FAMILY IN ANCIENT GREECE.

The Greek family was monogamous and nuclear, being composed in essence of husband and wife with their children; but Greek writers tend to equate it with the household as an economic unit, and therefore to regard other dependent relatives and slaves as part of it.
The family fulfilled a number of social functions apart from the economic. It was the source of new citizens; in the classical period the state intervened to establish increasingly stringent rules for citizenship and so for legitimacy: ultimately a citizen must be the offspring of a legally recognized marriage between two Athenian citizens, whose parents must also be citizens; this increasingly sharp definition tended to exclude the more flexible unions of an earlier period. It became impossible for an Athenian to marry a foreigner or to obtain recognition for the children of any other type of liaison: the development is essentially democratic, the imposition of the social norms of the peasant majority on an aristocracy which had previously behaved very differently; for the aristocracy had often married outside the community and thereby determined its own criteria for legitimacy.
Indeed Pericles, the author of the first of these citizenship laws, demonstrates the painfulness of the process of adaptation; for, when his legitimate children died of the plague, he was forced to seek from the assembly permission for his children by Aspasia, his Milesian mistress, to be declared legitimate Athenian citizens. Other individuals, often of aristocratic birth, found themselves reclassified in this process as bastards, without either citizenship or rights of inheritance.
For a second function of the family, intimately connected with citizenship, was the inheritance of property. Greek society in general did not practise primogeniture, the right of the eldest son to inherit; rather the property was divided equally by lot between all surviving sons, so that the traditional word for an inheritance was a man's kleros or lot. This is one important reason for the instability of the Athenian family, for each family survived only as long as its head, and its property was redistributed on his death. There were of course countervailing tendencies. The common practice of burial in family plots gave a focus for a group of families over several generations, at least among those able to afford the considerable expense of the land and the impressive monuments which were a feature of these group burials: the phenomenon is perhaps a case of the wealthier citizens imitating aristocratic practices.

Marriage, even at the highest levels, was endogamous, within a close circle of relatives, in order to preserve family property from fragmentation. More generally, for the same reason, it was common to limit family size; and that could often lead to the absence of male heirs through death, and the redistribution of the property among the wider group of relatives, who also had duties to prosecute a man's murderer. But in general there is little evidence for extended family groups being important in the classical age. Another function of the family raises one of the central problems in our understanding of Athenian social values: the family clearly served as the means of protecting and enclosing women. Women were citizens, with certain cults reserved to them and not allowed to foreign women, and they were citizens for the purposes of marriage and procreation; but otherwise they lacked all independent status.
They could not enter into any transaction worth more than one medimnos of barley; they could not own any property, with the conventional exception of their clothes, their personal jewellery and personal slaves. At all times they had to be under the protection of a kyrios, a guardian; if they were unmarried, their father or closest male relative, if they were married their husband, if widowed their son or other male relative by marriage or birth. At all times the woman belonged to a family and was under the legal protection of its head.
The two types of occasion when a woman could be involved in property transactions illustrate the nature of this protection. The first concerns the dowry: it was the duty of a kyrios to provide a dowry for all women in his family: the lack of a dowry demonstrated extreme poverty, and might even lead people to suspect that no legal marriage had in fact taken place. The formula in the betrothal ceremony was:
"I give this woman for the procreation of legitimate children.
I accept.
And (e.g.) 3 talents dowry.
I am content".

Wedding Procession on an Athenian vase by the Amasis Painter, about 540 B.C.

Marriage was deemed to have taken place on receipt of the dowry. The dowry accompanied the woman, but did not belong to her: it was in the complete control of her husband; but in the case of divorce or the death of the husband it could be reclaimed along with the woman, and was only really transferred once the woman had a male heir to inherit, and to be her kyrios. A woman could also be the carrier of property in the absence of a will and of male heirs in the appropriate degree. In this case the woman became an epikleros, or heiress: her name was publicly proclaimed in the assembly, and she and the property were adjudged to the closest male relative of the deceased who was prepared to marry her, often her paternal uncle.
This was a well-established procedure: soldiers were given special leave to press their claims; a claimant was entitled to divorce his wife in order to marry the heiress, and could even take the heiress from her husband if she were already married, provided the marriage was childless: 'many who were married have had their wives taken from them', says one orator in a speech in which he explains that his father did not claim an inheritance belonging to his mother, for fear that one of her relatives would then seize her in marriage. A system of law and private property reflects the prejudices of the society which creates it; the Athenian system was unusual in ancient Greece merely in being more systematic; but it was possible for other cities to develop differently.
In Sparta, for instance, the freedom of women was notorious, and much disapproved of by those very philosophers who idealized Sparta otherwise; in Sparta too women could inherit land in their own right, until by the third century the fact that two-fifths of the land was in their hands provoked a political revolution. The status of women in Athens does perhaps require explanation.
There are two different strands in the Athenian attitude to women. The first is the effect of democracy on the status of women. Aristocratic women at least had been freer in earlier times, but the coming of democracy meant the imposition of the social norms of the majority. Many peasant societies combine a high value placed on women with mistrust of them. Semonides of Amorgos in the sixth century described the appalling varieties of women that the gods had made to be a burden on men, in terms of their animal characteristics; only one type is any good, and she is like the bee: 'She causes his property to grow and increase, and she grows old with a husband whom she loves and who loves her, the mother of a handsome and reputable family. She stands out among all women, and a godlike beauty plays around her. She takes no pleasure in sitting among woman in places where they tell stories about love' (83-93).
Such attitudes compound fear of the irrational and passionate nature of women with an exaggerated belief in their value and the importance of protecting them from the public eye. In agrarian societies these attitudes are held in check by the need for women's labour in the fields; with the advent of urban life the woman is confined to the house, and increased wealth brings with it aspirations to liberate her even from domestic duties. In a dialogue of Xenophon, Socrates confronts the problem of a friend "who, because of the political turmoil, finds himself with fourteen female relatives living in his house, all well brought up and therefore unused to any form of work: Socrates persuades him that he should nevertheless provide them with suitable work such as spinning; their tempers are much improved, and the only problem is that they now complain of the idleness of their protector- but, says Socrates, his duty is to protect, as the sheepdog cares for the sheep (Xenophon, Memorabilia 2. 7).

