EVERYDAY LIFE IN CLASSICAL GREECE

Life on the land

The dramatic events of the Persian Wars confirmed the reputation of the Greeks as effective soldiers and sailors. They tended to mask the fact that the majority of Greeks spent most of their time as farmers. In fact, as in all the preindustrial economies discussed in this book, 90 per cent of the population of ancient Greece cultivated the land and had no other option if their city was to survive. As Robin Osborne pointed out in his Classical Landscape with Figures, these were the forgotten Greeks, barely mentioned in the literature and their scratchings on the surface of the soil hardly noticed by archaeologists. It is only since the 1970s that what little has survived in writing about the land has been correlated with the findings of field surveys to bring to life the farming activities of the Greek world.

The most common form of landownership in ancient Greece was the small plot, the kleros, a share inherited by a son from his father. The owner and his family might be the only workers on it. (The sources say little as to whether slaves were normally used, but some scholars -- Mike Jameson, for instance -- have argued that even poor farmers may have employed one or two.) In general the soil in Greece is poor, but the greatest challenge faced by all farmers in Greece is the unpredictability of rainfall. To take one modern example, in the 1960s the annual rainfall in Kavala, the ancient Neapolis on the northern Aegean, varied between 252 millimetres and 897 millimetres, and research suggests the climate was little different in classical times. A good yield depended on frequent turning and weeding if moisture was to be retained, but instruments were primitive and the work must have been backbreaking. The ard, a rudimentary form of plough, always made of wood with perhaps an iron tip, would only cut through, not turn, the soil, and turning had to be completed as a separate task. Oxen might help with the ploughing, but most tasks, from pruning to harvesting the various crops, cereals, grapes, and olives, had to be done by hand.

The typical city state had access to plains, hillsides that might be cultivated with terracing, hillsides which could not be cultivated but might be used as pasture, and mountains which were totally barren. Each city had a different mix of lands and had to plot its survival accordingly. How land was divided is the subject of much scholarly debate. One view is that farmers hoped to accumulate a variety of plots in different situations to maximize the chances of a reasonable crop. Studies of the property of a set of Athenian aristocrats in the late fifth century, for instance, showed that, typically, they had land scattered throughout Attica as well as beyond the state. Field survey evidence is now suggesting, however, that in the fifth and fourth centuries plots were being consolidated to achieve greater economy of scale and that animals were being pastured on them and their manure used for fertilizer. This suggests the emergence of a more intensive and, possibly, more market-oriented agricultural economy.

Most important in terms of calorie yield were cereals. Barley was the most popular cereal as it requires only half as much rainfall as wheat. (This made wheat bread a luxury, to be found mainly on the tables of the aristocratic symposia, for which see below.) Studies of farming in Neolithic Greece suggest that a yield of 1,000 kilos of grain could be raised per hectare. There is some evidence that grains were larger by classical times, but there would still have been a significant shortfall of grain requirements in Attica each year, one reason why the trade routes to the cereal-growing areas of the north Aegean and Black Sea became so important for the city. The most widespread crop was the olive. Its deep roots and narrow leaves were well suited to a climate of hot sun and low rainfall. Its oil could be used for cooking, lighting, and even as a form of soap, and could be traded to areas such as the Crimea and Egypt where olives did not grow. It grew alongside the vine, another of the staples of the Greek economy.

The fear of crop failure provided a permanent anxiety to everyday life. Ideally, the Greek farmer would plan for a small surplus, partly of course through prudence, but also to supply dowries for his daughters, contributions to collective feasts, and as a means of buying pottery, salt, fish, and metals. If the evidence that land-holdings were being consolidated from the fifth century is true, this surplus might be gained from the marketing of produce. There remains, however, very little actual evidence for trading outside the Athenian deme, for instance, and in Athens itself archaeologists have found no market buildings earlier than the late fifth century (though this does not rule out more makeshift arrangements for the transfer of goods).

The Greek farming year had two periods of intensive activity. From September to November the olives and grapes were gathered, just at the same time as the ploughing and the sowing of seed took place for the next year. The harvesting of grain took place in May or June. There were two important slack times, in early spring and from July to September when the harvest was in. It was in these times that the great games of the Greek world were held, the Isthmian Games in the spring and the others in the autumn. Fighting also took place in these periods. The Persian wars, as has been seen, were fought in the autumn; the Persian forces of 480 having entered Greece at the time when there was ample food for them to plunder. Men and their animals could also be employed in building. Accounts from the Athenian sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis show almost all construction took place in the slack periods, particularly after the harvest. Oxen were also available then. Sixty-six are recorded as being drafted in to drag one column of marble.

