The aim of this volume is to bring together a series of case-studies in which the archaeological evidence for housing is used to address a variety of questions about Greek households. Our focus is on settlements in Greece itself and Asia Minor during the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods (Map 1.1), and the chapters included here form part of a wider body of research in which new ways of approaching this material are being explored, both to provide fresh angles on familiar questions and to open up new areas for investigation. Also implicit is a testing of different ways of...

A household consists of a group of people sharing a common place of residence, who by virtue of their joint behavior, function as a social and economic unit.¹ With the exception of widows, the unmarried, or cohabiting brothers and sisters, the basic element of the household in ancient Greece was the family, consisting of parents and children together. An exceptional form of household was one that comprised a group, unconnected by kinship, who shared the same architectural and structural dwelling complex (Ault, Chap. 9). In Archaic Greece, a household could have been composed of one or more families, sometimes including...

The Troad is an important source for houses in the Greek world by virtue of its location on the Dardanelles, along the only maritime passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Military operations of Xerxes and Alexander the Great focused attention on the Dardanelles as a border between Europe and Asia, and the strategic importance of the Troad was not lost upon its inhabitants. Cities and territory in the Troad changed hands on numerous occasions in Classical and Hellenistic times, and the political and military instability of the region influenced the character of domestic life there. This chapter focuses...

A common trope in ancient Greek literature is that craftsmen and traders were socially marginalized: that they were not allowed to participate in the political or social life of the city as fully as those who depended on agriculture as their primary source of livelihood. At Thebes, according to Aristotle, there was a law that no one who had not kept away from the agora for the last ten years might be admitted to office (Politics 1277b; compare 1328b–1329b). Euripides’ mother was slandered for being a vegetable seller, and there are innumerable other examples of the low status of...

Since 1931, archaeologists working under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens have uncovered major portions of the Classical Athenian Agora. In the process of revealing its public buildings, the excavators have exposed the remains of residential and industrial districts on the periphery of the public space. These areas, located largely on the slopes of the Kolonos Agoraios and the Areopagus, and in the valley between the Areopagus and the Pnyx, were clearly densely populated from the fifth century onward, and the houses located there offer a view of fifth-century private life that balances the better-known...

Studies of the size and distribution of the population of Athens and Attica have suggested that for most of the fifth and fourth centuries more than two thirds of Athenian citizens are likely to have been resident outside the asty, in dispersed farmsteads and, more frequently, in the rural and coastal villages which formed the core of many of the extra-urban Attic demes (for example Rosivach 1993).¹ While the city of Athens must have played a major role in the political, economic and social lives of some inhabitants of these demes, epigraphic evidence has shown that for others the main...

Already in the late nineteenth and again in the first half of twentieth century, Th. Wiegand and H. Schrader, followed by D. M. Robinson, recognized the importance of artifact distributions for analyzing domestic space in ancient Greek houses.¹ They published ground-plans of houses from Priene and Olynthus, marking find-spots of small finds and pottery (Wiegand and Schrader 1904, 325, with fig. 365; Robinson 1946, pl. 136). Nevertheless, until now very few Greek houses have been published together with their finds material.² And architectural features alone generally do not allow us to clarify the use of every room in a private...

The domestic architecture on the Cycladic island of Delos is often cited as an example of the increased luxury in Late Hellenistic housing compared with its Classical predecessors (Nevett 1999, 164–166). Indeed, evidence found in some of the houses supports the thesis that lifestyles became more lavish in the Hellenistic period. Characteristic of these houses are elaborate architectural features including peristyles, statuary, and rich decoration of walls and floors with painted frescoes and tessellated mosaic pavements. However, an extensive overview of all living units revealed in the French excavation since 1873 offers a more differentiated picture: the spectrum of...

In these two passages from the ancient sources, the father of Cynic philosophy is alternately admired and derided for making his home in a large storage jar. Since it is Diogenes’ own deliberate choice to reject the creature comforts of materialism, Juvenal finds him noble. Lucian, on the other hand, in a tone more satirical than Juvenal himself, finds it ridiculous: giving up the trappings of normal domestic life on the pretence that it will bring true fulfillment is pure nonsense. Nevertheless, Lucian’s Diogenes does indicate three sorts of places where the homeless might be found dwelling, in tomb structures,...

The foregoing nine chapters adopt a wide variety of approaches to the study of Greek houses and households, and are unified by their archaeological perspective. They encompass a range of chronological and geographical contexts, as well as social, cultural, and economic ones. Far from underscoring any sort of homogeneity (whether in terms of ground plans, typologies, or domestic organization as a whole), the overarching themes have been change, diversity, and adaptability. Houses are seen as “meaningful architecture” (Locock 1994), constituting a unique form of “social space” (Parker Pearson and Richards 1994). They therefore merit consideration as an independent and highly...