At a quite different level similar attitudes emerge among intellectuals. Philosophers (with the honourable exception of Plato) agreed that women are less endowed with reason than men-as Aristotle put it, 'the deliberative faculty is not present at all in the slave, in the female it is inoperative, in the child undeveloped'; the family is a natural relationship involving ruler and ruled and 'as regards male and female this relationship of superior and inferior is permanent'. Tragedians and comic poets may portray women with greater vividness and character than men: the most powerful figures in Greek tragedy are women. But the reason for this is precisely that women are believed to be more liable to extremes of emotion and to consequent violent actions. The tragedians show great insight into the predicament of women: But now outside my father's house I am nothing; yes, often I have looked on the nature of women thus, that we are nothing.
Young girls, in my opinion have the sweetest existence known to mortals in their fathers' homes, for innocence keeps children safe and happy always. But when we reach puberty and understanding, we are thrust out and sold away from our ancestral gods and from our parents. Some go to strangers' homes, others to foreigners', some to joyless houses, some to hostile. And all this, once the first night has yoked us to our husband, we are forced to praise and say that all is well. (Sophocles, Tereus, fr. 583) But these very insights are embedded in stories of appalling violence: in this lost play of Sophocles, Procne is preparing to kill her son in revenge for her husband's seduction of her sister. In the religious sphere, too, women were seen as different from men in their suitability for the blacker, less rational, more orgiastic aspects of belief and ritual.
Despite the many signs of empathy with the female condition, the result was a reinforcing of social attitudes that women needed protection from themselves and from the outside world.
Such attitudes relate only to Athenian women: For this is what having a woman as a wife means, to have children by her and to introduce the sons to members of the phratry and the deme, and to betroth the daughters to husbands as one's own. Call-girls (hetairai) we have for the sake of pleasure, mistresses for the daily refreshment of our bodies, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to look after the house faithfully.
Thus did an Athenian speaker appeal to an Athenian jury to remember the distinction between Athenian women and others. It is an outrage if a stranger enters a house where women are or may be present, unless invited by the master. The layout of Athenian houses in fact suggests even within the house a strict segregation between women's quarters and the public rooms for men: in larger houses the women's quarters are situated away from the street entrance which is well guarded by a slave porter. In the country the characteristic shape of the farmhouse is a courtyard where the women and children live during the day, surrounded by single storey rooms; in one corner stands a strong storage tower, into the upper floors of which the women retreat if strangers come. In smaller city houses the men's quarters are on the ground floor, the women's on the upper: in a famous murder trial the defendant claims that his young wife persuaded him to swap sleeping quarters so that she would be near the well to wash the baby-and so that her lover could visit her. But how had this lover even made contact with a married woman? He had noticed her at a funeral, he had bribed her slave-girl to run messages, he had met her under cover of the women's festival of the Thesmophoria: only on such occasions would she have left the house. It was of course legal for the husband with a gang of neighbours to kill the lover caught in the act: the prosecution could only claim that the murder was planned beforehand for other reasons. Women normally left the house accompanied; and the fact that a woman worked in public was either a sign of extreme poverty or evidence that she was not a citizen.
It is not easy to come to terms with such attitudes, however common they may be in peasant societies, if only because we idealize the Greeks as the originators of western civilization. But we should remember that (polygamy apart) the position of Athenian women was in most important respects the same as that of the 200,000,000 women who today live under Islam, and that in the history of the world only communism and the advanced capitalist societies have made any pretence of treating men and women equally. The consequence of these attitudes in Athens, combined with the importance placed on male social groupings, was to establish public life as the centre of the polis: the balance in ancient Athens was shifted away from the family and towards the community: hence the magnificent festivals and displays, the great public buildings for religious and political purposes. It was surrounded by these buildings, in the agora, that the Athenian male spent his time.

In contrast his home was mean and unimpressive: it was not safe in a democracy to display a lifestyle different from that of other citizens, and anyway a man's life was lived in public not in private. Here lies a fundamental reason for the achievement of Athens in exemplifying the ideal type of the ancient city; the erosion of the family was the price to be paid for her success in escaping from the ties of tribalism and kinship to create a new type of social and political organization.

 By Oswyn Murray in the book "The Oxford History of the Classical World" -Greece and the Hellenistic World v. 1 , Edited By John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, Oswyn Murray,Publisher by Oxford University Press; New edition, 1988. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa