Nineteen years after leaving his home to fight in a foreign war, a man returns to his native island. After a decade of testing adventures that have deflected him from his homeward course, he is weary and yearning for peace, but the countryside is shrouded in mist and at first he does not recognize it. "What part of the world is this?" he asks a young shepherd, and it is only when the shepherd reveals himself to be a goddess in disguise that the returning warrior is persuaded of the truth: The island is indeed the realm over which he once ruled as king. "And now joy came at last to the gallant, long-suffering Odysseus. So happy did the sight of his own land make him that he kissed the generous soil."
The long and interrupted journey home of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, after the Trojan War is the subject of the Odyssey, one of the earliest masterworks of world literature, composed by the ninth-century-BC Ionian poet known to succeeding ages as Homer. But the landing of Odysseus on Ithaca occurs just over halfway through the tale, and is by no means the end of the hero's adventures. His kingdom is in danger, his faithful wife, Penelope, is beset by jealous suitors, and the story has several twists and turns to come before Odysseus's authority is finally reestablished.
Entering his palace in the guise of an anonymous beggar, Odysseus is recognized only by his former nurse — who catches sight of a familiar scar on his thigh — and by his now - ancient and flea - ridden hunting dog, which pricks up its ears as its master approaches. Odysseus strings a mighty bow that each of the greedy suitors in turn has failed to bend, and he and his son Telemachus wreak vengeance on the suitors until "they lay in heaps in the blood and dust, like fish that the fishermen have dragged out of the gray surf in the meshes of their net onto a bend of the beach, to lie in masses on the sand gasping for the salt seawater till the bright sun ends their lives." Then comes the reunion with Penelope, who still cannot reconcile the appearance of the returned Odysseus with the image she retains of her husband as he set sail from Ithaca almost twenty years before. Odysseus convinces her, however, by describing in detail their marriage bed, constructed around the trunk of an olive tree in an inner court, knowledge that only he could have possessed. Odysseus and Penelope tearfully embrace, and "glad indeed they were to lie once more together in the bed that had known them long ago."
The consummation of Odysseus's homecoming has an inevitability that gives shape and meaning to all of the events that have gone before. In retrospect, the apparently random adventures of the cunning and footloose hero are seen to be stages along the way to the only possible destination. The story as a whole reveals itself as a celebration of the universal experience of home — a place, that is, to which a person's social and moral identity is intimately linked, a place where a person knows that he or she most truly belongs.
That place, of course, need not be a royal palace built of stone of the kind to which Odysseus returned. At least since the time of Homer, the physical structure of home has varied widely among different societies, and among different groups in any one society. Most inhabitants of ancient Egypt lived in impermanent houses built of sun-dried mud bricks; in China, Japan, and the well-forested countries of northern Europe, simple wooden dwellings have, been home to the majority of the population through much of recorded history. By the late twentieth century a city could present a miscellany of homes within a few square miles, ranging from luxury apartments in high - rise concrete buildings to shantytowri huts built of corrugated iron sheets. And for many people the idea of home is not necessarily restricted to the particular building or location they happen to occupy: Nomadic tribes may regard as home the vast tract of territory over which they range, while exiles and other displaced people may dream of a homeland they will never again see. It is precisely because of this variety of physical structures, however, that the details of any one type of dwelling are so significant. Although the meanings of home are complex and wide-ranging, most people's mental image of home is highly specific: It is an open blue door in a weathered brick house with a garden to the side, the smell of chicken roasting in the oven, the voices of neighbors through a common wall. Such details testify to the degrees of prosperity, comfort, and privacy taken for granted by a building's occupants. And the alterations that are made from one generation to the next — a garage added on, the kitchen extended to accommodate a washing machine and other appliances — are a concrete record of the development of people's aspirations and conceptions of their own identity. Over a much longer timespan, changes in the physical setting in which men and women carry out their domestic activities demonstrate the human progression from the status of — in Shakespeare's phrase — "poor bare forked animal" to modern-day affluence. The rate of such changes has varied at different times and in different parts of the world. For Homer's audience in the ninth century BC, Odysseus's stone palace represented a degree of luxury they could only dream of: Most people in the Mediterranean lands lived in simple wooden huts that were scarcely more than shelters from the elements. Yet while similar material levels remained the norm in most of the rest of the world, the Greeks and the Romans developed domestic lifestyles to a peak of sophistication that, following the demise of the Roman Empire, would not be equaled in the Western world for another 1 ,500 years.
