

Any property that a woman used, like clothes or jewellery, was part of the oikos and as such belonged to her husband.

Even when her husband died a woman wouldn’t hold on to the family property – she needed to swiftly remarry (preferably to a member of the ankhisteia) so that the property could be taken on by another male.

Although restrictive, the position women were expected to adopt in ancient Greek society was somewhat manageable in wealthy households where numerous slaves ran the oikos. Women from poorer families, however, had to be much more active because they carried out all the tasks necessary to keep the household going. Some women even worked alongside their husbands in the family trade or at the market. Despite their hard work, women were still tied to and financially dependent on men. The only women who were financially independent were some of the more exclusive prostitutes, who I talk about in Chapter 15.

Mythical monsters

Women in Greek myth and tragic plays have a hard time. Most are portrayed as untrustworthy and temperamental. Examples include:

Clytemnestra: Wife of Agamemnon. She murdered her husband when he returned home from the Trojan War.

Medea: The wife of Jason from the Argonauts story (told in Chapter 20). When he left her for another woman, she murdered their new children and his new bride.

Pandora: The first ever woman. She was responsible for bringing all the ills into the world.

Of course, things aren’t quite that simple and most men behave appallingly in myths too. But these images of women in myth affected the ancient Greeks. Men were suspicious and tried to keep women under close control.

Marrying and Divorcing

Part of the reason why ancient Greek society controlled women so tightly was so as not to damage their chances of securing good marriages. Marriage was the main event of a woman’s life – something that she spent her young life preparing for.

Girls married at a young age, usually about 14, to men who were considerably older, probably 25 to 30 years old. Often, women married much older men, if the men had been recently widowed.

The poet Theognis describes the challenges of marrying a young bride, particularly when the husband is older:

‘A young wife is not suitable for an elderly husband

For she is a boat that does not obey the rudder.

Nor do anchors hold her; and she breaks her mooring cables,

Often at night to find another harbour.’

Getting hitched: It’s all about the money

Weddings were complicated things to organise because they centred largely on property transfers. When a bride moved in with her new husband, she brought a dowry with her. The dowry was typically a large sum of money that represented a portion of her father’s property because giving up the land itself would be very complicated. The wife didn’t own her dowry and it immediately became the property of her husband – even though he may have to return it if they divorced.

Marriage took place in two stages: the betrothal (when the union was announced) and the actual (and completely unromantic) wedding itself.

The betrothal

The first part of the marriage was called the eggue, which is similar to the modern notion of betrothal – although the term really means something more like ‘pledge’.

The coming marriage was announced publicly (read out in front of members of the ankhisteia) so others were able to witness both the size of the dowry the bride’s father was offering and to make assurances that the girl was still a virgin. A betrothal often took place very early in a girl’s life when she was still a child of maybe 5 or 6.

A young man picked his wife on the basis of status and family connections usually as a result of intensive negotiations within the ankhisteia carried out by his father. The couple probably never met each other before the betrothal. Romance didn’t even come into the picture. The entire process was a business transaction, pure and simple.

The wedding – or moving day

The actual marriage itself was very straightforward. The girl simply entered the oikos of her new husband and began living with him. The couple went through a small formal ceremony to bless the union, but it was all very private. You didn’t need a marriage licence because marriage was a private transaction between the two kurioi.

A wedding feast usually took place afterwards and sometimes went on for two or three days. All the members of the ankhestia would attend with the women all gathered with the bride in the women’s quarters of the house. It was usually a good natured revel with much eating, drinking, and dancing – not too different from the average wedding reception today.

Packing up and moving on

Ancient Greek divorce, like marriage, was pretty straightforward: The bride simply moved out. She went back to the house of her father, if he was still alive, or to the home of the nearest male relative.

Either side of a couple could ask for divorce, but more often than not men sought divorce following an allegation of adultery. (Men commonly slept with other women and prostitutes, but wives were supposed to be entirely faithful.) Typically public proclamations were made about unfaithful wives, and the women were totally humiliated.

The other major reason for divorce was so that men could make other, more socially attractive and financially beneficial marriages. Having been married before was no barrier to marrying again – for a man or a woman – but a man had much more choice in whom he married the second or third time. Unlike other ancient cultures only one spouse was allowed at the same time!

Of course, some marriages took place that didn’t conform to these well-defined social structures. The poorer and lower classes also married but without the elaborate preparations and negotiations involved in more moneyed households. Many more of these marriages would have been for love; unfortunately historians don’t know too much about them because all of the evidence relates to the moneyed literate classes.

Starting Out in Life: Children

In general, the ancient Greek attitude toward children was very harsh. Some of the things that I talk about in this section are quite upsetting – so be warned.

