Afterword: The Future of the Ancient Greek Family
My focus on the Greek family in particular has three justifications. First, I know more about it. Second, the conference which inspired these remarks was held in Sweden, home of the world’s most successful source of household furnishings. The name of that firm – IKEA – bears an uncanny resemblance to oikia, a common Greek word for the household and those connected to it. Could this be mere coincidence? I think not, and I am sure Henning Mankell would agree.1 Finally, the study of the Greek family seems to me to offer special challenges but also the chance to do new and exciting work – which maybe even work which students of the Roman family would find worth their while for a change.2
Some 30 years ago, when Richard Saller arrived in Cambridge, he told Moses Finley (then Professor of Ancient History) that he intended to work on the Roman family. ‘Why?’ asked Finley. ‘The lawyers have already written everything that needs to be said.’ In the decades since, Saller and others (including Keith Bradley, Suzanne Dixon, Judith Evans-Grubbs, Beryl Rawson, Brent Shaw, Hanne Sigismund-Nielsen) have transformed our understanding of the Roman family and of the European family as a whole. Of special importance, they have asserted the primacy of the nuclear triad, the emotional core of father, mother and children which was once thought to have developed only after Antiquity. This new paradigm has not gone uncontested – this is still an active area of research. For example, Bradley has stressed the vulnerability of the Roman nuclear family to death and divorce and the role played by slave nurses and minders in the lives of its children.3 Pointing to the many epitaphs with no identified dedicator, Sigismund-Nielsen suggests that for many of the urban working class, mostly freed slaves, it was their workmates, organized informally or in collegia, who filled the familial role.4 These ‘choice families’, as Sigismund-Nielsen calls them, were what Ann-Cathrin Harders terms a ‘framily’. Dale Martin even questions methodology developed by Saller and Shaw in their ground-breaking study of funerary inscriptions from the Roman west: how should we count joint or multiple commemorations on the tombstones on which the argument for the predominance of the nuclear family is based?5 Jonathan Edmondson has in fact used the method both of Saller and Shaw and of Martin to analyze two epigraphic samples from Lusitania and reached virtually identical results, both pointing to the predominance of the nuclear family.6 This is not to say that extended kin and others did not share the household with it and play a significant role in the lives of its members. Nor is it to discount variation. Our best evidence for household composition, from Greco-Roman Egypt, reveals a range of household types, from individuals living alone to conjugal, extended and multiple family dwellings, and there are differences (as Saskia Hin reminds us in this volume) between urban areas and the countryside too. Variation is also striking in Martin’s examination of inscriptions from Asia Minor and the Levant, with the proportion of those outside the immediate family as commemorators rising from one in four in Bithynia to almost three times as many at Olympus in Lycia.7 In addition, siblings commemorate and cousins marry more often in the east than in the western provinces. In general, as Edmondson observes, the Greek east is characterized by a ‘broader emphasis on maintaining links and emotional ties with more distant kin’.8
Let us turn to the Greeks then. What have students of the Greek family been doing since Saller and the rest began their Roman revolution in family studies (and reminded us that we should always seek a second opinion about lawyers’ advice)? When Daniel Ogden’s Greek Bastardy appeared in 1996, I reviewed it and noted some of the other fine English-language work related to the Greek family which had been published in the previous few years: Lene Rubinstein’s book on Athenian adoption, Barry Strauss’ on fathers and sons at Athens, Nancy Demand’s on birth and motherhood, the volume by Oakley and Sinos on weddings, Patricia Watson’s work on Greek and Roman stepmothers, my own on Athenian childhood.9 The time was right, I thought, for a new synthesis to replace Lacey’s useful but inevitably outdated The Family in Classical Greece, published in 1968 and a surprising survivor from that tumultuous year. If only my views had as much influence on my own family! Soon enough there were two such syntheses, very different, equally excellent books by Sarah Pomeroy and Cynthia Patterson.10 I have reviewed these elsewhere and will not do so now.11 I am more concerned with one of their unanticipated consequences: the virtual disappearance of the Greek family.