In the Europe of the Middle Ages, the majority of people counted themselves lucky if they could feed, house, and clothe themselves and rear enough children to look after them in their old age. As the climate improved and trade expanded, the fortunate few built homes that befitted their new prosperity, and after the European discovery of the New World this wealth fed through to other social strata. The emergent middle classes could afford to indulge their appetites for new pleasures and fashions, setting a pattern that nineteenth-century technology made available to increasing numbers. So pervasive was the appeal of such Western models in the late twentieth century that domestic arrangements had become ever more standardized across the world: American business executives who visited their counterparts in Japan, for example, may have felt comfortably at home, the physical evidence of their cultural differences having been largely smoothed away. Largely, but not completely. And the longer the Americans stayed in Japan, the more they may have become aware of particular features of the Japanese households, and of unfamiliar social customs, that expressed different relationships to the outside world and among the family members from those they were used to. Most likely, however courteous the hosts, the Americans looked forward to eventually returning to their native land.
The stone palace to which Homer had Odysseus return at the end of his travels was an early literary version of a modern Hollywood film set: a fictional edifice larger than life in every respect, yet still recognizable and appealing to its audience. In real life, conditions for many contemporary Greeks were hard: Their lives were a constant struggle to produce enough food to support themselves against the handicaps of almost - unarable land, barren hillsides, and hot, rainless summers. The way most Greeks lived was reflected more realistically by another poet who wrote more than a century later than Homer. Hesiod, in his poem entitled Works and Days, described a harsh world in which famine was a constant threat for the poor farmer; Hesiod talked in longing terms of a golden age when life was comfortable for all. Part of the appeal of Homer's poem lay in a similar nostalgia. Odysseus's residence embodied folk memories of the palaces of the Mycenaean kings who had ruled in southern Greece in the last centuries of the second millennium BC. Homer was also concerned mainly with the exploits of the aristocratic warrior class — Achilles, the hero of his poem the Iliad, imagined the life of a landless laborer as the most miserable existence possible. Yet that existence, rather than the lives of the noble warriors, would have been closer to that of Homer's audience. The allure of Homer's description of such grand settings as Odysseus's palace depended on the stark contrast between the glamour of myth and legend and the meager dwellings to which his listeners returned after the tale was told.
Most people in Europe at the beginning of the first millennium BC lived in simple square, rectangular, or round huts built of wood; stone was employed only in parts of southern Europe and Scandinavia where timber was scarce. Many among them were skilled in working these materials, and also in making pottery and in smelting iron to fashion tools or weapons. The majority lived off the land, growing just enough crops to feed themselves and their dependents. But the impact of cities — pioneered in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3000 BC — was beginning to be felt, and it was the development of urban ways of life in the Mediterranean region that was to promote advances in domestic conditions far exceeding anything even Homer had imagined. Only cities offered an alternative to backbreaking labor on the land; only cities enabled ordinary men and women to invent for themselves more varied, comfortable, and rewarding lives.
In Greece, as Iron Age villages coalesced into larger centers, these urban concentrations further developed into the key institution of the classical world — the polis, or city-state. In its heyday, between about 600 and 400 BC, the city-state spawned most of the extraordinary intellectual, cultural, social, and political achievements of Greek civilization. In turn, these achievements directly shaped all of Western civilization until the influence of Rome gave way to Christianity in the middle of the first millennium AD. For more than ten centuries, a great many features of everyday life remained largely unchanged.
The polis rolled into one all the attributes of village, city, community, country, and nation-state. At its heart was a town or small city, probably surrounded by a defensive wall, but the polis also comprised the surrounding hinterland and outlying villages. Thus the polis of Athens, for example, encompassed the whole district of Attica, an area of some 965 square miles, and its population by around 400 BC may have numbered as many as 350,000.
