6
Plato gave thanks to nature, first that he was born a human being rather than a dumb animal; second that he was a man rather than a woman; then that he was a Greek not a foreigner; finally that he was Athenian born in the time of Socrates.
Lactantius, Divine Institutions 3.19
Citizens, Metoikoi and Slaves
Aristotle defined a polis as ‘a compound made up of citizens’, and a citizen as ‘a man who shares in the administration of justice and in the holding of office’.1 The citizenship issue was very clear cut: if you were not a citizen, you always remained an outsider, regardless of whether you were a free man (be this a foreigner [xenos, pl. xenoi] or a resident alien [metoikos, ‘metic’, pl. metoikoi]), a woman or a slave. Statistics are hard to come by, but although it is not the same as the total population of the state (we need to factor in women, children, slaves and foreigners) it is likely that there were never more than 50,000 citizens in Athens.
The concept of citizenship was crucial. Losing your citizen rights (atimia = the deprivation of time) – a penalty imposed at Athens for crimes such as embezzlement, bribery, cowardice in battle, perjury, violence against your parents and anti-democratic activity – barred you from speaking in the Assembly or the law courts, holding any public office, sitting on the Boule, acting as a juror or entering temples or the agora. Also, as Athens’ democracy became more radical, the citizen body became more exclusive. Initially Athenian citizenship depended simply on having a citizen father – Kleisthenes, Themistokles and Kimon had non-Athenian or even non-Greek mothers – but after 451/50 BCE only males with an Athenian citizen father and an Athenian mother from a citizen background were eligible. Very occasionally metoikoi or xenoi could be voted to receive citizenship as a reward for some extraordinary service to the democracy, but this was rare.
Economic distinctions affected the citizens’ political and military roles because there was always a direct link between their wealth and their function in the army, which in turn determined how much political power they might have. Only the very wealthy could afford to equip themselves as cavalry, and the moderately wealthy as hoplites, meaning that the poor majority played a very subordinate role in land warfare. However, once sea power became the basis of Athens’ military might, the poor Athenians who manned the fleet started to play key roles. Democracy and naval empire went hand in hand.
For the Athenian, citizenship brought both inalienable rights and clearly defined duties. The English word ‘idiot’ is derived from the Greek ‘idiotes’ (= ‘private person/individual’, i.e. someone who does not get involved in politics). The right to vote for, initiate and amend legislation, make decisions on war or peace, elect officials and generals, and speak in the Assembly, entailed an obligation to take an intelligent and active interest in the city’s affairs. The privilege of being able to stand for election to the various magistracies, councils and committees, and being paid for service, went hand-in-hand with an acute sense of political responsibility and participation. State subsidies were granted to various groups, such as those who were unable to afford tickets for the theatre during religious festivals, or the orphans and widows of those killed in action and invalided in war, but rich citizens had to perform ‘liturgies’ such as the outfitting, maintenance and command of a trireme, or the funding of a tragic or comic chorus, and everyone had to contribute a war tax (eisphora) in time of emergency (though income tax was not normal). To maintain everyone’s right to national security, citizens were required to fight for their gods, homes and laws; the Hippeis had to provide their own horses; allepheboi(‘ephebes’, boys of 18–20) had to complete military training involving frontier duty; and all citizens between 20 and 60 years had to provide their own armour and equipment, and report for duty with three days’ rations if called up. And, finally, the right to worship obliged everyone to participate in and respect religious observances.
The metoikoi were free Greeks or non-Greeks who lived in Athens or in Attika. After a stay of (probably) one month, xenoi had to register as a metoikos or face being sold into slavery, and even then they had to comply with certain obligations that symbolized their inferior status. Every metoikos had to find a prostates (legal protector) – an Athenian citizen who would undertake legal representation if necessary – and the penalty for neglecting this obligation was also to be sold into slavery. Metics also had to register as being domiciled in one of the demes of Attika, and they are easy to identify on inscriptions: citizens’ names are followed by their demos name; metics’ names are followed by ‘domiciled in the demos of …’; slaves’ names by the name of their master or nothing at all. The accounts relating to work on the Erekhtheion shows citizens (28 per cent of the work force), metoikoi (50 per cent) and slaves (22 per cent) working side by side on its sculptures, here being paid the same rates of 60 drakhmai per figure, or 18 drakhmaifor work on the fluting of the columns:
Phyromakhos of the demos of Kephisia [i.e. citizen] – the youth
beside the breast-plate: 60 dr.
Praxias domiciled in the demos of Melite [i.e. metoikos] – the horse
and the man appearing behind it and hitting it in the flank: 120 dr.
Antiphanes of the demos of Kerameis [i.e. citizen] – the chariot, the
youth, and the two horses being harnessed: 240 dr. …
Ameiniades domiciled in the demos of Koile [i.e. metoikos]: 18 dr.
Aiskhines [i.e. slave]: 18 dr.