Already in the 1970s French scholars had dispelled the old image of multifamily groups, phratries and gene, controlling Archaic Greek communities and standing in opposition to the new institutions and social forms of the territorial state.12 Patterson surveyed the nineteenth-century sources for this mirage – Bachofen, Fustel de Coulanges, Maine, Morgan, Engels – and summarized the prevailing view: ‘polis and family developed in a relationship of creative and productive partnership’.13 In fact, Athens’ phratries may stem (like so much else) from Cleisthenes and most of her gene may be one hundred years younger and more.
The nuclear family was ready for its close-up. Instead, scholarship focused on the household: the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary went so far as to omit the topic altogether, directing those interested in ‘family, Greek’ to an entry on ‘household, Greek’. We still await Greek equivalents for The Roman Mother, Brothers of Romulus, Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society, or the five volumes of papers from the international conferences on the Roman family originally organized by the late Beryl Rawson.14
Certainly there are advantages in privileging the household in this way. The household provided the economic context for the family’s life cycle.15 The birth of children put a strain on its resources, often met by bringing in outsiders (slaves, wage workers), especially at peak times such as harvest. These were then let go or sold in times of crisis – perhaps one in four crops in Attica was inadequate – and when children grew old enough to contribute their labour. These outsiders might affect the family’s emotional economy too. A source of continuity in the flux caused by demographic realities, nurses and paidagogoi also remind us that the roles of ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’ are complex and culture-bound. Engendering and birthing, nurturance, training, sponsorship can be tasks for different adults, not all of them kin.16 Slave mistresses, however common in fact, figure in Greek drama precisely to raise questions about the family’s boundaries. In Agamemnon, Cassandra and the king enter on a cart meant to mirror a wedding procession, an image reinforced by references to a bride’s veil. Is the captive, a princess after all, a threat to Clytemnestra’s place in the family? Was the queen herself (like any wife) not once an outsider? Had she not too brought yet another, Aegisthus – kin but hostile – into the home? In Euripides’ Andromache and in comedies of Menander we detect contemporary voices debating the definition of family and its relation to the household. The structural and other similarities of the household’s subordinate members – women, children, slaves – has proved itself to be an especially fruitful subject.17 And of course our interest in the Greek household echoes an especially clear and convincing voice – Aristotle’s in Politics.
Aristotle nevertheless has his limitations and biases. As Giulia Sissa puts it, Politics is ‘an essay in social anthropology rather than a record of the reality of the family in ancient Athens’.18 Aristotle’s presentation is motivated, at least in part, by a reaction against Plato’s dismissal of the family in The Republic. His inclusion of slaves in the oikos is in fact eccentric.19 His account of the motivation for Pericles’ citizenship law of 451/0 BC, which established the legal basis of the Athenian nuclear family for generations, is internally inconsistent and anyway improbable.20 He exaggerates the role played by disputes over epikleroi at Phocis – family feuds – in the causes of the Third Sacred War and (as a comparison with Thucydides shows) likely does the same in respect to conflicts at Mytilene.
All this amounts to a plea for reinstating the Greek family on our agenda. What should a new synthesis entail? First, it should consider ‘family relations’, both external links (with the polis as a whole, with other kin groups, with outsiders such as slaves) and internal ties. It should recognize that even the smallest family was nuclear, not an indivisible atom. So when the Athenians deposited their dependants on Salamis in the face of the Persian advance (says Lysias), they felt pity for their children, yearning for their wives, compassion for their parents.21 In another funeral speech, Hyperides makes other distinctions, saying that his fellow citizens owe it to their brave forebears that fathers have grown famous, mothers are looked up to in the city, sisters make worthy marriages, and that children will find a way to the people’s good will.22 How do those with different roles relate? (Fathers to sons? Fathers to all others?) How do different groups interact (men to women, the old to the young)? Second, how does the family change over time? Do relations between individuals alter as they age? Did the Greeks (for example) share the view of Martha Cochrane in Julian Barnes’ England, England: ‘After the age of 25, you were not allowed to blame anything on your parents’?23 Perhaps not: the prosecutor in an Athenian lawsuit says that a father – a man over 50 above all – should restrain and curb his wanton sons.24 What was the effect of high mortality? The influence of the mother’s father and brother is prominent in myth, and maternal kin have been found to be more supportive than a father’s family in the Athenian courts.25 One