By the fifth century BC, Athens was effectively the cultural capital of Greece. Yet there were many other important and distinctive poleis. Some — such as Corinth, strategically placed on the neck of Peloponnesus — were commercial and trading centers. Others grew up around the manufacture of special products. Sparta, a law unto itself, was distinguished by its exclusively military character: Every citizen was a soldier and all other callings were forbidden. In fact, Greece was not a single nation at all: Hellas, the word that referred to the Greek mainland territories as a whole, had emotional but no political meaning, for each polis functioned as an independent state, as often as not at loggerheads with its neighbors.
For all their differences, most poleis shared a similar plan. Outside the walls were cemeteries, sacred groves and shrines, and small farms and gardens. Those closest to the walls were owned and worked by citizens living within; farther away would be the plots of hard-working peasant farmers. Inside the walls, the traditional heart of the polis was the acropolis, a defensive retreat on a convenient hill that frequently also boasted a temple or two, especially to a deity of local importance. The hill was also a favorite place for the open-air Greek theater, the slope forming a convenient base for the banked seating. But the social focus of the entire community of the classical polis was the agora, a large open space in which were concentrated all of the many facets of Greek public life. It was often approached down a flight of steps that doubled as seats for an assembled crowd.
The limitations of Greek technology meant that large buildings like assembly halls were rare. But the lack of indoor gathering places had little effect on everyday life, because from first light until dusk the Greek citizen lived largely out-of-doors. All of his daily activities — meeting friends, shopping, exercising in the gymnasium, attending religious festivals, running the affairs of the polis — took place in the open air. The warm climate of Greece made possible something that was wholly impractical in other parts of the world: Public affairs were conducted in public space, not in the seclusion of a council chamber or chieftain's hut.
Greek cities were always compact, usually for defensive reasons, and housing districts were squeezed into the space left around the all-important public areas, graphically reflecting the priorities of Greek thinking: the political and social first, the domestic last. The restricted city sites produced the incidental effect that different classes lived closely together; there was insufficient space to allow the rich to escape to exclusive districts.
Houses were built in blocks, typically approximately 100 feet deep and 150 feet or more long, and were undistinguished from the outside. Most ordinary houses were constructed of dried mud bricks reinforced with timbers, and they were joined to their neighbors in continuous rows. This configuration could have unexpected benefits: In 431 BC, according to the historian Thucydides, a contingent of enemy soldiers infiltrated the central Greek city of Plataea by night; relaxing in an open square, the invaders were overcome by Plataean defenders who had secretly advanced "by knocking holes through the party walls of the houses, that they might not be seen walking through the streets."
Each home usually had only one entrance, commonly facing south, which in all except the smallest houses led into a small cobbled courtyard. Here there would be a domestic altar, and usually a large earthenware pot or stone cistern for water storage. External windows were small and high up in the walls of the rooms. These were often fitted with wooden shutters, which, in the deforested lowlands of Greece, were considered precious possessions. When an Athenian citizen moved from a house, he took his doors and shutters with him.
Upper stories were reached by an external staircase and probably housed bedrooms under their pitched roofs of terra-cotta tiles. The removal of these tiles was a favorite method of housebreaking; another was to tunnel under the very shallow wall foundations, a practice celebrated in the Greek word for burglar, which literally translates as "wall excavator."
The often dull and uniform external appearance of Greek houses was deceptive. No two had the same internal organization. As in all times, the rich were able to command more space, and hence might have a dozen rooms instead of the more usual five or six. They also had more scope in the choice of materials and decoration: stone instead of burned brick, cemented or even mosaic floors instead of tamped earth, and painted walls. But even the homes of the affluent were sparsely furnished: One room suitable for entertaining guests might be lined with simple benches, another would contain a bed, yet another a brazier or stone hearth.
All Greek homes had a separate gynaeceum, or women's quarters. Depending on the size of the house, this consisted of one or more rooms set apart from the guest rooms and the more public area at the front of the house. The separation was nominal rather than the result of special walls or locked doors, but its effect was the same. One reason for the gynaeceum might have been to monitor the behavior of the female slaves who lived there — and to control male access to them. But its principal inhabitant was the woman of the house. Here was where the cloistered wives of Greek citizens were expected to spend a large part of their time.