Somenes, slave of Ameiniades: 18 dr.2
Depending on their personal wealth, the metoikoi were subject to liturgies in the same way as citizens were, and they were also liable to call-up for the military. They had, on pain of being sold into slavery, to pay the metoikion (‘metic-tax’), which was not much (12dr. per annum for adult males, 6 dr. for adult women living on their own), but citizens did not pay poll taxes like this. They also had to pay tax for the right to trade in the agora. Yet in Aristophanes’ play The Acharnians, Dikaiopolis says that the citizens are the flour of the Athenian corn, the xenoi are the worthless chaff, and the metoikoi the bran that the Athenians incorporated into their bread: nutritionally inferior, but nonetheless essential companions. When Nikias addressed the metoikoi in the Athenian navy on the eve of the Sicilian disaster, he was similarly inclusive:
Through your knowledge of our language and imitation of our manners [you] were always considered Athenians, even though not so in reality.3
For all this, metic status entailed a number of limitations: crucially they had no political rights; they had no right of intermarriage with citizens, which meant there was no possibility (except in the case of a special grant) of obtaining citizen status; the murder of ametoikos was treated as unpremeditated homicide; furthermore, only a citizen could normally acquire, own and alienate land, which meant that metoikoi could not borrow or lend money on the security of land. This limited the types of economic activity that they could get involved in, yet despite this they seem to have conducted a wide range of occupations, and some of them became very wealthy.
An inscription dating from 401/400 BCE listing metics who had performed extraordinary services to the democracy, gives us an interesting snapshot of ordinary working-class people:
Leptines, a cook; Demetrios, a carpenter; Euphorion, a muleteer; Kephisodoros, a builder; Hegesias, a gardener; Epameinon, an ass driver; … Opos, an oil merchant; … On, a nut seller; … Bendiphanes, a bath maker (?); Emporion, a farmer; Paidikos, a baker; Sosias, a fuller; Psammis [an Egyptian name] a farmer; … Eukolion, a hired servant; Kallias, a statuette maker.4
Trying to put numbers on the metoikos population is fraught with difficulty. The only overall figure available comes from the census Demetrios of Phaleron carried out at the end of the fourth century BCE, which counted 21,000 citizens and 10,000metoikoi(although it is unclear whether metic women were included). Demetrios’ Athens was a very different beast to Perikles’, but considering the emotive nature of immigration in modern politics, this still raises the issue of why, if there were about half as many resident aliens as citizens, the Athenians allowed them in. The sources are unanimous: they needed their economic services, the revenues they brought in, and their service in the military. The ‘Old Oligarch’, writing c.430 BCE, has some shrewd insights to make in among his overt prejudices:
As far as slaves and metoikoi are concerned, it is in Athens that you see them behaving with the greatest insolence; you may not strike them there and the slave will not stand out of your way. The reason … is this: if there was a law allowing the free man to strike the slave, the metoikos or, the freedman, he would often have struck an Athenian thinking he was a slave. For the common people there are no better-dressed than the slaves and the metoikoi [But] the city needs the metoikoi on account of the multiplicity of trades and because of the fleet.5
So the presence of metics was actively encouraged, and the citizens tended to regard them not as economic rivals but as indispensable to Athens’ economy.
Another group that was a key element in the polis structure was the slaves. Like every other ancient society, the Greeks treated slavery as a basic fact of life. Slaves were a form of property, and if you could afford to buy them, you did:
Of property, the first and most necessary kind, the best and most manageable, is man. Therefore, the first step is to procure good slaves.6
There is no uncontroversial evidence about the number of slaves in Athens, or about what proportion of Athenians owned slaves, but even the very lowest estimates add up to approximately one slave per citizen. Slaves not only lacked the privileges of citizens, but they had no legally enforceable rights whatsoever: they did not do military service (the Athenians did not use ‘galley-slaves’ – service as a rower was the prerogative of the free man), and, because they were property, they could be bought and sold in a market. They were also tortured if summoned as witnesses in the courts – how else, the Athenians thought, could it be guaranteed that they would tell the truth? However, a slave did have the right of sanctuary if he or she were being ill treated, and could take refuge in a temple, but it was up to the priests to decide whether to send the slave back or sell him or her to a new master.
After Solon banned Athenians being kept as slaves at Athens the main sources of supply of slaves was capture. The women and children of any polis defeated in war were liable to be enslaved (and the grown men put to death), after which they would either be sold in the conquering city, or exported. Slave dealers also obtained prisoners from piracy. ‘Pirate’ is a Greek word (peirates). Plato was said to have been captured and only saved from slavery by payment of a large ransom, and many heroines of Greek New Comedy went down this route into slavery. Generally, though, the dealers acquired slaves from outside Greece, and the words ‘slave’ and ‘barbarian’ became practically synonymous. Both citizens and metoikoi could own slaves, and an inscription recording an auction allows us to see the range of their backgrounds, the high prices that they fetched, and what you could get for your money: 170 or 115 dr. would buy a Thracian male; a Thracian woman cost between 220 and 135; a Syrian up to 301; a Carian 105, a Carian boy 174, or a Carian infant 72; 121 or 161 got you an Illyrian; 144 a Scythian; 153 a Colchian; and 85 a Lydian woman.7 In the same auction, you could have bought two female work oxen for 100 dr., 67 goats and their young for 710, a bed for 9, a table for 4, and a bench for 1 dr. 1 obol. Roughly speaking, a slave represents the kind of outlay that a modern person might make on a car.
Another source of slaves came from the sale or ‘exposure’ of unwanted children, although our sources also mention that the chance to have children is offered to good slaves, who:
will love us the better for it; but those, who through subtlety will endeavour to gain their ends with any of the women without consent, will be always contriving and practising ways to our disadvantage, to compass or carry on their lewd designs.8
Slaves were employed to carry out pretty much every conceivable kind of task, be this in an urban, rural, private or public setting. They often worked alongside their masters, and, in a world without pension plans or an NHS, a slave provided security against old age or misfortune, as one disabled Athenian tells us:
I have a trade, which brings me in a little, but I can barely work at it
myself and I cannot afford to buy someone to replace myself in it.9
More fortunate individuals might own larger numbers of slaves.