explanation: wives were normally much younger than their husbands, so more of their kin survived. Does wealth matter? The rich may have handed over property earlier, as dowries to their daughters and as inheritances pre-mortem to their sons, simply because they had more than enough to live on. Is this why bridegrooms on Attic vases and suitors on Menander’s stage (these at least members of the elite) seem so young? And how about long-term change? In some ways it seems that even modern Greek families are a lot like ancient ones, as in their naming practices.26 Yet we can also identify changes within relatively short periods of time: the Peloponnesian War kept many men away from home for long stretches or forever, and women’s role in the family probably grew to (help) fill the gap. The effects of other secular changes are more problematic. Alexander’s conquests reshaped the Greek world. Yet Reit van Bremen considers the Hellenistic family to have become distinctive only a century and a half later and Dorothy Thompson denies that there is such a thing as the Hellenistic family at all: ‘No single model [ . . . ] can cover all the evidence’.27 In any case, few families could have been aware of even momentous developments over time. While Egyptian family archives extend over 11 generations, there is nothing remotely similar from Greece, where oral tradition reached back to the time of a great-grandfather and (judging from Andocides) was not very reliable then.28
The extent of the ‘family’ at any one time is a third issue for consideration. In Athens, no law set out the membership of the oikos; orators were free to shrink or expand it as their cases required. So Andocides provides a list of his relations denounced by Diocleides. This family is made up of his father, a brother-in-law, the father’s cousin, his son, and his brother-in-law.29 The anchisteia, ‘those nearest’, extended to the children of cousins (and so to members of different oikoi by any measure). This category was important for inheritance of property and determining who was to fulfil certain obligations (prosecuting homicides and, for women, mourning). But it was unstable, defined for each individual and in existence for his or her lifetime only, and never acted as a group. Moreover, it is unclear whether all forms of inheritance followed the same rules (as William Bubelis argues in the case of priesthoods in this volume).30 At its narrowest, the family was the nuclear triad, the father, mother and child(ren) who ate and slept in the same dwelling, conducted regular religious rites together, and were entwined in a mesh of economic symbiosis and emotional solidarity. I will round off these remarks on the future of the ancient Greek family with a few comments on two themes, myth and domestic space. Neither plays a role in Patterson’s or Pomeroy’s book and both confirm the importance of the nuclear family as opposed to more extended kin networks.
Much more than the Romans’, the pantheon of the Greeks was structured as a family, with Zeus, an adult male, at its head.31 But the divine family, like that of mortal Greeks, practised partible inheritance. Zeus, whose domain is the sky, rules over the gods both literally and owing to his superior strength, while his brothers hold sway over the sea (Poseidon) and the underworld (Hades). This is not a system of primo- or ultimo-geniture. In fact, Zeus is both first- and last-born, a sign that he is special. He was the youngest son of Cronos and Rhea, but – since Cronos swallowed all his older offspring and was prevented from treating Zeus the same only because Rhea hid the baby away and substituted a stone – he has effectively spent more time alive as well. His success, won at his father’s expense, may reflect a tension within many Greek families. The first-born son must always have been welcome, but a second posed a problem. Certainly he was insurance against his brother’s death, a misfortune all too common. But (if both survived) he must also be a drain on the family’s resources (at first at any rate) and these might not be sufficient to support two families when the time came to pass them down.
Conflict between fathers and sons did not start with Cronos and Zeus: Uranus too had tried to prevent the birth of his children by concealment, within the body of their mother Earth, and Cronos had deposed him (and freed his other children) by castration. Such struggles needed to be carried to extremes among the gods because immortal fathers do not weaken with age, let alone leave the field free by dying. Zeus too faced the prospect that a son would grow to be greater and overthrow him. However, he avoided that fate by letting Peleus marry Thetis and engender Achilles. In this way as in others he establishes a new natural order, in which fathers and sons need not be enemies. As a result, Hector (in The Iliad) may hope that the infant Astyanax will grow up to surpass him. Unlike the gods, Greek men could not expect to live forever; their ambitions to live on in memory required a son to succeed (in both senses of the word). The Odyssey too offers a model of how human fathers and sons should behave. Laertes retired as king of Ithaca in favour of his son Odysseus and Telemachus did not attempt to supplant his father Odysseus in his absence.32 At the end of the poem, all three generations stand together to fight common enemies in defence of their home and family.