Ancient Greek men were pretty paranoid about adultery and it partly explains their distrust and restriction of women. Part of their concern was because of the possibility of illegitimate children. Greek law around inheritance was very strict and the emergence of any illegitimate children could really complicate a situation and result in lengthy legal cases.

Clearing a difficult first hurdle: Birth

Ancient Greece had no scientific methods of contraception so women often fell pregnant. Women would be expected to give birth a number of times during their life and because they married quite young (age 14 or 15) would have had many fertile years ahead of them. Four or five children in a family wouldn’t be unusual.

Oedipus: A case in point

Probably the most famous Greek play is Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles. The drama centres around the fact that, after receiving an unfavourable prophecy, Oedipus’s father gives his son as an infant to be exposed. The shepherd asked to expose the child takes sympathy on Oedipus and gives him away to be adopted, starting one of the most famously tragic cycle of events ever.

The fifth-century BC audience that watched this play originally wouldn’t have been shocked by the decision of Oedipus’s father because they were familiar and comfortable with the ultimate power that a man had over his oikos. You can read more about the play in Chapter 16.

Delivery

In the vast majority of cases, birth was an all-female affair. Either experienced midwives or female friends delivered babies. Male doctors were called in only for the most difficult of cases. (See Chapter 15 for more on ancient Greek medical practices.) Birth took place in the household where the woman would have spent her entire term.

The risks to the woman giving birth were as high as they were for the child. The potential loss of blood and complications in delivery that would be manageable today were potentially fatal in ancient Greece. In many cases, one or other didn’t survive the experience.

Infanticide

Although appalling, infanticide (the killing or leaving to die of small children) wasn’t uncommon in ancient Greece. Most Athenian men wanted sons because a male was able to work in the family business and provided an heir for the oikos. (The poet Hesiod in his Works and Days poem advises that it’s best to have only one son and no daughters at all.) Daughters were considered problems. They were expensive to keep and cost a lot in dowries when they married.

The Greek solution was appalling but simple. If the kurios of an oikos decided that he already had enough children, then subsequent children, especially girls, were exposed. This horrific practice involved leaving the infant out in the countryside where he or she either starved or was taken by animals.

I’m not excusing the appalling practice of infanticide, but as I mention when I discuss warfare (see Chapter 5), the everyday presence and possibility of death and disease hardened the ancient Greek people. Also, although exposure of babies is terrible, you need to bear in mind that life expectancy in ancient Greece was only around 30 years. Of course, loads of people lived to be much older than 30, but the average was brought down by the huge number of infant mortalities. Death and the loss of loved ones was a common experience, although that wouldn’t make the pain of losing somebody any easier.

Getting an education

If you managed to make it through early childhood, the next stage of life was your education. This varied hugely depending on whether you were a boy or a girl.

School for boys

No age requirement existed for schooling. Many boys received some kind of formal education from 5 or 6 all the way through to adulthood (16).

Ancient Greece didn’t have a state-sponsored education system. All classes were paid for by a boy’s kurios or guardian. Wealthier families provided tutors who lived and worked in the home, giving lessons to a number of children.

Boys experienced three main strands of education:

Grammatistes taught formal subjects like mathematics, reading, and writing. Boys spent a lot of their time memorising the works of Homer and other poets. The Greeks felt that the great works of literature provided moral training via the conduct of the characters in the stories.

Kitharistes taught music and poetry. Boys learned how to play the lyre and perform songs and poetry.

Paidotribes taught gymnastics and fitness training, most probably at the palaestra, or training ground. For more on this sort of training see Chapter 16.

A boy usually had lessons from all these tutors every day (apart from festival days), often travelling to different places for classes.

For the wealthy, further study was available when boys became men. Men could obtain individual tuition in a specific area or subject from teachers called sophists who hired themselves out for the purpose. By the beginning of the fourth century BC, Plato’s Academy, and later Aristotle’s Lyceum, became established as official schools of higher education. I talk more about all this in Chapter 23.

Education for the poor

Education was expensive. For families without money, education meant working in the family business or on the family farm. This education was vocational so that children could take over the business from their parents. Girls would also be involved in this work until they reached an age where they might marry. Many poorer people would have been illiterate.

Girls: They don’t need no education!

Like so many things in ancient Greece, education was different for girls. It was very unusual for a father to spend money on his daughter’s education. Boys were educated because they were taught the skills they needed in order to succeed in public life. Girls, by contrast, were expected to be domestic and were taught the skills of needlework and how to run a home.

Some women were highly educated and nothing stopped them learning later in life, but these more learned women were very much in the minority and never had a public role to showcase their talents.

