Social Roles in the Household
Social Roles in the Household
WAS THERE REALLY A TROJAN WAR?
Economics. The Greek household was based on a principle of economy: it provided the food, clothing, and shelter necessary to sustain the life of its inhabitants. It was a kind of cottage industry where residents engaged in productive activities such as farming, spinning, weaving, and food preservation that would ensure survival. The household also produced children who would continue to live in it and maintain it for generations. The goal of each oikos was therefore self-sufficiency, the ability to sustain and perpetuate itself for generations.
Women’s Work. There was a strict division of labor within the oikos. In Homer’s Iliad (circa eighth-seventh centuries b.c.e.), the great Trojan hero, Hector, explains to his wife that he must return to the battle to defend his honor and his city and commands her to return to the house: “Go back to our house, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff, and see to it that your handmaidens ply their work also; but the men must see to the fighting....” As this passage reveals, the Greeks believed that war was the province of men, and the household the realm of women. From the Archaic Period on, women were expected to preserve the things within the house and to produce legitimate male heirs; men, on the other hand, spent their time farming, fighting, and in democratic Athens, governing their city.
WAS THERE REALLY A TROJAN WAR?
The ancient Greeks believed that their ancestors joined together sometime around 1184 b.c.e. to sail against Troy under the command of several Mycenaean leaders. According to Greek myth, the war began when the Trojan prince Paris (also known as Alexander) kidnapped Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, during a visit of xenia (guest friendship) and brought her back to Troy. Led by Agamemnon, the brother of Menelaus, armies from several regions in Greece waged a campaign against Troy. With the help of heroes like Achilles, Ajax, and Odysseus, they won the war in the tenth year. A cycle of poems about the outbreak of the Trojan War, the actual battles, and its aftermath, including stories of heroic return, developed in the Dark Age and later influenced Athenian tragedy. Composed before the advent of writing, these stories originally took an oral form, performed by a special class of poets called aoidoi to the accompaniment of the lyre. In the nineteenth century C.E., Hemrich Schliemann, a German businessman with an interest in archaeology, set out to discover the lost Troy. What he found was a city, the modern Husarlik in the northwestern part of Turkey, that consisted of several layers, or strata, showing continuous inhabitation from around 3500 b.c.e. to 550 c.e. Subsequent archaeologists have identified the strata known as Troy Six and Seven as the legendary Troy because they coincide with the date traditionally accepted for the Trojan conflict. Although Schliemann and later archaeologists have not been able to substantiate the Trojan War as an historical fact, the myths surrounding this city played a central role in establishing a sense of cultural identity for the Greeks for hundreds of years to come.
Source: Michael Grant, The Rise of the Greeks (New York: Scribners, 1988).
Wool Working. Women were responsible for caring for all the members of the household—aging parents, children, and slaves—and for ensuring that they were clothed, fed, and healthy. Their main task was wool working, the process of cleaning and spinning wool into a thread that could be woven into a finished piece of cloth. So closely identified was this activity with women that Greek myth represents the Fates as three old women spinning the destinies of mortals. In art, vase painters often indicated female virtue by showing a woman at her loom or engaged in the spinning of wool. In Homer’s Odyssey (circa eighth-seventh centuries b.c.e.), Penelope uses weaving as a means of keeping her suitors at bay: telling the men she will choose a spouse once she has finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, she weaves during the day and unravels the cloth by night, thereby perpetuating a temporal stasis. Women also prepared the dead for burial and assisted in childbirth. A conversation between a husband and his young wife in Xenophon’s Economics describes this division of labor in the Classical Period:
“It will be your job,” I said, “to remain indoors and to send out those members of the household who must work outdoors, and to supervise those who must work indoors, and to receive what is brought in and to allocate what each must spend, and you must decide what surplus needs to remain, and watch that the expenditure set aside for a year is not used up in a month. When fleeces are brought to you, you must take care that they become cloaks for those who need them. And you must take care that the grain that is stored remains edible. One of your duties, however,” I said, “you may find unwelcome, which is, if one of the household slaves is ill, you must see to it that he is looked after.”
Women were entrusted with the major responsibility of managing the household and supervising all of its members. If they failed in this task, the oikos ceased to thrive.
