Daily life in ancient Athens: a day in the city

Imagine Athens around 400 BC. The city is full of people: citizens, foreigners who live and work there, and many slaves. Their day, the ἡμέρα, starts early.

The first meal is very small. The Greeks called it ἀκράτισμα, breakfast. It was a piece of bread dipped in wine. The name comes from ἄκρατος, which means “unmixed”, because this wine had no water in it. At other times Greeks usually mixed their wine, the οἶνος, with water.

Bread was the most important food of the day. There were two main kinds. Ἄρτος was a loaf of wheat bread. Μᾶζα was a barley cake. In the market people could also buy figs, garlic, vegetables, salt and honey to go with their bread.

After breakfast, boys from families who could pay went to school. They did not walk there alone. A slave called the παιδαγωγός, “the one who leads the boy”, went with them from home to school and back again.

The philosopher Plato tells us what boys learned. First a teacher taught them their letters. Then they read the works of good poets and learned them by heart. A music teacher taught them to play the lyre and to sing. Later a trainer made their bodies strong. Rich boys started school youngest and stayed longest.

Girls did not go to school. They stayed at home with their mothers and learned to spin wool and to weave. This was the main work of most Athenian women, who made the cloth for the whole family. They worked at a tall upright loom, the ἱστός, often in the courtyard in the middle of the house, because weaving needs good daylight.

In the morning the ἀγορά was full of people. The Greeks even said “when the agora is full” to mean late morning. The agora was a large open square with stalls, shops, temples and public buildings. Men came here to buy and sell, to take part in the life of the city, or just to talk with friends.

Many sellers in the market were women. They sold flour, salt, honey, figs, vegetables, perfume and ribbons. The comic poet Aristophanes made up a very long joke word for them: σκοροδοπανδοκευτριαρτοπώλιδες, “garlic-innkeeper-bread-women”. Can you find ἄρτος inside it? Writers also tell us that in rich families a slave girl often did the shopping.

Houses had no taps. Water came from wells or from a public fountain, the κρήνη. People carried it home in a large water jar, the ὑδρία. On older vases we see women filling their jars at the fountain and meeting their friends there. In the time of Pericles, rich families preferred to send slaves for this heavy job.

Around midday came a light lunch, the ἄριστον. In Homer's old poems this word meant breakfast, but in classical Athens it was the midday meal.

The main meal, the δεῖπνον, came later, in the afternoon or evening. Sometimes rich men invited friends to dinner. After the food came a drinking party, the symposium. There the wine was mixed with water in a big bowl, the krater, before anyone drank it.

Not every Athenian lived the same day. A rich citizen, a poor craftsman, a woman, a child and a slave all had very different lives. Most of the books that survive were written by rich men, so historians still discuss how often citizen women really went out. Vase paintings and objects found by archaeologists in and around the agora, such as clay loom weights and broken pots, help us see the lives of ordinary people too.