How about the family’s women? Greek myths include instances of Zeus giving birth from his own body. Athena (sprung from his head) is a female figure with a warlike nature and a bent for helping male heroes gain their ends; Dionysus (once bound up in his thigh) is a male god surrounded in myth by female followers and with a feminine side of his own. Zeus, it seems, is powerful enough to produce gods who have a share in both genders. He is sometimes said to be Hephaestus’ father too. But there is another version, in which he is Hera’s son alone – and he is the one god to be physically imperfect, suffering from what we must vaguely call (to use the jargon of the National Hockey League) a lower-body injury. Even in birthing, women’s special area of expertise, the queen of the gods is not a match for her mate. Ideally (as male characters in tragedy lament) women would not be necessary for the family’s continuation at all. Are they even really a part of it? They do move from one to another at marriage and return to their original family, of birth, on divorce (and Athenian law permitted fathers to force the dissolution of a marriage until the birth of a male heir and perhaps after). Poised as they are between families, liable to move among them, the position of women is hard to establish securely. Greek myth presents them with choices, all of them likely to be wrong.33 Medea abandons her family of birth, betraying her father and murdering her brother, in order to run off with Jason and found a new family with him. Althaea, on the other hand, avenges her brothers by causing her son’s death. In each case – and this is the point – women’s decisions on family loyalty are ruinous to men, and they are blamed for their role in a social system in which they are rarely agents.
We should not forget that the families of myth were real to most Greeks (and could conventially be presented as real by sceptics). Omar Coloru’s contribution to this volume outlines the efforts made by Hellenistic dynasts to present themselves as champions of family values. At the same time, sharing the same – mythical – family also played a political role, as the basis of alliances between city-states in the eastern Mediterranean. Such linkages continued to count in the Greek cities of the Roman Empire, though they are much less prominent in the Latin west.34 There are many examples (as well as others for different purposes, such as the upgrading of a local festival).35 A recently discovered inscription from the third century BC, new evidence for a treaty between Athens and Cydonia on Crete, appeals to their mythical ancestors, Ion and Cydon, both sons of Apollo.36 This family relationship, attested by other, independent sources, is likely to be traditional rather than a fiction invented for the purpose.37 There is therefore some likelihood that the link between these two distant cities was inspired by their family connection in the distant past.
Before we reach our final destination, domestic space, we must take a detour through one of the more remarkable byways of ancient family history. Those who think of classicists as stodgy and repressed will be surprised to find many recent pages of two of the profession’s flagship journals devoted to discussions of brother–sister sex, marriage and reproduction. Goodbye, Mr Chips, indeed. The sibling marriages of the Ptolemies have quite a few parallels elsewhere; Sheila Ager’s lead article in Journal of Hellenic Studies convincingly portrayed it as a means for monarchs to flaunt their exceptionality, elevating them to the ranks of divine models such as Isis and Osiris and Zeus and Hera.38 That ordinary brothers and sisters in Egypt of the Hellenistic and Roman periods shared this custom has long been recognized. Though the consensus was briefly threatened by an article by Sabine Huebner arguing that those our sources term ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ are in fact not biological siblings but participants in a pattern of adoption and marriage widespread in the eastern Mediterranean, the evidence of census records and other official documents, literary texts (which stress that the Egyptian marriages were indeed thought to be unusual), and naming practices in my view establishes the existence of full sibling marriage beyond a doubt.39 A series of sophisticated studies by Walter Scheidel has brought this anomalous (though not quite unique) phenomenon to the attention of social scientists and evolutionary biologists.40 In its own way, it is as revolutionary as the discovery of the Roman nuclear family and, like that research, underscores the continuing relevance of the study of Greek and Rome to more contemporary concerns.