Animals also formed an essential part of the agricultural economy. Sheep and goats could be pastured on higher ground or along the borders of the city state. Ownership of the land was not required, so flocks would range widely. Once these animals had passed through the rituals of sacrifice , they provided most of the protein needed by the population. All the raw materials for clothing were available from wool and leather. There were settlements in the hills wholly concerned with making cloth, leather goods, and cheese.

Industries, Crafts, and Trade

The largest non-agricultural concerns were the mines. Iron ore could be found locally in Greece and smelted for tools and weapons. Precious metals, gold and silver, were used by the state for large-scale enterprises such as paying mercenaries and, particularly from the late sixth century onwards, for coins to oil transactions of everyday commercial life. The silver mines in Attica are the best known as they underpinned the success of Athens as a naval and political power. The ancient remains have been carefully surveyed. Around two thousand shafts have been located around Laurium, some over 120 metres in depth. Records from the fourth century show that two hundred Athenians were then involved in taking out concessions. They could borrow the substantial amounts of money required (at 12 per cent interest in one recorded case) and then approach a slaveowner for the lease of labour. The historian Xenophon mentions one contractor with a thousand slaves available for hire, but they were often used so harshly by their hirers that their life expectancy was short.

Even richer than the Athenian mines were those of Chalcidice and the Rhodope massif in the northern Aegean. In addition to silver, they held the only Greek-controlled source of gold. While the total Athenian production in a year has been calculated at 65 talents, individual mines within this area are said to have produced 1,000 talents worth of precious metal each year at the height of production in the fourth century. These mines later fell under the control of Macedonia, which is one reason why this remote kingdom on the north of the Greek world became so powerful a force in the fourth century under the energetic leadership of Philip II.

Manufacturing was widespread in the Greek world. Most of it was local, drawing on raw materials such as wool, iron ore, and clay and processing them for immediate sale. Everything was done on a small scale and technology was virtually unknown. The Greeks had no tradition of applying their scientific understanding to creating more efficient ways of production. Even coins were made in an unsophisticated way with each one stamped individually. The largest workshop recorded in Athens made shields and employed 120 workers. Of two workshops owned by the father of the orator Demosthenes, one employed thirty slaves making knives, the other twenty joiners making beds. There were probably no more than 200 workers in the Athenian potters' quarter, the Ceramicus, at one time.

By the sixth century trade routes were busy, but the patterns of trade and the quantities of goods transported have proved difficult to measure. The evidence from shipwrecks, unlike that from later periods, has been too small to be of much use. All traces of slaves, grain, livestock, timber, the probable staples, have disappeared, but it is clear that commerce was based on small-scale free enterprise, with individuals taking responsibility for raising and managing their own voyages. The single largest commodity was grain shipped from those areas which had a consistent surplus, the Black Sea, Egypt, and Italy, to those which could not depend on one. Metal ores were also important, and in some cases their sources can now be pinpointed. Silver for the first Athenian coinage, for example, came from Thrace, not the Laurium mines in Athens. There was some specialization. It can be shown, for instance, that one late sixth-century group of Athenian potters, the so-called Perizoma group, produced designs specifically aimed at Etruscan tastes. They put loincloths on athletes in deference to Italian sensitivities about nudity and transformed conventional pictures of Athenian symposia into Etruscan funerary scenes.

Slavery

In many enterprises, those of building, mining, manufacturing, and work on the land, slaves carried out much of the labour. Slavery had long been widespread in the ancient world, the common fate, as Homer makes clear, of war captives and their families. However, as human beings seem to have been one of the few commodities the civilizations of the east would take from the Greeks in return for their luxury goods, a slave trade began. Thrace was the most important early source of slaves and then later the inland areas of Asia Minor. It gradually became more common for the Greeks to keep slaves for themselves, and eventually they may have made up perhaps 30 per cent of the population of many cities.

The slave had normally gone through traumatic experiences even before he or she had started work for a Greek master. The slave's family had usually been broken up and he or she had been removed from a native culture. The culture shock of entering the Greek world as an owned person must have been severe. What was added to the shock by the experience of day-to-day living as a slave is difficult to gauge. Within the home there were rituals and conventions which offered some protection to the slave. He or she was welcomed with a ceremony in the new home (and, as a symbol of the fresh beginning in life, given a new name). It was thought an act of hubris, pride, to beat a slave unjustly. These conventions and natural altruism may have combined to make life tolerable, but one cannot be too optimistic. The comedies of Aristophanes suggest casual brutality was common. Sex by men with their female slaves was tolerated and, as the evidence in one lawsuit suggested, was not considered serious enough to justify a wife's infidelity.