The metoikos Kephisodoros had at least sixteen, and Demosthenes’ father had more than fifty, split between two businesses:
One was a sword-factory, employing 32 or 33 slaves, mostly valued
at 5 or 6 minai and none at less than 3. From this he received a net
income of 30 minai a year. The other was a bed-factory, employing
20 slaves, offering a security of 40 minai, and bringing in a net
income of 12 minai.10
The sums of money he is talking about are very substantial: 1 mina = 100 drakhmai (see Table 6.1, below). Some slaves, called ‘pay bringers’ or ‘those living apart’, lived separately from their masters, and were contracted out. These might sometimes be allowed to keep a portion of their wages, although that privilege probably did not apply to the 1,000 slaves who Nikias rented as mine workers to a Thracian called Sosias (presumably a metoikos) for 1 obol per day per man, thereby generating an enormous income of 166 dr. per day for Nikias, and allowing Sosias to undercut the price of free labour by a considerable margin. Slaves might even supervise other slaves, and we hear that Nikias paid the staggering sum of 1 talent to buy a slave to manage a silver mine.11Presumably he was worth it.
It is clear that slave labour was used in farming. Smallholders tended to work their own land, but those with medium-sized holdings, such as Gorgias in Menander’s Old Cantankerous, would have had slaves working alongside them. Larger estates were more dependent on slave labour, but Greece had nothing like the massive latifundia that came to characterize Roman agriculture.
Table 6.1 Athenian currency
|
Currency |
Equivalent |
|
6 obols |
= 1 drakhma |
|
[literally ‘metal spits’, but in practice small coins] |
[i.e. a bundle of 6 spits] |
|
100 drakhmai |
= 1 mina |
|
60 minai |
= 1 talent |
|
Daily pay for jurymen |
= 2 or 3 obols |
|
Daily pay for a skilled artisan |
= 1 drakhma |
The state kept public slaves, ranging from well-educated secretaries, to criers, gaolers, an executioner and a ‘police force’ of Scythian archers. The Scythians became stereotypical buffoons on the comic stage, but in reality they must have had the power to arrest free men. Policing seems to have been a job that no Athenian citizen wanted to do.
At the opposite end of the slave hierarchy came the likes of mine workers. Archaeological excavation of the mine shafts vividly illustrates how cramped the conditions were and how stale the air. When the Spartans occupied Dekeleia in 413 BCE some 20,000 slaves ran away – eloquent testimony to their desperation. Yet, despite these defections, there were no slave revolts in Classical Athens to compare with those of Spartacus in Roman times, or of the Helots against the Spartans, and neither was it expected that there would be: Sparta’s Helots were Greeks enslaved by other Greeks, whereas Athens’ slaves were largely from diverse barbarian backgrounds. Plato felt that this was essential:
The revolts … in Sparta, and in the states where a lot of people speak the same language, have shown the evils of the system often enough … If the slaves are to submit to their condition without giving trouble, they should not all come from the same country or speak the same tongue; they should also be properly treated, not only for their own sake, but more so in the master’s interest.12
Most sources agree: good but firm treatment is what slaves needed, and it is extremely difficult to generalize about slave conditions. The majority of them lived among the general population, and because every slave had a price, the less unfortunate might be able to save up enough money to buy their freedom. There was no special process (‘manumission’ is derived from Latin, not Greek), but ex-slaves became metoikoi, and continued to owe various obligations to their liberators as patrons. Manumission might also occur in their master’s will, and we hear of some slaves being liberated as a reward for giving information about serious crimes or for distinguished service in war. In Aristophanes’ The Frogs, Charon, the ferryman of the dead, refuses to take the slave Xanthias over the Styx because he had not ‘fought in the sea-battle’ – a reference to the battle of Arginousai, which the Athenians won with the help of slaves, who were rewarded with their freedom. In the fourth century BCE consortiums even lent slaves the money to buy themselves out:
Bion, gem engraver, domiciled in the demos of Melite, having ‘defeated’ Khairippos, son of Khairedemos of the demos of Halai, and an association of contributors headed by Khairippos of Halai, [has dedicated] a bowl worth 100 drakhmai.13
Bion’s ex-master loaned him the money to buy his freedom!
The highly charged term ‘freedom’ (eleutheria) became enormously important because it was this that divided the citizens from the slaves. In the Homeric poems the basis of slavery was pure force, and a slave was not necessarily regarded as an inferior being, except in so far as she or he was under someone else’s power: Eumaios in the Odyssey is a man of the highest virtue. But after the Greeks defeated the Persians, they began to consider themselves superior to barbarians, who also readily submitted to absolute monarchy, which the newly democratic Greeks regarded as tantamount to slavery. Freedom made people truly human; forced labour made them little better than animals. Freedom allowed people to develop reason, self-control, courage, generosity and high-mindedness; slaves exercised no mental or spiritual faculties at all and so were irrational, undisciplined, cowardly, selfish and pusillanimous. This led to two conclusions: (a) barbarians were naturally fitted to slavery; and (b) given that it was morally right to help your friends and harm your enemies, it was the duty of the Greeks to enslave them:
So, as the poets say, ‘It is proper that Greeks should rule non-Greeks’,14 the implication being that non-Greek and slave are by nature identical.15
Plato believed that those who are not inhabited by divine wisdom are better off when controlled by those who are, and that if wisdom and control do not come from within, they must be imposed from without. Aristotle argued that good or bad character is not theresult of freedom and slavery, but the cause of it. Those who are slaves by culture are so precisely because they are slaves by nature. Such an ideology makes it seem natural that those who are free should govern those who are not. It is to everyone’s benefit,especially the slaves’:
It is clear then that by nature some are free, others slaves, and that for these it is both just and expedient that they should serve as slaves … Whereas the one must be ruled, the other should exercise the rule for which he is fitted by nature, thus being the master.16
Aristotle does, however, disapprove of instances where people become slaves for the wrong reason (military conquest, for example): this is an unnatural type of enslavement, since those enslaved are not slaves by nature.
So slavery itself was unquestioned and had a central economic and social function in many Hellenic poleis. From the Greek perspective, any moral issues surrounding the ownership of slaves were practically non-existent. One regular modern criticism of Athenian democracy is that it was not democratic: the time that the citizens needed to participate in it was created at the expense of slaves. But the Athenians would not have seen the logic of the complaint because: (a) Athens had always had slaves, but had not always been a democracy; and (b) other Greek states had slaves and were not democracies.
It is similarly objected that Athenian ‘democracy’ was confined to the adult, male, native, freeborn community, a minority of the total population. It was. But equally, an Athenian would have looked at our society and seen people heading off to work each morning and being told what to do by their employers, and concluded that pretty well everyone was a slave. An Athenian aristocrat would take this view one step further. He saw his social and economic activities as a form of self cultivation, undertaken for honour rather than material benefit, and liked to think that what he did was never subject to any form of compulsion. To him, work for any form of material gain was a pointless and disgusting form of slavery.
A Woman’s Place is in the Oikos
The basic social unit of the polis was the oikos (pl. oikoi), ‘household’, although the word can be used both of the building (‘house’) and the people who lived in it. Aristotle tells us that a complete household consists of slaves and free men, and that its key elements – in which the male kyrios (head of the oikos) holds the dominant position – are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children, plus ‘the so-called art of getting wealth’.17
Only a man could be kyrios. At birth an Athenian male had to be accepted by his father and, after the reforms of Kleisthenes, registered in his hereditary deme; a woman remained part of her oikos until she married, after which she joined her husband’s. Even ‘citizen’ women had no political rights, but the Greeks would have baulked at the glib modern assertion that they ‘treated women just like slaves’. That, says Aristotle, is a barbarian thing to do: in Greek society, ‘Nature has distinguished between female and slave’, and the husband’s relationship with his wife is defined as ‘in the position of a statesman governing fellow citizens’, even though ‘the male is more fitted to rule than the female, unless conditions are quite contrary to nature’.18 When Socrates asks a friend, ‘Which are better, your free women or Keramon’s slaves?’ he gets the reply, ‘My free women, of course.’19
On his father’s death, a legitimate son would automatically take possession of the inheritance. If there was more than one legitimate son they shared equally, and a man without a legitimate son might adopt an heir during his lifetime or in his will. This would normally be an adult with Athenian parentage on both sides, usually a relative. A daughter only inherited, in a very technical sense, if there were no sons, sons of predeceased sons, or adopted sons. Such a girl was called an epikleros, but she had to marry either the man named by her father, or her nearest male relative, who would then claim the estate. All this was aimed at preserving the individual oikos, and there was a focus not just on the transmission of property, but also on the heir’s obligation to take responsibility for all members of the oikos.
In order to fulfil what Aristotle calls the ‘procreative relationship’, there would have to be a marriage. The prospective husband was usually chosen by the bride’s father or guardian. Betrothal took place in front of witnesses, and a dowry had to be agreed upon. Husbands were often about fifteen years older than their brides, and since there was a ‘surplus’ of girls as a result of deaths in battle, a dowry was indispensable in order to keep the bride in the style to which she was accustomed. Athenian law stated that thekyrioswho had a woman’s dowry in his possession was obliged to support her; if there was a divorce the dowry had to be repaid, which might provide the woman with a degree of security.
Athenian women could divorce their husbands, but the procedures made this practically impossible if the husband was reluctant. The virtuous and affectionate Hipparete became sick of her husband Alkibiades’ liaisons with various courtesans, but the law demanded that she lodge her petition for divorce with the magistrate in person. When she did this, Alkibiades simply carried her home again. Plutarch comments that this was not regarded as inhuman or illegal.
Indeed, it would appear that the law, in laying it down that the wife who wishes to separate from her husband must attend the court in person, is actually designed to give the husband the opportunity to meet her and recover her.20
The wedding, presided over by the household gods, and attended only by parents and friends, took place when the bride was transferred to the bridegroom’s oikos. Much of our information about weddings comes from special long-necked vessels used to draw water for the nuptial bath, called loutrophoroi. One example by Polygnotos21 shows the bride being greeted by her husband, who gives her a pomegranate, a many-seeded symbol of fertility that emphasizes that the birth and upbringing of children was the main purpose of marriage. Loutrophoroi were sometimes placed on the graves of girls who died unmarried.