Division of Labor. Many Greek writers believed that men’s and women’s social roles, and the division of labor within the household, resulted from natural differences between men and women. Males, because physically hardier, were considered more suited to outdoor work, while females, because more timid, were thought to have a temperament more appropriate for guarding and caretaking. Individuals who did not conform to these gender roles were looked upon with suspicion and considered socially aberrant. In Xenophon’s words, “It is more shameful for a man to stay indoors than to busy himself with outdoor affairs.” Men with physical infirmities, such as lameness, made up the lowest strata of society because they were forced to do the menial labor of blacksmiths or other craft indoors, where women normally did their work. The Athenians considered the masculinity of such men to be compromised. Thus, in a comic play cobblers are described as having the white faces characteristic of women because they work indoors. Conversely, women who ventured out of doors ran the risk of losing their good reputations, since only prostitutes, normally foreign women, brazenly showed themselves in public. Of course, women from the poorer families could not avoid venturing forth in public, whether to the marketplace to do their shopping or to draw water from the local fountain, because they had no servants.
The Greek House. Because they were confined to unpleasant indoor quarters, Plato describes Athenian women as “accustomed to a submerged and shadowy existence.” The typical Greek house was dark and cramped by modern standards. It was constructed of mud bricks laid on a stone foundation and organized around a rectangular inner courtyard instead of a yard. Most rooms opened on to this inner space, as did a doorway leading to the street. Windows were few, and living quarters were organized away from the street, to maintain privacy. Many houses had a second story that could be reached either by a ladder, or more infrequently, a staircase. Floors consisted of packed dirt. Some sites show sturdier floors where bathing, cooking, and other heavy household chores may have been carried out, although meal preparation could have taken place in the courtyard or on a charcoal brazier.
GREEK TRAGEDY
The greatest contribution of the Athenians may have been dramatic poetry, an invention credited to a man known as Thespis, the first tragic actor, whose name still survives in one of the modern terms for actor, thespian. Around 535 b.c.e., the tyrant Pisistratus instituted a new festival in honor of the god Dionysus, called the City Dionysia, Once a year, in early spring. Athenian citizens, probably only men, gathered to watch a trilogy of tragic plays followed by a comic play on each of three successive days. The festival was actually a competition in which leading poets, like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three best-known tragedians, competed to win first prke. There were also processions, sacrifices and libations, a parade of war orphans, comedy performances, and various types of poetry. The spectators began watching the plays at dawn and stayed all day. They were rude by modern standards; as they sat, they ate food, drank wine, greeted friends, and even threw the occasional bit of food at actors if they thought them particularly bad. The spectacle onstage consisted of three actors and a chorus of about fifteen members, all men, who enacted stories from Greek myth (one play on an historical theme—the Persian War—does exist). Although most of their material was drawn from the heroic past, the tragic poets focused on conflicts between family members and private life, rather than on the glorious deeds of warriors, giving a contemporary meaning to traditional stories.
Sources: Walter K. Lacey, The Family in Classical Greece (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968).
Cynthia Patterson, The Family in Greek History (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Special Rooms. Literary sources attest to a special room for men, the andron, a public room where their drinking parties were held, and to another space reserved especially for women, the gunaikeion. The Athenian orator Lysias, in recording the views of a husband who has murdered his
wife’s lover, provides an example of how the space in a Greek house might have been divided:
I must explain that I have a small house which is divided into two—the men’s quarters and the women’s—each having the same space, the women upstairs and the men downstairs. After the birth of my child, his mother nursed him; but I did not want her to run the risk of going downstairs every time she had to give him a bath, so I myself took over the upper story, and let the women have the ground floor. And so it came about that by this time it was quite customary for my wife often to go downstairs and sleep with the child, so that she could give him the breast and stop him from crying.
Separate Quarters. Although archaeologists have not been able to confirm the presence of a separate women’s quarters, the traditional arrangement has the women upstairs, as far away from the street, and therefore other men, as possible. They may have been located at the back of the house, or possibly on the second floor, but since the houses would have been constructed of wood, there remains no physical evidence of them. Fancy floors with inlaid mosaic pictures typify the men’s quarters, normally a larger room centrally located and abutting the street. Separate living quarters for women were intended to protect their chastity and to keep them away from men as much as possible. Properly secluded females were embarrassed to be seen by men, even their own relatives. It was considered bold and disgraceful for a woman to look directly into a man’s eyes, even those of her husband; instead she was to keep their eyes downcast in the presence of men.