Slavery can take various forms. Chattel slavery, the direct ownership of the slave, was the most common, but there were other forms of servitude such as that suffered by the helots in Sparta. Some idea of their status can be seen from a remark by Thucydides that 700 helots who had been raised to campaign with the Spartan king Brasidas were rewarded by being made free and allowed to live where they wanted. This implies they were normally tied to the land and were seen as the servants of the state rather than of individual owners. They differed from the mass of chattel slaves, in that they were Greeks, lived in their own communities in lands that had traditionally been their own, and were allowed to retain at least part of their produce (the rest being handed over to the state). In other ways their lives were miserable. At each new election of ephors, there was a ritual by which war was declared against helots in general, and it appears that those who looked like emerging as leaders were systematically killed. One episode in the training of adolescent Spartans for war involved placing them in the countryside and giving them free rein to kill any helots they came across.

With the possible exception of Sparta, there was no distinct slave economy in ancient Greece (as there was, for instance, on the sugar and cotton plantations of the West Indies and the American South). Those slaves with skills could work alongside freemen and even citizens. The status of eighty-six of the skilled workforce is known from the records which survive of the construction of the Erechtheum in Athens. Twenty-four were citizens, twenty-four metics (foreigners of free status), and twenty slaves. The slaves worked as masons and carpenters and their labour was paid at the same rate as free men. It was said, in fact, to be impossible to distinguish slaves from free men in the streets.

A large number of slaves worked as domestic servants in the homes. Here a slave might achieve some identity because of his or her skills or general usefulness. Much less secure, however, were those slaves who found themselves working in larger groups in the fields, in workshops, or, worst of all, in the mines. Here there was little chance of preserving any individual identity and treatment appears to have been harsh. In the mines the slave seems to have been no more than an expendable instrument for obtaining the city's most sought-after source of wealth. Slaves also made up a large part of the population of common prostitutes.

The use of slaves was inextricably bound up with the Greeks' sense of their own identity. It was considered demeaning to be the servant of others, and by employing slaves the citizen was reinforcing his identity both as a free man and as a Greek. Slave labour also freed the citizen for political life. However, some justification had to be evolved for the practice. For the philosopher Aristotle, who explored the problem in his Politics, it was part of the natural order that there should be an élite who did the ruling and a slave class who carried out the labour on which civilized living depended (although he accepted that some disagreed with this view). 'One that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and one that can do these things with his body is subject and naturally a slave . . . the latter are strong for necessary service, the former erect and unserviceable for such occupations but serviceable for a life of citizenship.' However, a physical source for this slave labour had to be found, and this left Aristotle with little real option other than to define the difference in status between ruler and slave in ethnic terms. As he continued:

"The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbours. The people of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skilful in temperament, but lack spirit so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent: hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions and to be capable of ruling all mankind."
(Translation: H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library edition)

Citizens and Others

According to Aristotle, therefore, slaves 'deserve' their position because they are outsiders. As Paul Cartledge has shown in his book The Greeks, the world of the Greek citizen can be explored through the way it created outsiders such as barbarians, both free and slave, and, within the city, women and non-citizens in order to strengthen the identity of the citizen group. In Athens the cohesiveness of male citizen society was reinforced by a variety of associations and kinship groups. The traditional kinship group in Athens had been the phratry, which may originally have been based on allegiance to an aristocratic clan. By the sixth century, the phratry, while still aristocratic in tone, appears to have become a political grouping, controlling citizenship. Cleisthenes deprived it of its political power and undermined the individual identity of each phratry by using one of the traditional Ionian festivals, the Apatouria, to allow the phratries to meet collectively and exercise functions such as recognizing marriages, admitting infant members, and overseeing the transition of young men to adulthood as a group.

There were many other associations. Some of them were purely religious, others were connected with particular trades. Aristocrats might claim allegiance to a clan, the Alcmaeonidae, for instance, or a drinking club. The sense of comradeship that resulted is finely expressed in a speech by the Athenian Cleocritus (as recorded by the historian Xenophon). Cleocritus is leading an attack on the oligarchs in the city who wish to destroy democracy:

"Fellow-citizens, why are you driving us out of the city? Why do you want to kill us? Wehave never done you any harm. We have shared with you in the most holy religious services, in sacrifices and in splendid festivals; we have joined in dances with you, gone to school with you and fought in the army with you, braving together with you the dangers of land and sea in defence of our common safety and freedom." 
(Translation: Oswyn Murray)

The Athenian citizen was thus given identity through a range of shared activities which went well beyond his involvement in the Assembly.

