Daily Life in Greece at the Time of Pericles

Abstract

PREFACEThe Greeks - not only the inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, but also those settled in Asia Minor, Sicily, and places as remote as Marseilles or the cities round the Euxine (Black Sea) - all recognized their common racial kinship, and felt bound by a deep-rooted unity of language (despite various local dialects), religion, and mores in contradistinction to the world they termed 'barbarian' - that is to say, all those nations that spoke languages other than Greek. Yet the name of Greece - or rather, Hellas - never had any true political significance in antiquity; Greece, properly speaking, never formed a single 'state' until subjugated first by Macedonia and latterly by Rome. Though three cities with more strength and ambition than the rest - Athens, Sparta, and Thebes - did in fact sway the country's destiny through their successive hegemonies, the confederations which they formed were of short duration, and, most important, did not absorb by any means every city in Greece. Each city, however small its territory, was determined to remain absolutely independent, and possessed its own political, religious, and legal institutions; very often, indeed, it also had its own coinage and system of weights and measures. In the midst of such diversity, and confronted with such a scatter of sovereign states, how can one set about describing daily life 'in Greece'? The existence of the Spartan, enrolled for pre-military training at the age of seven, and kept under a most rigorous discipline of life till he reached sixty, differed radically from that of the Athenian, whose upbringing was more liberal, and whose obligations, in consequence, less exacting. We therefore have no option but to select - though our selection is to a great extent dictated by what literary and archaeological evidence remains available. Almost all the authors from the classical period whose works we still possess were Athenians; and obviously the bulk of the information they provide us with will concern their fellow-countrymen. As for the ruins that have been brought to light by the spade of the archaeologist, they confirm Thucydides' prediction (1.10.2) as to the relative impressiveness of the two cities in after ages; here, too, Athens is much luckier than most other Greek cities, Sparta in particular. It is true that as far as private houses are concerned, the site of Olynthus, in the Chalcidic peninsula, is far richer than that of Athens: but except for the ground-plans of their homes, what do we know about the daily life of the Olynthians?So it is primarily Athens, and the Athenians, that I shall be discussing in the present volume, though this will not prevent me from glancing at other cities intermittently by way of comparison. Besides, even in antiquity, Athens was already regarded as the Greek city par excellence.As for the period to be covered, I have found it impracticable to restrict myself to the years of Pericles' administration (from about 450 to 429 bc): too many crucial documents in my chosen field are of earlier - or, more often, later - date than this brief epoch. Even if we extend it to take in the fifty years - Thucydides' pentekontaetia - from the Battle of Plataea (479) to the death of Pericles (429), we should still have to exclude the vital testimony of Aristophanes and the fourth-century orators. I have at times even cited authors from the third century; but my general rule is to use the 'Periclean Age' , in its widest interpretation, as my chronological framework, defining it (conveniently if arbitrarily) as beginning circa 450 bc, after the major crisis of the Persian Wars, and ending a century later (350) before the Battle of Chaeronea in 338. Chaeronea ushered in the era of Macedonian domination, and was thus the prelude to those numerous radical changes, both political and social, which characterized what we now call the Hellenistic or Alexandrian Age. Athenians