Legal Guardianship. Athenian women of the Classical Period could not participate in politics: they could neither vote nor hold public office; they could not own or dispose of property valued at above one medimnos (about one day’s ration of grain); and they probably could not go to the theater or a trial. Indeed, touching, speaking to, or even looking at a male who was not a family member could incur disgrace, as a passage from a play of Euripides indicates, “it is shameful [for a man] to exchange words with women.” Not only were Athenian women not to be spoken to by men, they were also not to be spoken about. In a famous speech commemorating the war dead, the Athenian statesman, Pericles, urged widows to avoid being the subject of gossip: “Your great reputation is not to become worse than your original nature. For your glory is not to be talked about for good or evil among men.” In the courtrooms of Classical Athens, orators went to great lengths to avoid mentioning reputable women by name. The mere mention of their names in public, among men, brought disgrace upon women. Instead, the orators referred to upper-class women with indirect phrases, such as “the wife of that man’s brother.” Although women lived in the city of Athens, they were not citizens: the names of female infants were not inscribed on the lists of citizens, and they were probably not recorded in the phratry, a political association that recognized males born to its members.
Representation. If a woman had public business to conduct, she had to rely on her kurios (legal guardian) to represent her. A girl’s father was her kyrios until the time she married, when her husband became her legal guardian. His function was primarily economic: he ensured that his ward was properly betrothed and married; he managed her dowry, and acted on her behalf in any financial transaction larger than a day’s ration of grain. He was also responsible for any public representation required by his wife or daughter. In an anonymous dramatic fragment, the speech of a young girl suggests how the kyrios might have functioned
in a public context: “Father, you should make the speech which I am now making. For it is fitting for you, rather than for me, to think and speak where necessary.” The custom of guardianship indicates that the Greeks regarded women as perpetual children who required the guidance and experience of older men. Older women, past the childbearing years and perhaps widowed, apparently enjoyed a measure of independence and freedom not accorded to younger wives. In addition, although the legal process excluded women, recent scholarship on fourth-century Attic oratory demonstrates that women played an important role behind the scenes, generating disputes between men and encouraging husbands and sons to take legal action; by such means, they contributed to the political status of their households.
Women and Religion. Women also played an important public role in religion. At Athens, they participated in civic festivals like the Panathenaia in honor of Athena, and in other religious festivals reserved for women only, like the Thesmophoria, as well as performed specific ritual duties associated with important stages of life, like weddings and funerals. Indeed, representations of women in Attic drama often involve religious activities.
Mourning Rituals. The Greeks believed that women had an innate affinity for weeping and sorrowful songs, as the character Medea remarks: ‘Women by nature are given to weeping.” Because of their role as caretakers of the body, women had a central part in the mourning of the dead. After washing and dressing the corpse, they sang special songs, called laments. The women of the family stood closest to the body, around the head, with men standing at a distance. This spatial arrangement, in addition to the physical gestures accompanying laments, reinforced the association of women with the body and with physical care. As they lamented, the mourners beat their breasts and heads and tore at their clothing and face with their fingernails. More lamentation accompanied the ekphora, the procession in which the corpse was carried out of the house to the cemetery, followed by another round of laments at the tomb. Sometimes a family would hire mourners to honor the dead with a showy display of grief. The rituals surrounding death and burial were perhaps the oldest and least changing art form in ancient Greece. Performed predominantly by women, lamentation represented part of a long tradition that extends even to modern-day Greece. The example of Antigone in classical drama shows how female lamentation affords a means of resisting masculine civic authority. Antigone’s desire to bury her brother, while conforming to traditional expectations of female behavior, completely undermines the edicts of Creon and his regime. Her laments give her a public voice in a culture in which women were normally silent.
Female Chorus. Besides performing laments, women in ancient Greece had other religious roles. Girls took part in religious festivals in both the Archaic and Classical Periods as members of choruses that sang in honor of female deities. In Athens, two to four girls, called arrephoroi, from important families were chosen each year to bestow a new garment on a statue of Athena on the Acropolis, the religious center of Athens, as part of the festival of the Panathenaia. At Artemis’s sanctuary at Brauron girls, dressed in saffron robes, ran races in honor of the goddess that probably functioned as puberty rites. The female chorus in one of Aristophanes’ comedies recounts the ritual activities of their girlhood:
We are setting out, all you citizens, to say something useful for the city, as we well may, because it reared me in splendid affluence. From the moment I was seven, I served as an arrhephoros; then at ten I was a baker for Athena Arkhegetis; then I had my saffron robe and was a bear [for Artemis] at the Brauronia; and then I was once a basket-carrier, a lovely girl with a bunch of figs.