An insight into a husband’s expectations from his marriage were, appears in a conversation between Socrates and the affluent Iskhomakhos in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos. Iskhomakhos has not married for love – he wants someone to handle his domestic arrangements, bear his children, and bring them up – but the relationship would not necessarily be loveless. Greek literature is full of tales of the power of love: Hector clearly adores Andromache; there is electrifying passion between Jason and Medea; Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is built around the reciprocal lusts of husbands and wives; and Xenophon’s Socrates seems to understand the demands of motherhood:
The wife conceives and bears her burden. She suffers pains and endangers her life; she gives away the food that sustains her. She goes through a period of labour, gives birth and brings up the child with care … The baby does not know its helper, and cannot convey its needs. She has to guess what is good for it and will satisfy it, and tries to provide these to the full. She cares for the baby night and day laboriously for a long period, with no expectation of reward.22
Perikles, on the other hand, became disenchanted with his wife, arranged for her remarriage by mutual agreement, and developed a relationship with Aspasia that was clearly sexual, but affectionate too:
He took Aspasia and loved her dearly. Every day on leaving for his public business and on returning he would kiss her.23
But Aspasia was not typical. Not only was she not Perikles’ wife, she was a hetaira (= courtesan). Men like Perikles and Iskhomakhos might fulfil their extramarital physical yearnings with other women, or indeed men, if they wanted. One option was a one-off liaison for cash with a porne (prostitute, hence the English ‘pornography’). Alternatively a long-term and exclusive relationship with a pallake (‘concubine’, although the English word has more pejorative tone than the Greek), possibly Athenian, but more likely a foreigner or a slave, might suffice. Or again a hetaira (‘companion’/courtesan) might be a possibility. She would accept successive clients, often two or more at once, and might be a slave belonging to a pimp, hired or sold at a price commensurate with her ‘talents’, a free but poor woman turning whatever tricks she could, or an educated, beautiful and successful creature who could cherry-pick her lovers, and get rich doing so. A description of how prostitutes are treated and presented by their pimp comes from a fragment of the Fair Measure by the comic poet Alexis: short ones have cork soles stitched into their shoes; tall girls wear thin slippers, and hold their heads on one side; ones with blonde eyebrows paint them with lampblack; dark-complexioned ladies are smeared with white-lead; those that are too pale apply rouge; and those that are beautiful – in part – reveal that part naked.24
Greek same-sex relationships are the subject of ferocious scholarly argument, but it is crystal clear that ‘Greek love’ formed an integral part of the accepted pattern of life for men, and sometimes women. But the Greeks did not categorize anyone as ‘a homosexual’. They don’t have a word for this, although they do give us ours: the ‘homo-’ part is Greek (homos = ‘one and the same’), and so is the ‘hetero-’ in heterosexual (heteros = ‘other’). Their vocabulary centres on the erastes (‘lover’) and theeromenos(‘beloved’). The eromenos is generally someone at the specific life-stage between late teenage and early twenties. He was not expected to be liberal with his favours, and making sexual advances towards under-age boys was both morally unacceptable and illegal. Some commentators regard the erastes as a predatory older man looking for anal sex with a submissive young person, but stymied both by the law and strong social disapproval of penetrating a free man of any age, and hoping at best for a bit of excitement between the boy’s thighs. Greek males often had sex face to face, not bending over, and much male-on-male sexual activity was ‘intercrural’ (i.e. between the legs), rather than penetrative. Others dismiss this, seek evidence for a reciprocal same-sex disposition, regard theerastai simply as gawping admirers whose behaviour was totally baffling to the eromenoi, and interpret depictions of sexual activity on vases as warnings against this sort of behaviour. The debate rages on.
Demosthenes famously said:
We have courtesans for pleasure, concubines to look after the day-to-day needs of the body, wives that we may breed legitimate children and have trusty wardens of what we have in the house.25
Iskhomakhos and his wife (who is never named) need legitimate children to ensure the continuing prosperity of the oikos and to care for them in their old age. The importance of a child’s legitimacy is underlined by the fact that adultery with a married woman was both a public and private offence: it is the woman’s marital status that counts, whereas a man’s relations with pornai, pallakai and hetairai do not really affect this issue. However, it is notable that killing an adulterer caught in the act was considered justified, even if the frivolity with which adultery is sometimes treated could indicate a mismatch between the law and reality. In Homer’s Odyssey, when Aphrodite, goddess of love (or, more properly, sex), and her lover Ares are cunningly caught in the act and trapped under an unbreakable net by her husband Hephaistos, much to the delight of the male Olympian deities (the goddesses, ‘constrained by feminine modesty’, stayed at home), Apollo asks Hermes:
‘Would you care, though held in those unyielding shackles, to lie in bed by golden Aphrodite’s side?’ To which the Giant-slayer replied: ‘… There is nothing I should relish more. Though the chains that kept me prisoner were three times as many, though all you gods and all the goddesses were looking on, yet would I gladly sleep by golden Aphrodite’s side.’26
In Aristophanes’ Wealth we hear that money can enable a detected adulterer to escape ritual humiliation,27 and in the The Clouds Pheidippides learns how to escape using the power of words:
WRONG ARGUMENT: Supposing you get caught with somebody’s wife, you can say to him, cool as a cucumber, ‘What have I done wrong? Look at Zeus; wasn’t he always the slave of his passions, sexwise? And do you expect a mere mortal like me to do any better than a god?’
RIGHT ARGUMENT: Ah, but suppose the man doesn’t take any notice? Suppose he starts applying the carrot and ashes treatment? Then you’ll have bugger’s arse for the rest of your life. [To WRONG ARGUMENT] Get out of that one, clever guy!28
The Wrong Argument’s mention of Zeus refers to the frequency with which he succumbed to extramarital sexual temptation, and abused his supernatural powers to have sex with lots of mortal females. The Right Argument’s worries centre on the way in which to humiliate the adulterer, and symbolize his feminization and rape by the husband, his pubic hair was burnt off with hot ash (a similar fate to that avoided by the affluent aduterer in Wealth), and a root vegetable (usually a rhaphanis, a very large radish) was forced up his anus. The Greeks despised any male who enjoyed submitting and called him ‘katapygon’ (‘a down-into-the-arse man’) or ‘euryproktos’ (‘having a wide anus’), the latter term being the one rather misleadingly translated ‘bugger’ here.
Adultery not only potentially confused the issue between the husband’s children and the adulterer’s, it also resulted in legal attitudes that regarded rape as less serious than seduction, on the premise that a woman hates a rapist, but not a seducer. So thepremaritalvirginity of Iskhomakhos’ wife was incredibly important. She was married at the age of fifteen, and had lived an incredibly sheltered existence before then. Iskhomakhos’ advice that she exercise by ‘moving around the house and supervising thehousework’ suggests that her movement outdoors was restricted. Even within the house the women’s accommodation was segregated from the men’s. We hear of women who were so obsessed with their modesty that they were embarrassed even to be seen by their male relatives,29 and that respectable wives did not accompany their husbands to banquets or dine with strangers. This cocooned environment is reflected in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata where the women have difficulty in attending a meeting:
It’s not easy for women to get away. We’re always dancing attendance on our husbands, or getting the maid moving, or putting the baby to bed, bathing it, feeding it.30
The house itself could have had the characteristics of the Hellenistic merchants’ houses excavated on Delos, where the small but tastefully simple ‘House of the Lake’ was fairly typical. You entered from the street by a double door leading into a small forecourt, on the right of which was possibly a thyroreion (doorman’s lodge). A door led from the forecourt to a peristyle courtyard, which was surrounded by twelve columns. It is from here that the house derives its light and air. There are no ground-floor exterior windows, making the house cool, quiet and secure. In the centre of the peristyle was a square space covered with mosaic for the reception of rainwater that was drained off into a cistern below, and surrounding it were the reception rooms, ancillary areas, slaves’ rooms and storerooms. A large room with three doors that opened on to the peristyle was probably the andron (room for entertaining male guests) facing south to give maximum light in winter and shade in summer; beyond it were two smaller rooms probably used as male sleeping chambers. There was probably a kitchen and a latrine off the secondary entrance, and a common feature of these houses was an open recess (exedra), which was probably used as a summer sitting room. The women’s and children’s quarters would be on the upper storey, accessed by wooden or stone stairs.
Within this environment, the standing of ‘Mrs Iskhomakhos’ would increase significantly once she had given birth, preferably to males. As one Athenian puts it:
When my son was born, I began to trust [my wife], and put all my possessions in her hands, presuming that this was the greatest proof of intimacy.31
Gravestones prove that childbirth was very dangerous for mother and baby. The question – ‘What about contraception?’ – reflects modern concerns rather more than ancient ones. The womb was considered to have a life of its own, making it anxious to become pregnant to stop it wandering about inside a woman’s body to the detriment of her health. Therefore sex was the only cure, early marriage was essential, and contraception was less important than conception. However, we hear of a substance called misy (copper ore?), which supposedly had the power to prevent conception for one year. Various general gynaecological remedies may have been effective as contraceptives or early-stage abortificients: sponges soaked in vinegar or oil were commonly used as barriers, and cedar resin was applied to the mouth of the womb. Pomegranate skin, pennyroyal, willow and the squirting cucumber, which forcefully ejects its seeds, could be taken orally or used as pessaries, while amulets and other magical techniques were deployed, along with ‘non-fertile’ sexual positions, although the use of coitus interruptus does not appear in the sources. The ancient physician Soranus recommended sneezing after sex, washing the vagina, and drinking cold water. Since it was erroneously believed that the most fertile time of the month was just before or just after menstruation, using the rhythm method could result in having sex at exactly the wrong time. Although the Hippocratic Oath included a vow not to give a pessary to cause an abortion, other Hippocratic writings discuss both herbal and mechanical methods of achieving the same result, and the first ban on abortion did not appear until c.211 CE in Rome. The exposure of unwanted babies was a common enough alternative to termination.
Girls were taught household skills such as cooking, weaving and spinning in the home; poorer boys generally learned the trade of their fathers. A good citizen was expected to be kalos k’agathos (‘beautiful and good’), which entailed being honourable, physically fit and well mannered, with the Homeric heroes providing essential role models. Enormous emphasis was placed on good behaviour and self-control:
Nurse, mother, paidagogos [a slave responsible for a child’s education, who would later escort the boy to and from school and ensure discipline in the classroom] and the father himself vie with each other to make him as good as possible, instructing him through everything he does or says, pointing out: ‘this is right and that is wrong, this honourable and that disgraceful, this holy, that impious: do this, don’t do that.’ If he is obedient, well and good. If not, they straighten him with threats and beatings, like a warped and twisted plank.32
Formal education, which was neither compulsory nor free, started around the age of six if the parents could afford it. A wealthy boy might be taught at home by a tutor, as were Achilles (in myth), Perikles and Alexander the Great, but most children were taught in groups in schools: the city of Priene had a schoolroom, whose walls still bear the graffiti of the boys who had marked out their territory: ‘the place of Dionysios’, etc. Laws attributed to Solon imposed strict regulations on teachers:
The teachers are not allowed to open the school before sunrise and are bound to close it before sunset … The law is extremely suspicious of allowing a teacher alone with a boy, especially in the dark.33
The basic curriculum at this stage comprised: reading and writing, taught by the grammatistes, which was then used as a vehicle for studying morally inspiring poetry; music, taught by the kitharistes, because the study of rhythm and harmony was thought to make children better adjusted, and because music was a leisure activity fit for free men; and physical education, taught by the paidotribes, which encompassed activities like javelin and discus throwing, jumping, running and combat sports. The latter took place either in the palaistra or the gymnasium and, despite some philosophers’ misgivings (‘the labour of the body prevents the progress of the mind, and the mind of the body34), the whole process was seen as essential to developing good citizens.