In contrast, life in Sparta seems uniform and regimented. It pays to be cautious in saying this because Sparta was often deliberately presented, by both admirers and detractors, as a contrast to Athens and so what was different about the city might well be unduly emphasized. The Spartans also made it difficult to establish the truth about themselves. They prided themselves on presenting an inscrutable face to the world and in hiding their true military strength. Anton Powell, in an overview of life in Sparta, suggests a comparison with Mao Tsetung's China, 'where the movement of foreigners was restricted, communication with outsiders was guarded, while much that was reported derived from the uncheckable accounts of enthusiasts'.

What cannot be denied was that Sparta was a city which idealized the state over the individual and concentrated on breaking down any activities or relationships which threatened the cohesion of the community. The process of socialization began at the age of 7 with the removal of a boy from his family. Plato remarked that all education in Sparta was carried out through violence rather than through persuasion and the emphasis was on producing hardiness through endless tests of self-reliance and endurance. At the age of 20 the boys joined messes, the syssitia. These were, in effect, the only associations recognized by the state and they provided a totalitarian social world. The messes ate together nightly and there was no distinction between young and old, rich or poor. It seems, though the direct evidence is slight, that homosexual relationships were the norm. Certainly there was little scope for any other form of physical affection. Men could marry, but until they were 30 all visits to their wives had to be conducted stealthily by night. (There was an interesting ritual relating to the consummation of marriage. On the marriage night the bride was dressed in a man's cloak and sandals and laid in an unlit room to await the attentions of her bridegroom. The deflowering of a woman dressed as a man may, it has been suggested, have marked a formal transition from the homosexual world of the mess to that of the heterosexual.)

The state inculcated its own values, related to its need for survival as a military machine. The greatest glory was to die in the service of the state. The families of hose who had died appeared to rejoice even after a defeat. Survivors, on the other hand, were shunned. There were two from Thermopylae. When they returned to the closed society of Sparta both were humiliated and one even committed suicide. Action was valued above words. The Athenian politician Pericles puts it well when he talks of the Athenians as superior to the Spartans because they did not think that words 'damaged' actions as the Spartans did. The Spartans were famous for their brevity of speech (the word 'laconic', from the Latin for Lacadaemon, the country of Sparta, derives from this source). It is also interesting to note that they had little use for literacy. Only one classical inscription has been discovered in Sparta itself, and writing seems to have been reserved for the recording of international treaties.

Propaganda became an essential part of maintaining the public façade of the Spartan state. With so little respect given to words, it was expressed visually, particularly in the display of her troops. Their hair was kept conspicuously long and they were dressed in identical red cloaks. (The historian Xenophon remarked that the Spartan army seemed to consist entirely of bronze and scarlet.) Their numbers were always kept a closely guarded secret. Other states grasped the importance of deflating this proud image. When the Spartans were finally defeated at Leuctra (371 BC), the Thebans exposed their dead separately so that all could see they were not invincible.

Citizenship in Sparta was defined through ownership of land through which membership of a mess could be sustained. In Athens no land was required, but, by the mid-fifth century, citizenship was only available to those born to parents who were both themselves citizens. Citizenship was thus a privilege and a closely guarded one. It implied duties but also economic and social advantages. In Athens only citizens could take part in government, own land, or join most of the associations. Outsiders, metics, were not, however, social rejects. In Athens they could mix freely with the intellectual élite of the city ( Plato's Republic takes place in the house of Cephalus the Syracusan) and take part in religious processions. They had some legal privileges as well such as the right to speak on their own behalf in lawcourts. Unable to own land, they probably had a predominant influence in manufacturing and trade.

The shared language, culture, and values of the Greek world and the relative ease with which it could be crossed allowed those with skills every chance of exploiting them within other Greek communities. The lyric poet Pindar was born near Thebes but is reputed to have moved to Athens to study music. His travels then took him to Sicily (some of his greatest odes were in honour of the Sicilian tyrants), and he finally died in the Peloponnese in 436 at the age of 80. The philosopher Aristotle was born in northern Greece in 384. He moved south when he was 17 and spent twenty years in Athens as a pupil of Plato. Then, for twelve years, he travelled, setting up academies in two cities on the coast of Asia Minor, Assos and Miletus. He spent three years in Macedonia as tutor to the young prince of Macedon who was to become Alexander the Great, before returning to Athens for a further twelve years. He retired to the island of Euboea, where he died in 322. For neither man was lack of citizenship a barrier to a successful career outside his home community.

