The house and family in ancient Greece

The Greek word οἶκος means “house”. But it also means the whole household. A Greek οἶκος was like a small team. It had the father, the mother and their children. Often a grandparent lived there too. In many families there were also slaves, who worked in the house or in the fields. The animals, the land, the tools and the food in the storeroom were part of the οἶκος as well.

The father was the head of the household. He spoke for the family in the city, in the assembly and in the courts. Women could not vote, so a father, a husband or a brother acted for them in law.

Children were very important. A son would one day take over the land and look after his old parents. A daughter usually married young, often at about fifteen, and went to live in her husband’s οἶκος. The small child, the παιδίον, stayed at home with the mother and the nurse.

From the street, a Greek house did not look special. The walls were made of mud bricks on a low base of stone. There were few windows, and one door, the θύρα, led inside.

Behind the door was the heart of the house: an open courtyard, the αὐλή. Light and fresh air came in from there. Children played in it, women spun wool and wove cloth there, and the family kept water jars there. Many courtyards had a small altar, where the family prayed to the gods.

The rooms stood around the courtyard. Along one side there was often a roofed porch, the pastas, which gave shade in summer. There was a kitchen and a storeroom, and some houses had a small bathroom with a clay tub. Some houses had a second floor. In a speech by Lysias, an Athenian says that his house had two floors, and that the women’s rooms were upstairs.

One room was only for men and their guests. It was called the ἀνδρών, “the men’s room”. Here the father invited his friends to dinner. The guests did not sit on chairs. They lay on couches, each called a κλίνη, and ate and drank lying down. In many houses the andron had a nicer floor, sometimes a mosaic made of small pebbles.

The women’s rooms were called the γυναικωνῖτις. Here women and girls spent much of their day. They spun wool, wove cloth for the whole family and looked after the small children. Rich women had slaves to fetch water and do the shopping. Poor women had to go out and work, in the market or in the fields.

The hearth, the ἑστία, was the fire of the home. It was used for warmth and for cooking. The goddess of the hearth, Hestia, had the same name. Some houses at Olynthus had a special room with a hearth inside a ring of stones, used for cooking.

Most Greek houses were made of mud brick, so very few survive. One city is special: Olynthus, in northern Greece. King Philip II of Macedon destroyed it in 348 BC, and no one built a new town on top. From 1928 to 1938, American archaeologists dug up more than 100 houses there. Many were about 17 metres long on each side, with the courtyard to the south. No two houses were exactly the same.

The writer Xenophon wrote a book in the 4th century BC called Oikonomikos, “On running a household”. In it, a rich Athenian called Ischomachus explains how he taught his young wife to run the house. His house faced south, so it was sunny in winter and shady in summer. His wife looked after the stores, the slaves and the wool, and made sure the food lasted a whole year.

Remember that Xenophon describes one rich man’s idea of a perfect home. Poor families had smaller houses and less help, and everyone worked hard.