More formal training in the duties required of a citizen-soldier took place in the ephebos groups, where, from the ages of 18 to 20, young Athenian men eligible for hoplite status did military service patrolling the frontiers with light-armed troops.
Around the middle of the fifth century BCE, educational practice at Athens was shaken to the core by the arrival of the Sophists. The word ‘sophistes’ originally meant simply ‘wise man’, but gradually it acquired the sense from which we get our words ‘sophistical’ and ‘sophistry’. Our evidence about the Sophists comes primarily from hostile sources, who regarded them as verbal tricksters who charged outrageous fees for turning their pupils into immoral know-it-alls, but their teaching really developed in response both to the practical demands of democratic life and to a new atmosphere of inquiry and scepticism in Greece.
Persuasion had become a crucial art: in democratic Athens it was the key to political power. Protagoras of Abdera said that his students came to him to learn how to become ‘a real power in the city, both as speaker and man of action’.35 So although many Sophists had their own specialities, such as mathematics or astronomy, they were primarily tutors of rhetoric. Like Protagoras, Hippias of Elis and Gorgias of Leontinoi, they tended to be metoikoi, and they had to make a living. What concerned their critics was the fact that rhetoric could easily be used for selfish ends rather than the greater good. At the heart of the whole debate was arete (often translated ‘virtue’, but also covering ‘goodness’, ‘excellence’ and ‘social effectiveness’), which many Sophists claimed to be able to teach, as Protagoras did when Socrates quizzed him about his curriculum:
‘Do I follow you?’ said I. ‘I take you to be describing the art of politics, and promising to make men good citizens.’
‘That,’ said he, ‘is exactly what I profess to do.’36
However, Xenophon felt that while the Sophists professed to direct the young towards virtue, they actually did the exact opposite,37 and Socrates told Protagoras: ‘I do not believe that arete can be taught.’38
This burning issue found its way on to the comic stage in Aristophanes’ scintillating play the The Clouds. Here we meet two personified characters: the Right Argument, who represents the Establishment, champions the old-style of education and the older generation, distrusts the new, and has pederastic obsessions; and the Wrong Argument, who is immoral, clever, subversive, stands for the Sophists and the new, uses subtle arguments to win the debate, and completely converts the Right Argument to his viewpoint. This deliberately manipulates popular (mis)conceptions about the Sophists as people who can win legal cases regardless of right and wrong, engage in trivial and irrelevant scientific research, have bohemian habits, and deny the existence of the traditional gods.
Some Sophists did indeed question the nature of the gods: ‘Concerning the gods I am unable to discover whether they exist or not, or what they are like in form.’39 Many of the Sophists were also at the cutting edge of a movement that believed that human beings ought to be at the centre of our view of the world. Protagoras’ famous statement, ‘Man is the measure of all things’,40 sounds like a manifesto for the whole Sophistic movement, and leads on to a position that rejects absolute truths and embraces relativism: a bucket of lukewarm water feels warmer to a man coming in from the snow than it does to one coming in from the sunshine; beauty is in the eye of the beholder; and both religion and morality are the result of custom and tradition, which vary according to where people live. In The Clouds Aristophanes ascribes such views to Socrates, but this was an outrageous falsehood: he had nothing to do with atheism, physical science or rhetoric, and taught that truth, justice, beauty, arete and so on were non-negotiable and were the same the whole world over. He felt that a person’s duty was to learn what arete was, since once you knew this you would act accordingly: evil was simply due to lack of knowledge. What disturbed him most was the thought of the Sophists’ students exploiting their new-found skills regardless of what was right and good.
When it came to what was right and good for women, Perikles stated the received wisdom on the subject of female arete:
Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men whether for good or for bad.41
Many sources reflect this attitude. Andromache in Euripides’ Trojan Women says, ‘there is one prime source of scandal for a woman, when she won’t stay indoors’,42 and in Xenophon’s Memorabilia Aristarkhos also accepts the convention that his sisters, cousins and nieces, who have come to him in a time of economic crisis, must remain within the house. He is prepared to set them to work making clothes, but only within the confines of the oikos. Apparently:
frowns gave way to smiles, grumbles to contentment. They loved him as a protector, he was satisfied with them as being of practical use. Finally he went to Socrates and told him with a laugh that their only grouse against him was that he was the only person in the house who didn’t work for his food.43
However, the notion that women’s seclusion was total is bogus. There were religious festivals especially for women, such as the Thesmophoria and the Arrephoria. In Aristophanes’ comedy Ekklesiazousai Blepyros wakes up to find his wife Praxagora missing, but is surprised not that she has gone out but that she has taken his clothes. Then she rehearses a speech she is going to deliver to a male gathering, pretending to be a man but praising women in ways calculated to appeal to men, which descends into a series of stock jokes against women, and so reveals some interesting social attitudes:
It will not take me long to demonstrate the superiority of their methods to ours. In the first place, they all, without exception, continue to use hot water when dying wool, as has always been the custom. I mean, you won’t find them experimenting with other methods, such as the use of cold water. Whereas, if the City had some institution that worked well, do you think you’d try to preserve it? You wouldn’t rest, I tell you, till you’d thought up something different. Women still sit down to do the roasting, as they’ve always done. They carry things on their heads, as they’ve always done. They hold the Thesmophoria Festival, as they’ve always done. They bake their cakes, as they’ve always done. They infuriate their husbands, as they’ve always done. They conceal lovers in the house, as they’ve always done. They buy themselves little extras on the side, as they’ve always done. They drink their wine neat, as they’ve always done. They enjoy a bit of sex, as they’ve always done.44
There was a generally held Greek view that women enjoyed sex more than men. Teiresias, the mythical prophet who had been both a man and a woman in his lifetime, asserted that, of the ten units of pleasure involved in making love, the man got one and the woman got nine.