How are we to explain so queer a custom? There is no agreement. The approach I find most helpful is to place the practice into the context of Greek colonization of Egypt after the conquests of Alexander.41 Greeks who stayed in or came to Egypt wanted to marry other Greeks, but found it hard to find partners of a suitable age and status, all the more in the smaller and isolated centres where most of them lived. Settlers came from many parts of the Greek world, each boasting its own customs. Many of their home communities allowed marriages of half-siblings, though some restricted them to children of the same father (as in Athens), others to those of the same mother (Sparta). Far from home as they were, the force of traditional taboos was weakened. And the step from marrying half- to full siblings may have been easier if this taboo was not very strong in any case: Aristotle leaves brother–sister incest off his (short) list of the most shameful forms.42 Brother–sister marriage may represent a strong form of both the endogamy characteristic of the ancient Greeks and the solidarity between brothers and sisters so memorably expressed by Antigone.43
I do not think this hypothesis is controverted by the fact that brother–sister marriages are attested among native Egyptians too. Elite mores are often taken up by others and in fact Hellenistic Egypt provides an example: the adoption of a kyrios after the Greek fashion, by Jewish and eventually some Egyptian women who were not required by law to have one.44 But more certainly needs to be said. Among much else of value, Janet Rowlandson and Ryusoke Takahashi have foregrounded the role of the inheritance regime of Greco-Roman Egypt. Partible as elsewhere in the Greek world, inheritance in Egypt was unconventional in allotting an equal share to women. Since both fathers and mothers thus transmitted property to both sons and daughters – often giving daughters their share as dowry – holdings became exceptionally fragmented, a tendency amplified by the Egyptian custom of raising all their children, daughters too. For Rowlandson and Takahashi, it is the fragmentation of agricultural land and the inconvenience of accounting for small lots in the registers of real property introduced by the Romans in the late first century BC which are crucial. I wonder if this does not slight the importance of domestic space. Awkward though they might be, small and scattered landholdings could be worked or rented out or sold to a neighbour without much disruption. Also liable to the requirement that they be registered as private property, Egyptian houses were less easy to divide, especially since they typically had just one entrance or staircase.45 Furthermore, as Rowaldson and Takahashi point out, Egyptian marriages (like most in the Greek world) were virilocal: sibling marriage allowed daughters to take ownership of part of the parental home at the same time as they continued to live within it. It was therefore less disruptive than other endogamous arrangements, such as marrying a cousin. Maintaining the integrity of domestic space was likely one motivation for brother-sister marriage.
This raises one last issue: just how much domestic space did the Greek family have? I used to imagine that the typical Greek house was small, squalid and dark, much like the hovels of the poor in Engels’ account of working-class Manchester in the earlier nineteenth-century. Many of my colleagues, I suspect, shared this impression. In any case, I was wrong. We now have data from some 300 houses for the period from 800 to 300 BC, from all over the Greek world: from Acragas, Athens, Olynthus, Miletus, cities, villages, the countryside. These appear to have been quite spacious on the whole, in the Classical period at least, with a median ground area for roofed portions of the house of approximately 1,000 (fifth century) to 2,200 square feet (fourth century) or more.46 But such dwellings are about ten times bigger than English tenant houses in the 1830s and comparable to those of eighteenth-century Boston or middle-class areas of Winnipeg today. What is more, the houses which have been excavated were generally well made, with stone socles, walls of stone or sundried brick, tiled roofs, earthen floors, or when they had to be waterproof, constructed from crushed rock. In Ian Morris’ words, ‘fourth-century Greek houses were large and quite comfortable, even by the standards of developed countries in the early twenty-first century’.47 Now, this evidence is skewed towards the larger end of the scale. Smaller houses, at least those less soundly built, are harder to discern in the material record and may have not seemed worth the trouble of excavation. In addition, some Greeks certainly lived in apartments or shared homes. And houses grew larger over time, so that those in Hesiod’s eighth-century Boeotian village were much more likely to match my expectations than those in the Athens