Women in the Greek World

Many sources written by Athenian men suggest that the seclusion of Athenian women within the home was total, but this cannot be the whole truth. In comedy women are portrayed outside the house (and thus available for erotic adventures), but a distinction needs to be made between those who had to go outside, to fetch water, for instance, and those of higher status who had slaves to do this for them but who nevertheless enjoyed other relationships, particularly with other women, outside the home. (The distinction was symbolized by a woman's complexion. Women who had to share the work on farms or who had to leave the home to work or fetch water for themselves betrayed their lower status by their sunburned skin.)

Whatever the reality of women's lives, they themselves have left little record of it. When they speak, above all in tragic drama, they do so through men's voices. What women really felt as they sat together in the women's quarters of the cramped and probably smelly houses which were typical of urban Athens is unknown. They may have taken some satisfaction in their status as citizens and mothers of citizens-to-be. On the other hand, they may have yearned to enjoy the freedom of the hetairai, the courtesans who attended the symposia and who sometimes established stable relationships with young aristocrats. (However successful in the short term, however, the hetaira's life depended on her looks and charm. She was vulnerable to pregnancy (and the child could never be recognized as a citizen) and disease, and when her lover married she would be discarded).

The most important moment of transition in a woman's life was marriage. The experience consisted of being taken at a young age, just after puberty, into a relationship with a man, probably ten to fifteen years older, in a strange home. A fragment from one of Sophocles' plays records the experience:

"Unmarried girls, in my own opinion, have the sweetest existence known to mortals in their fathers' homes, for their innocence always keeps such children safe and happy. But when we reach puberty and can understand we are thrust out and sold away from our ancestral gods and from our parents. Some go to strange men's homes, others to foreigners, some to joyless houses, some to hostile. And all this once the first night has yoked us to our husband we are forced to praise and say all is well."
Tanslation: Oswyn Murray)

It is written, like almost all comments on women, by a man, but it makes the point that women, unlike men, entered a form of exile when they married.

Solon had recommended that men marry between the ages of 28 and 35, when they were past the peak of their strength and should rightly consider the future of their family. Girls might be ten to fifteen years younger. This discrepancy may have been deliberate, to ensure the dominance of males who were, at their age of marriage, sophisticated and well used to public life, over women who, in the words of one source, 'had been closely supervised in order that they would see as little as possible, hear as little as possible and learn as little as possible'. There were also medical theories that child-bearing was safest for a younger mother (while, in contrast, male sperm became more potent with age) and that sexual intercourse was the best answer to the emotional upheavals of female adolescence.

As in most traditional societies, love played little part in the choosing of partners. Marriage partners were usually chosen from within a relatively small circle of families known to each other. The bride's family had to provide a dowry, and it was the passing over of this, into the complete control of the bridegroom, that formalized the agreement. The preservation of property within a family was another important factor. It would normally pass only through the male line, but a woman who had no brothers was assigned a special status, that of epikleros, because she went with the estate (kleros). So that her inheritance would not be lost to the family, she could be married to the nearest of her male relations who would have her. (A paternal uncle would often come forward.) Even if she was already married, a new marriage could be formed to preserve the inheritance, so long as the first marriage was childless.

Inevitably, as with every moment of transition in Greek life, marriage involved rituals. The bride took a purifying bath before being taken in a formal procession with the bridegroom and his best friend in a cart to the bridegroom's home. The bride would be greeted by the bridegroom's mother and then go through the formalities of welcome to a new home before the couple retired for the physical consummation of the marriage. The importance of the wife as a bearer of children was underlined by the fact that her status in the new home improved once a son was born. 'When a child was born, then I began to trust her and I put her in charge of all my things, believing that the closest connections had been formed', as one suitor in an Athenian law-case put it. A marriage which was childless could be dissolved, and women did possess the right to divorce their husbands if their behaviour was particularly shameless.

The Greeks used the word oikos as a term both to describe the family unit itself (or, rather, the family community, including its slaves and close relatives) and the house in which this community lived. 'Household' would perhaps be the most apt translation. The domestic arrangements of Greek families are not well documented. However, at Olynthos in northern Greece, the foundations of houses have been uncovered in a town which was destroyed by Philip of Macedon in 348. Typically, each house was closed off to the outside world, its exterior walls provided with relatively few windows. The men's room, the andron, was near the main door so that visitors could be entertained without having to intrude on the more secluded quarters of the women. In larger houses there would be a courtyard where the women could sew and weave on warm days, and here there would also be ample space for the storage of the family's oil, wine, and grain. Richer homes might have mosaics on the floors of the public rooms but on the whole there is little sign of luxury. In democratic Athens, in any case, it was socially and politically unacceptable to flaunt wealth. The more prosperous and comfortable bourgeois home was not common in the Greek world before the Hellenistic age.

Every Athenian woman had her protector, the kyrios, either a male relative before she was married or her husband. 'Her' property, outside her immediate possessions of clothes and jewellery, was in his care and she could undertake only the most modest of transactions on her own behalf. However, the Athenians do not seem to have believed that women deserved protection simply because they were the weaker sex. In fact, the opposite seems to have been true. It was claimed that women were subject to particularly strong and threatening feelings and that suppression of their instincts by men was justified through fear of the emotional havoc they could wreak. A legal example makes the point. A man who violently raped a woman was treated less severely than one who seduced a woman. The reason was that the seduction, unlike rape, threatened to create an individual able to follow her own desires. (The matter was made more complicated, however, by the fact that the seduction or rape was also an offence against the hubris, pride, of the woman's husband or family.) Women's sexual desires were assumed (by men) to be strong. Aristophanes in his play Lysistrata describes the consternation of the women characters when one of them suggests a sex strike. Other sources suggest that men believed that a woman allowed outside the house would soon engage in sexual adventures. Seclusion, however, was imposed not just out of sexual possessiveness. There were also fears that a woman who conceived with an unknown man would jeopardize the inheritance of the family property. She alone was the vessel though which it could be passed legitimately on to another generation.

There were occasions, mainly religious festivals, in which women could participate in their own right. The Thesmophoria, the most widespread of the Greek festivals, was celebrated entirely by women. The ritual in Athens lasted for three days, and the women withdrew to a sanctuary out of the sight of men. The sacrifices were of piglets, but there were also rituals in which phalluses were thrown into the earth and the remnants of sacrifices from earlier years brought out from the ground. This suggests elements of a fertility cult, although a period of sexual abstinence was also demanded even before the festival began. In accompanying rituals men were denounced in obscenities and there were legends of men who disturbed the rituals being castrated. 'At the core of the festival' writes Walter Burkert, 'there remains the dissolution of the family, the separation of the sexes, and the constitution of a society of women; once a year at least women demonstraöte their independence, their responsibility, and importance for the fertility of the community and the land.' It could be argued that the Thesmophoria had the social function of legitimizing the oppression of women for the remainder of the year.

The male Greek's fantasies and fears of women could also be released in drama. Here is further evidence that the Greeks saw women as capable of intense emotion, emotions which could be manipulated by the playwright to explore the furthest boundaries of human behaviour. Greek tragedy is full of strong women. Medea, Phaedra, Antigone, Electra, who exhibit the full range of lust, defiance, and revenge which, for cultural reasons it may have been difficult to attribute to male characters. However, the playwrits were also able to show some empathy for the condition of women, as in the famous speech given by Euripides to Medea:

"Of all things that are living and can form a judgement we women are the most unfortunate creatures. Firstly, with an excess of wealth it is required for us to buy a husband and take for our bodies a master; for not to take one is even worse. And now the question is serious whether we take a good or bad one; for there is no easy escape for a woman, nor can she say no to her marriage. She arrives among new modes of behaviour and manners, and needs prophetic power, unless she has learned at home, how best to manage him who shares the bed with her. And if we work this out well and carefully, and the husband lives with us and lightly bears his yoke, then life is enviable. If not, I'd rather die. A man, when he's tired of the company in his home, goes out of the house and puts an end to his boredom and turns to a friend or companion of his own age. But we are forced to keep our eyes on one alone. What they say of us is that we have a peaceful time living at home, while they do the fighting in war. How wrong they are. I would very much rather stand three times in the front of battle than bear one child."
(Translation: Simon Goldhill)

(There may be much truth in the final two lines. One calculation from the evidence of Greek skeletons suggests that the average life-span of adult women was thirty-six years, compared to the forty-five of men (although more sophisticated analysis may raise these figures). Early death from child-bearing seems the most likely explanation. There is also evidence that girl babies were more likely to be exposed to die than boys.)

The women of Sparta enjoyed (or were seen by outside observers to enjoy) a much freer life than their counterparts in Athens. Their husbands were preoccupied with their military training and often away at war and this may have left women with far greater initiative in the management of their daily lives. It is also possible that Spartan women kept their own dowries, which enabled them to own land. ( Aristotle claimed that two-fifths of the whole country belonged to women.) However, there is no doubt that the state saw the main role of women as producers of male children. They were expected to undergo physical training to make then stronger for their task. (The fact that they did so naked scandalized other Greeks). Special privileges were given to those who had three or more sons.

Aristocratic Survivals

While public life in Athens reinforced the seclusion of women, it also threatened the continuance of an aristocratic lifestyle. As has been seen in Chapter 8, the political power of the aristocrat was eroded by the rise of the hoplite. He could no longer prove himself as a heroic warrior and he was no longer distinguishable by his wealth. It was not surprising, therefore, that he focused on his birth. The poet Theognis, a Megaran aristocrat writing about 550 BC, expressed the views of a class who feel themselves under siege. Birth is the defining factor of their status. Those of good birth are described as agathoi, loosely translated as 'the good ones' but with connotations of physical excellence and skill in war. The rest are kakoi, the unworthy ones. The agathoi need wealth because it is the only way that their position can be sustained. For the kakoi, however, wealth is seen as potentially corrupting (the kakos has not been brought up to know how to handle it and certainly he can never use it to transform himself into an agathos). Intermarriage, for Theognis, is anathema. The class of agathoi must be kept pure. Similar attitudes were not unknown among the aristocracy of nineteenthcentury Europe faced with the influx of 'new' money made in trade.

Now that the old Homeric warrior contest was no more, aristocrats became obsessed with proving themselves through other forms of contests, agones. The early sixth century was the period when games spread through the Greek world. The Olympic Games, held every four years, were by then officially two hundred years old but probably much older still. They had originated as a festival to the god Zeus, and the great temple to the god stood in a sacred enclosure around which the stadium, the race track for chariot races, the gymnasium, and the wrestling ring were grouped. Close to it was an ancient altar at which, at the central point of the Games, a hundred oxen were sacrificed to Zeus. The ashes were never cleared away but mixed into a paste, with the result that every year the altar became more monumental.

By the sixth century the Games had taken their final form of nine events, among them running and chariot races, boxing, wrestling, and a pentathlon. The custom of running naked was already well established. The contestants would assemble at Elis, the city which managed the Games, a month before they were due to start, and then two days before the first races a procession would set out for the sanctuary with officials leading the athletes, horses, and chariots. The games would last for five days and were attended by vast crowds. The events were interwoven with contests for heralds and trumpeters, speeches by well-known orators, banquets, sacrifices, and finally, on the last day, a great procession of the victors to the Temple of Zeus where they were given their wreaths of wild olive and showered with leaves and flowers. (The last Games were held in AD 395, but the site had become forgotten after earthquakes changed the flow of the river Alphaeus and allowed it to be buried in silt. Much of the site of Olympia has been excavated since its discovery in 1766.)

In the sixth century the Olympic Games were joined by the Pythian Games at Delphi (in 582), in 581 by the Isthmian Games, and by the Nemean Games at Nemea in the Argolis in 573. Each year there were now one or two major festivals. However, they were, in effect, only open to those with the leisure to train for them. This preserved them for the aristocracy. The prizes were, as at Olympia, always modest -- a pine crown at the Isthmian games, a crown of wild celery at the Nemean. A victory might erect his statue at the games or his city would offer him special honour, with a welcoming banquet and perhaps a commemorative statue as well. (Hundreds of statues still remained at Olympia when the site was visited by the Greek traveller Pausanias in the second century AD.)

Among the poets of this world is Pindar ( 518-438 BC), a Theban aristocrat whose complex but exquisite songs were commissioned by aristocratic victors from throughout the Greek world. Pindar believed the good breeding of the aristocrat made him naturally superior, while victory in the games elevated him further, close to the gods and heroes of the past. His achievements shone with the radiance and magic of gold: 'Gold shines out like a blazing fire in the night beyond any proud wealth: and, if you wish to sing of prizes, seek no other bright star that is hotter in the day than the sun in the golden sky, nor shall we name a contest better than Olympia' ( Olympian I; translation: Ewen Bowie). It has also been suggested that these odes helped to sustain a role for the aristocrat within the city community, as one who brought it glory.

Just as victory brings its divinity so does defeat its shame. In a late ode to a wrestler, Pindar records the humiliation of those defeated:

"And now four times you came down with bodies beneath you,
(You meant them harm)
To whom the Pythian feast has given
No glad home-coming like yours.
They, when they meet their mothers,
Have no sweet laughter around them moving delight.
In back streets out of their enemies' way
They cower, disaster has bitten them."
(Translation: Maurice Bowra)

Back home after the excitement of the games, the aristocracy retreated into the private world of the symposia, drinking parties conducted within a formal and ritualized setting. The symposium had its roots in the hall-feasts of the warrior chieftains, but now they were developed into occasions of dignity and ceremony. Men reclined on couches set around the walls of the dining-room. There were always odd numbers of couches, a minimum of seven, a maximum of fifteen, often with two men to a couch. One man would preside over the proceedings, mixing the wine in a crater and overseeing the transfer of the mixture to the drinking-cups of the guests.