As regards the poorer women, the ones who had no slaves and had to do their own domestic work, help their husbands work the land, or even go out to work themselves: ‘Who could prevent the wives of the poor from going out when they want to?’45 According to conventional values, this was frowned upon, but needs must, and women were of course in demand as dancers, music girls and prostitutes. These were usually from non-citizen backgrounds, but we also have evidence of a wide range of occupations undertaken by poor citizen women, who seem to have found outlets in the retail trade (like Euripides’ mother, if we can believe Aristophanes), as midwives (like Socrates’ mother) or as wet nurses, woolworkers and fruit pickers.
So, although we might expect the men of the privileged classes to be particularly concerned with their honour and public reputation, and their wives to be more likely to be kept secluded to safeguard this, the sources suggest that for ordinary citizens there was a gap between the notion of what a woman’s idealized role should be and what was often the reality. But nevertheless, as Socrates said, it was still definitely better to be a man rather than a woman in ancient Athens, and the Athenians knew it.
Notes – Chapter 6
1. Aristotle, Politics 1275a1 ff., trans. T.A. Sinclair.
2. IG I2 374.
3. Thucydides, 7.63.
4. Tod, GHI II, no. 100. As a metic, Emporion would work the land, not own it.
5. Pseudo-Xenophon, Constitution of the Athenians 1.10 ff., trans. K. Hughes, M. Thorpe, and M. Thorpe, in The Old Oligarch, rev. edn, London: London Association of Classical Teachers, 1986.
6. Pseudo-Aristotle, Oikonomika 1.5.1, 1344a22.
7. R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions: To the End of the Fifth Century BC, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, no. 79a.
8. Oikonomikos 9.5, tr. R. Bradley in The Science of Good Husbandry, or, The Oeconomics of Xenophon: Shewing the Method of Ruling andOrdering a Family, and of Managing a Farm to the Best Advantage, London: T. Corbet, 1727.
9. Lysias, 24.6, tr. W.R.M. Lamb, Lysias with an English translation, London, 1930.
10. Demosthenes, Against Aphobos 9, trans. from J. Ferguson and K. Chisholm (eds), Social and Political Life in the Great Age of Athens, London: Ward Lock Educational, 1978.
11. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.5. 2.
12. Plato, Laws 776c–777d, trans. T.J. Saunders, in Plato: The Laws, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
13. IG2, 2 1 no. 1559, 26 ff. The way the ex-slave’s name is presented indicates he now has metoikos status. ‘Defeating’ your master is the technical term for saying you have secured your freedom and paid back the loan.
14. Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis 1400.
15. Aristotle, Politics 1252a 31ff., trans. T.A. Sinclair.
16. Ibid., 1255b4 ff.
17. Ibid., 1, 1253b13 By ‘the art of getting wealth’ he means the supply of food and other necessities, which he says is necessary and honourable, rather than moneymaking per se, which is unnatural.
18. Ibid., 1252a34 ff., 1259a37 ff.
19. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.7.4, trans. from Ferguson and Chisholm, Social and Political Life.
20. Plutarch, Alkibiades 8.3 ff., trans. I. Scott-Kilvert, in The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives, Harmondworth: Penguin, 1960.
21. Toronto 635, from near Athens, ARV 1031,51.
22. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2, 2, 4–5, trans. from Ferguson and Chisholm, Social and Political Life.
23. Plutarch, Perikles 24, trans. Scott-Kilvert, in The Rise and Fall of Athens.
24. Alexis in Athenaeus 13, 568a-d.
25. Demosthenes, Against Neaira, 122.
26. Homer, Odyssey 8.336 ff., trans. E.V. Rieu, in Homer: The Odyssey, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946.
27. Aristophanes, Wealth, 168.
28. Aristophanes, The Clouds, 1079 ff., trans. A.H. Sommerstein, in Aristophanes: The Acharnians, The Clouds, Lysistrata, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
29. Lysias, Against Simon 6.
30. Aristophanes, Lysistrata 15 ff., trans. from Ferguson and Chisholm, Social and Political Life.
31. Lysias 1.6, trans. S.P. Pomeroy, in Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, New York, 1975. Lysias’ client’s trust was misplaced; she had an affair with a neighbour, and the speaker killed him.
32. Plato, Protagoras 325d, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie, Plato: Protagoras and Meno, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956.
33. Aiskhines, Against Timarkhos 9, trans. from Ferguson and Chisholm, Social and Political Life.
34. Aristotle, Politics 1339a.
35. Plato, Protagoras 319a, tr. W.K.C. Guthrie, op. cit.
36. Ibid., 319a.
37. Xenophon, On Hunting 13.1.
38. Plato, Protagoras 320c.
39. Ibid., fr. 2.
40. Ibid., fr. 1.
41. Quoted by Thucydides, 2.45. Aspasia’s reputation certainly stands in entertaining contrast to the views attributed here to Perikles.
42. Euripides, Trojan Women 648 f.
43. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.7.12, trans. from Ferguson and Chisholm, Social and Political Life.
44. Aristophanes, Ekklesiazousai 214 ff., trans. D. Barrett, in Aristophanes: The Knights, Peace, Wealth, The Birds, The Assemblywomen, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
45. Aristotle, Politics, 1300a, trans. T.J. Sinclair, in Aristotle: The Politics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.