of Aristotle, 400 years later.48 Still, Greek houses were reasonably affordable: the single-family home was not the privilege of the elite alone.49 With all due allowance for scepticism, I am inclined to think that the houses we have are not so unrepresentative of a significant proportion of the stock which once existed. And one factor, the disappearance of evidence for upper storeys, may push the size of known houses down somewhat, though we cannot know how much area such structures covered or who lived in them. If Greek houses were as spacious as I now think, they would fit a newly-developing consensus that the Greeks were richer than we once believed in general: they and their animals were larger, their agricultural practices more productive, their access to resources more equal.50
Might this change the way we think about the Greek family? Answering this question forces us to enter the realm of speculation, even imaginative fiction, and run the risk of the criticism Virginia Woolf levelled at Edwardian novelists: ‘They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.’51 However, I am willing to hazard a guess: since the Greek house, at least in the Classical period was a more pleasant environment than we have usually assumed, our understanding of the relation of the public and private spheres in the Greek polis and of the importance of family life needs adjusting. To put it crudely: the more spacious and comfortable the home, the more time family members (especially adult males) would spend and enjoy there.52 Without question this bald statement is subject to a number of variables. Even a large dwelling can become crowded if there are enough people in it. Our best evidence for household size from the Egyptian census records reveals that just over one-third of Greek households included more than 5 adults and that one packed in 22.53 Cultures are notoriously unpredictable in their ideas about privacy and personal space but a house with 22 adults would probably feel overstuffed anywhere. What is more, the attractions of domestic space depend on factors other than space too; on furnishings, conveniences and so on. And the draw of the home may be counteracted by the scale and splendour of public amenities. Nonetheless, I think we should start to conceive of the ancient Greeks as homebodies as well as participants in one of the more vital and vigorous public cultures we know. After all, our evidence seems to show that in general they cooked and ate at home (rather than in the market or at stalls in the street); they slept at home (rather than in their workplaces). There are further implications: for example, while no one now believes that Athenian women were confined to the home, let alone to a small part of it, it is probable that a considerable portion of their time was spent indoors. A re-evaluation of that environment therefore contributes to a less pessimistic picture of their lives. I am, however, happy to leave further exploration of the relevance of myth and the role of domestic space to the next synthesis on the Greek family, one which I am confident my words will again conjure up.
Swedes discovered Winnipeg long ago, whether or not the Vikings made the Kensington rune-stone. Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson led our Jets to the World Hockey Association championship in the late 1970s and Thomas Steen starred for the National Hockey League Jets before becoming a Winnipeg city councillor (where he plays right wing, I am sorry to say). Even one of Henning Mankell’s victims has family in Winnipeg: ‘one daughter . . . lives in Canada, Winnipeg – wherever that is’, Faceless Killers (originally published 1991), tr. S. T. Murray, New York: Viking 1997, 32. The ARACHNE conference was my first opportunity to return their visits and I enjoyed every moment of it. Many thanks to the organizers, Mary Harlow, Ray Laurence, Lena Larsson Lovén, and Agneta Strömberg, for their clear thinking and hospitality and to the Gothenburg students and others for good conversation. This version of my keynote talk is indebted to Geof Kron, Lisa Nevett, Richard Saller and Walter Scheidel. |
Ann-Cathrin Harders’ paper in this collection shows that old-fashioned comparisons between Greeks and Romans can still be as productive as consideration of more exotic cultures. |
Bradley, 1993. |
Sigismund-Nielsen, 2006. |
Saller and Shaw, 1984; Martin, 1996, with the brief response of Rawson, 1997. |
Edmondson 2005, pp. 215–217, cf. Scheidel forthcoming. |
Martin, 1996, 47–60. Lindsay Penner’s chapter in this volume provides another example of careful quantitative analysis yielding an unexpected extent of variation, in Roman elite households. |
Edmondson, 2005, pp. 216–217. |
Review: Golden, 1996. English-language work: Rubinstein, 1993; Strauss, 1994; Demand, 1994; Oakley and Sinos, 1993; Watson, 1994 and Golden, 1990. |
Pomeroy, 1997 and C. Patterson, 1998. |