The symposia provided for many pleasures -- food and drink, good conversation, and sex. There were girls, the hetairal, who often had skills in dancing and music and who could provide more in companionship than the prostitute visited for immediate sexual relief. Attendance at a symposium appears to have been a part of the young boy's initiation into the values of aristocratic society. As a sign of his status he was allowed to sit, but not recline, on a couch, and was expected to pour out the wine once it had been mixed. In the same period that games became an integral part of aristocratic life, another form of competition, that of older unmarried men for the sexual attentions of young boys, appears. It is recorded without inhibition or prurience on many vase paintings.

Anthropologists have found pederasty to be a feature of many traditional societies, and it is normally related to the initiation of the boy into the warrior community. In some cases semen is passed on from the older man to the boy as if the strength of the community depends on it being preserved from one generation to the next. Usually the boy is expected to be a passive partner. In Athens, however, the essence of these pederastic relationships is not easy to discern. They certainly took place within heavily circumscribed limits. The erastes, the suitor, approached the eromenos, the loved one, according to the closely defined rituals of a courtship. The boy was expected to behave chastely, to refuse any material reward, and not to submit easily to the attentions of his lover. (This is the ideal put forward in Plato's Symposium.) The sexual element of the relationship appears to have been restrained, and may not have involved any actual penetration of the eromenos. In his essay 'Law, social control, and homosexuality', which deals with the control of sexuality in Athens, David Cohen suggests that the boy, who was not yet fully a male member of the community, might be being used as a substitute for women by older men who had not yet reached the age of marriage. The courtship rituals for boys and for women were, he suggests, very similar. The boy had the right to be protected from unreasonable sexual demands and his family would be vigilant to ensure he was not being abused by his lover.

A distinction has to be made between pederasty, as described above, and homosexuality. For a Greek male to accept the submissive role in a homosexual relationship, or to be paid for this role, was considered so degrading that, in Athens at least, it resulted in the loss of citizen rights. As a surviving vase painting showing the victory of the Greeks over the Persians at the battle of Eurymedon (early 460s Bc) suggests, one of the rights of a victor was to inflict sexual humiliation on those he had defeated.

For the older man pederasty appears always to have ceased with marriage, and older lovers were simply seen as ridiculous. 'What kind of life is there,' wailed the sixth-century poet Mimnermos, conscious above all of his failing sexual powers:

"without golden Aphrodite, the goddess of love. May I die when I no longer take any interest in secret love affairs, in sweet exchanges and in bed. These are the flowers of youth, pleasant alike for men and women. But when painful old age overtakes a man and makes him ugly outside and foul-minded within, then wretched cares eat away at his heart and no longer does he rejoice to gaze upon the sun, being hateful to young men and despicable to women." (Translation: Robert Garland)

The death-rate in ancient Greece, through childhood illness, death in battle, shipwreck, or disease, must have been high, but many Greeks survived into old age. Solon claimed that a man was at the peak of his intellect and power of speech between the ages of 42 and 56. Plato lived until he was 80, while the playwright Sophocles was still writing a year before he died aged 91. The rhetorician Gorgias, reputed to have lived to over 100, attributed his longevity to a meagre diet. (Certainly the normal Greek diet of oil, cereals, and fruit was a healthy one and modern Greeks have the highest male life expectancy in the EC) Some even found joy in being a grandparent. One fifth-century grave-marker commemorating a dead woman called Ampharete is inscribed, 'I am holding the dear child of my daughter, which I did when we both looked on the rays of the sun, and now that we have both passed away, I hold her still upon my knees.'

And so on towards death. For those who died young there was a desire to die nobly so that burial could take place publicly with all due honours. There was a complete contrast with Egypt, where the preoccupation was with the survival of the body and possessions into another world. The Greeks cared more for their posthumous reputations, and the preservation of the body had no importance. The rituals of death were simple and moving. The body was washed and anointed in olive oil, then wrapped in two layers of cloth. A vigil was held at which songs of mourning would be sung and the body taken in procession to the cemetery. Here its final resting place was marked by a stone stele or even a statue of the dead man for those who could afford one.

In the words of an unknown poet:

"Then he will lie in the deep-rooted earth
and share no more in the banquet, the lyre,
or the sweet cry of flutes."
(Translation: Oswyn Murray)

By Charles Freeman in " Egypt, Greece and Rome - Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean", second edition, Oxford University Press, UK/USA, 1996, excerpts pp. 169-185, chapter 11. Adapted and ilustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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