This passage shows the rich array of religious experiences afforded young girls as they grew to adulthood, and their importance for the community. By reminding the audience of their religious roles to underscore the validity of their advice, this chorus shows what a fundamental contribution women made to the welfare of the Athenian state.
Fertility Festivals. As mothers and wives, women also participated in state-sponsored fertility festivals such as the Thesmophoria at Athens. At this festival, married women congregated alone for three days near the Acropolis and performed rites in honor of the harvest goddess Demeter. They fasted, sang songs of lament, uttered ritual obscenities, and ended with a feast in honor of birth. During the festival period women set up their own temporary government, and all public business ceased. Husbands were required by law to pay for their wives to attend. Many of the rites performed by women imitated parts of the myth of the abduction of Persephone by Hades and the eventual reunion of the girl with her mother. In the myth, the chasm made by Hades swallowed up the swineherd Euboleus and his pigs; so, too, the participants of the Thesmophoria threw piglets into caves along with pinecones and cakes in the shapes of phalluses and snakes, all objects associated with fertility. Later, women called Bailers, who had abstained from sexual relations for three days, brought up the rotting remains of the objects that had been thrown into the pits. They shouted and clapped as they entered to scare away the snakes thought to inhabit and guard the sacred pits. The women placed the decaying material on altars where individuals wishing for a good harvest could retrieve it and sprinkle it over their fields. These rituals promoted the fertility of Athens, ensuring abundant crops and the birth of children to Athenian couples.
Priestesses. A few exceptional women could serve as priestesses. A fragment from a play by Euripides shows their importance in the Greek city:
Men’s criticism of women is the worthless twanging of a bowstring and evil talk. Women are better than men, as I will show. . . . They manage the household and preserve within the things carried by sea; nor in the absence of the wife is a house tidy or prosperous. Consider their role in religion, for that, in my opinion, comes first. We women play the most important part, because women prophesy the will of Zeus in the oracles of Phoebus. And at the holy site of Dodona near the sacred oak, females convey the will of Zeus to inquirers from Greece. As for the sacred rituals for the Fates and the Nameless Ones [the Erinues], all these would not be holy if performed by men, but prosper in women’s hands. In this way women have a rightful share in the service of the gods. Why is it, then, that women must have a bad reputation?
THE SORROWS OF ANTIGONE
The characters and stories of Greek tragedy have had an enduring impact on Western literature and art, and probably none more than Antigone (442 or 441 b.c.e.). Sophocles’ play influenced many modern writers and thinkers, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. In the passage below, a guard describes what he saw when he discovered Antigone lamenting over the body of her dead brother, Polyneices:
... then we saw the girl.
She was crying out with the shrill cry
of an embittered bird
that sees its nest robbed of its nestlings
and the bed empty. So, too, when she saw
the body stripped of its cover, she burst out in groans
calling terrible curses on those that had done the deed;
and with her hands immediately
brought thirsty dust to the body; from a shapely brazen
urn, held high over it, poured a triple stream
of funerary offerings, and crowned the corpse.
Source: Sophocles, Antigone, translated by David Grene (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), pp. 465-475.
At Dodona, in the north of Greece, female priestesses delivered prophecies to petitioners. Similarly, at Delphi, the Pythia, priestess of Apollo, foretold the future to denizens from all over the ancient world. Priestesses also performed important rites on behalf of other deities, thereby promoting the welfare of the city. Priestesses had an exceptional status in the ancient world: they remained virgins until their service to the god had ended, often when they were past their childbearing years; they did not have children nor did they marry. In return, they received the esteem and respect of their communities.
Sources
Elaine Fantha, and others, eds., Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
H. P. Foley, “The ‘Female Intruder Reconsidered,’” Classical Philology, 77 (1982): 1-22.
Homer, Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).
M. Jameson, “Domestic Space in the Greek City-State,” in Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space, edited by Susan Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 92-113.
Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London & New York: Routledge, 1989).
Laura McClure, Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
“The Politics of Tragic Lamentation,” in Alan H. Sommerstein and others, eds., Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari, Italy: Levante editori, 1993), pp. 101-143.
“Private Space and the Greek City,” in The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander, edited by Oswyn Murray and Simon Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 171-195.