Patterson: Golden 1998; Pomeroy: Golden, 1999. |
Bourriot, 1976; Roussel, 1976. |
C. Patterson, 1998, p. 69. |
Dixon, 1988; Bannon, 1997; Hallett, 1984. Rawson: the most recent collection of papers arising from these important meetings is Dasen and Späth, 2010. |
For the life cycle of the Greek peasant household, see Gallant, 1991. |
See in general Goody, 1999 (on West Africa.) |
See, for example, the studies collected in Moggi and Cordiano, 1997; Joshel and Murnaghan, 1998 and Birgitta Sjöberg’s discussion of ‘intersectionality’ in this volume. Athenian orators urged audiences to go to war to set themselves off from their slaves and wives and to emulate their valorous ancestors: Hunt 2010, pp. 108–33. |
Sissa, 1996, p. 194. |
MacDowell, 1989, cf. Ferrucci, 2006, pp. 186–192 on the differences in Aristotle’s usage of oikia from that of Xenophon and Attic legal texts and inscriptions. |
Blok, 2009. |
Lys. 2.34, 39. |
Hyper. Epit. 27. |
Julian Barnes, England, England, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 22. Martha is relevant here because she is doing graduate work on the history of the Sophists, p. 45. |
Dem. 54.22; cf. Lys. 19.55, where a speaker, now 30 years old, claims he has never had a dispute with his father. |
Myth: Bremmer, 1983; courts: Humphreys, 1986. |
Bresson, 2006. |
Van Bremen, 2003; Thompson, 2006, p. 94. |
Egypt: Thompson, 2006, p. 106; Athens: Thomas, 1989, pp. 95–154. Tomb-cult too extended over only three generations in Greece: Antonaccio, 1993, p. 63. |
Andoc. 1.47, cf. Dem. 59. 6, 12. |
For the inheritance of sitesis, the right to dinner in the Prytaneion, see now MacDowell, 2007. |
Much of the seminal work on myth and the Greek family and society more broadly has been produced by scholars writing in French – Louis Gernet, Georges Dumézil, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Nicole Loraux. See most recently Renaud and Wathelet, 2007, and, on Zeus’ position, Brulé, 2006. |
For another approach, invoking ‘matrimonial succession’ in kingship in the heroic or Bronze Age, see Finkelberg, 1991. |
Visser, 1986. |
For Rome, see now Battistoni, 2009. |
Jones, 1999 provides a wide-ranging account; local festival: see, e.g., L. E. Patterson, 2010. |
Papazarkadas and Thonemann, 2008. |
This is stressed by Curty, 2005. |
Ager, 2005, cf. now Müller, 2009. |
Huebner, 2007, with the responses of Remijsen and Clarysse, 2008 and of Rowlandson and Takahashi, 2009. |
E.g., Scheidel, 1996, 1997. |
See especially Shaw, 1992. |
Arist. Pol. 2. 1262a25. |
As Trollope observed in The Eustace Diamonds (originally published 1871), Oxford: OUP 1973 (10), ‘Brothers do not always care much for a brother’s success, but a sister is generally sympathetic.’ |
Pomeroy, 1984, p. 121. Note here that unlike Greeks and native Egyptians, Romans and Jews were forbidden by law to marry siblings. |
Muhs, 2008. Though Muhs emphasizes the care Egyptians took to prevent the division of homes, his study of Hawara in the Fayum reveals no sibling marriages. |
See the table in Morris, 2005, p. 110. The fullest collection of data that I know, in an unpublished paper by Geof Kron, concludes, ‘there is remarkably little variation in the sizes of citizens’ houses, which seem to have varied from 2200 to 3300 square feet’ in the Classical period (Kron, unpublished). Major collections of evidence include Robinson and Graham, 1938; Hoepfner and Schwandner, 1994 and Trümper, 1998. |
Morris, 2005, p. 123. |
Morris, 2004, 2005, pp. 107–125. |
Geof Kron estimates that nearly a third of Athenian citizen families at the end of the fourth century BC, and perhaps as many as three-quarters, could afford to buy a house: Kron forthcoming, cf. Ober, 2010, 258. |
See, e.g., Kron, 2005, 2008, Ober, 2010. |
Woolf, V. (1924), Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, London: Hogarth Press, p. 18. |
It may be significant here that Hesiod’s Works and Days demonstrates considerable concern about neighbours. Did his rural lifestyle combine with a smaller and less pleasant house to induce him to spend more time out of doors than later Greeks? |
Thompson, 2006, 102 |
Ager, S. L. (2005), ‘Familiarity breeds: incest and the Ptolemaic dynasty’, JHS, 125, 1–34.
Antonaccio, C. (1993), ‘The archaeology of ancestors’, in Dougherty, C. and Kurke, L. (eds), Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece. Cult, Performance, Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 46–70.
Battistoni, F. (2009), ‘Rome, kinship and diplomacy’, in C. Eliers ed. Diplomats and Diplomacy in the Roman World, Leiden and Boston: Brill, Mnemosyne, (Supplement 304), pp. 73–97.
Blok, J. H. (2009), ‘Perikles’ citizenship law: a new perspective’, Historia, 58, 141–70.
Bourriot, F. (1976), Recherches sur la Nature du Génos, Lille: Université de Lille III/H. Champion.
Bradley, K. R. (1993), Discovering the Roman Family, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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