Examining Slavery

In addition to the family members themselves, an oikos included the slaves within the household. Slavery formed a big part of Greek society, and ancient Athens included a huge number of slaves. Modern writers have estimated that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC (see Chapter 8), about 50,000 male citizens resided in Athens. At the same time, about 100,000 slaves also lived in the city. If you consider women and children, historians contend that the total population of Athens was split about 50:50 between slaves and non-slaves. Both men and women were slaves although they fulfilled different roles, women being mostly confined to maid duties and childcare.

Defining a slave

Slaves were the property of the oikos and had no legal rights whatsoever. Technically and legally, a slave was exactly the same as a pot or a sheep. Whoever owned slaves had the power of life and death over them and could do whatever they wanted. If a man regularly beat and even killed his slaves, he wasn’t thought of as unreasonably cruel.

As well as fighting wars and writing history Xenophon also wrote books about philosophy (see Chapter 9). In his book Memorabilia he recreates a conversation where Socrates discusses the appropriate punishments for slaves who are lazy and misbehave. The treatment he describes was probably quite commonplace:

Socrates: Do they not control their lecherousness by starving them? Prevent them stealing by locking up anything they might steal from? Stop them running away by putting them in fetters? Drive out their laziness with beatings?

Some people were born into slavery (as the children of slaves), but the vast majority were sold into it, mostly as a result of warfare. For example, Alexander the Great (see Chapters 10 and 11) sold the entire populations of several cities into slavery. He could only have done that if the market were thriving.

Establishing the going rate for a slave

Slave markets regularly took place in most cities, and Athens was no exception. The individuals for sale mostly came from the north in Thrace and Dalmatia but also from Asia Minor across the Mediterranean (see the map on the Cheat Sheet in the front of this book).

Following are some prices for slaves from an auction that took place in 415 BC:

A Thracian woman: 165 drachmas

A Syrian man: 240 drachmas

A Scythian man: 144 drachmas

A Carian child: 72 drachmas

To make some sense of the prices, 1 drachma was the average daily wage of a skilled worker (think of about £25 or $50). Young men were most valuable (and hence expensive) because they could be worked harder for longer and there was no risk of them falling pregnant. Older people could be expensive if they were well educated, and they were often bought to serve as tutors.

Dividing up the labour

After a slave owner bought a slave, the slave had several possible destinations and roles:

Most households had at least one oiketes, or basic domestic slave.

Some better skilled slaves were set up to work in businesses by their masters, working as potters or other types of craftsmen.

The Athenian state also owned slaves called demosioi who performed official functions, such as working with coinage or serving as clerks in the courts. The Athenian ‘police force’ was also made up of Scythian slaves often referred to as ‘Scythian Archers’.

Many slaves worked outside the cities on the farms owned by citizens. Some became trusted to run elements of the farm.

The most unfortunate slaves worked in the silver mines at Laureion near Athens. Their work was hard and remorseless, and death was the only thing to look forward to.

The huge number of slaves in Athens and in Attica generally did an enormous amount of work. Their efforts made it possible for male citizens to spend so much of their time involved in the political process (see Chapter 7). It’s kind of ironic that one of the major reasons that the Athenians were able to develop democracy was their system of subjugating and stripping the rights from hundreds of thousands of people.

Legal responsibilities

One of the most unpleasant aspects of being a slave was their legal position. If slaves were required to give evidence in legal cases (see Chapter 7), only statements given under torture were considered valid because it was felt that they would otherwise lie to protect themselves (being poor they were considered easy to corrupt with bribes and inducements).

Both parties in a legal case agreed to the form of torture in advance and to the compensation should the slave be disabled as a result. Typical tortures included the rack, beating, and having vinegar poured up the nose.

In general, slaves were best off claiming that they hadn’t seen anything.

Buying your freedom

Slaves were technically able to either buy or be given their freedom by their master, a process called manumission. Gaining freedom from slavery wasn’t as common as in some other civilisations (like the Roman Empire, for example).

And freedom had its issues. Freed slaves were in awkward positions because they weren’t able to gain Athenian citizenship and had to become metoikoi or metics (resident foreigners) instead.

Connecting with Alien Life: Metics

In addition to family and slave, the Athens oikos had one other possible household member: legal aliens, known as metoikoi or metics.

Metoikoi were foreigners who resided in Athens but weren’t granted citizen status. Their status was slightly different to that of normal visitors to the city because metoikoi paid a special tax and needed to have patrons who guaranteed them while they stayed in the city. Often, guaranteeing included providing accommodation to the metoikoi.

Metics sometimes worked as tutors in the houses of their patrons. Several famous characters went through this process, including the following:

The historian and traveller Herodotus performed his work for several years in Athens and was very popular, but he left when the city refused to grant him citizen status.

The great philosopher Aristotle spent years in Athens living in a house just outside the city walls. As a metoikos he wasn’t allowed to buy property in the city and was forced to build a house outside it.