Almost without exception, citizenship — which in a democratic polis such as Athens included the right to elect and serve as leaders, and to sit in the public assembly — was open only to freeborn men. Women had to content themselves with being the relatives of citizens, enjoying a social status similar to that of their fathers or husbands — but with no political rights. The lot of slaves was even more circumscribed: They, along with beggars, were at the very bottom of both the Greek and the Roman who composed the bulk of the citizenry, and the laboring classes of artisans, trades-people, and manual workers.
Although slaves made up much of the work force, there were large numbers of free men and women who worked just as hard, and slaves were probably of secondary importance economically. Nevertheless', they were considered a social necessity, as much a part of the natural order of life on earth as animals and birds. To the Greek way of thinking, the idea of a state without slaves was incomprehensible: The leisure that was deemed appropriate to the life of the upper classes would not have been possible, nor would so many citizens have been able to participate in government by attending the public assembly. The slave trade flourished for more than 1 ,000 years, many of the victims being prisoners of war and other captured foreigners, although large numbers were natives of Greece, born into slave families and destined to follow the occupations of their forebears.
One estimate suggests there was one slave for every two free adults in Athens by about 400 BC. Many poorer people had no slaves at all. The small farmers, for example, found it cheaper to hire freeborn day laborers for seasonal work than to feed a slave all year round. Some slaves developed skills and worked as artisans, and a minority worked in the employ of the state — for example, as street watchmen or as oarsmen in naval galleys. But most acted as domestic and personal servants, and in Greece, female slaves — usually destined to be maidservants, housemaids, and concubines — were more plentiful than males.
Whatever their work, slaves were subject to the absolute authority of their masters. Two particularly unfortunate groups were the helots — Sparta's enslaved subject population acquired by military conquest—and the mineworkers of Athens. The former were treated with great brutality; the latter were permanently shackled with leg irons, and frequently died in rockfalls or from suffocation in poorly ventilated tunnels. Those who attempted to escape risked flogging — a favorite all-purpose punishment for the errors of slaves — and branding on the face.
In the more intimate surroundings of the home, slaves were treated less like animals or inanimate possessions and more as children. The Roman master actually gave them children's names; Greeks preferred simply to call them "boy" or "girl." If they were lucky and served well they might be freed; occasionally, loyal favorites were given grants to start them on a new life.
The wealthy owned enormous numbers of slaves as a sign of social status. Maintenance costs were minimal: A slave's diet was composed of the poorest food - barley bread, cornmeal, salted fish, and occasional leftovers from the master's table. This frugal diet tempted some slaves to seek out other sources of food: Those working in bakeries are known to have worn special collars designed to keep them from sampling the bread.
Within prosperous households, slaves performed most of the menial domestic tasks, but the opportunities for women to indulge their leisure were nevertheless extremely limited. The prime duties of a respectable Greek woman were to manage the house and to raise children. Wives were therefore required to stay at home, where their pale complexions — often prized as a sign of gentility — were in stark contrast to the tanned features of their outdoor-living husbands. They did not eat at the same table as the men and generally kept to the women's quarters.
Women managed nearly all aspects of the Greek household economy. They produced both food and clothing at home: Grain was pounded and milled; yarn was spun, dyed, and woven into cloth; milk from sheep and goats was made into cheese. The Greek wife was also expected to cook and clean for her family, although if her husband was reasonably well off, she could delegate the work to one or more of the household's female servants.
There were few opportunities to leave the house, even to meet other women, and certainly none to meet other men. Greek husbands did the shopping, bringing the produce home in the folds of their tumc or sending it back with one of their slaves. This was motivated not by helpfulness or kindness but by the desire of the men to protect their wives from the disreputable surroundings of the market. Public activities and achievement were therefore completely denied to women, although there is evidence that respectable women did occasionally get out. Some writers worried that certain plays might not be fit for them, for instance, and the fourth-century BC philosopher Theophrastus felt it necessary to warn women of street characters like the "coarse buffoon," because "when he sees a lady coming he will raise his dress and show his private parts." In general, however, a Greek wife had very little to console herself with beyond her jewelry, clothing, and daily beautification rituals.
What the Greek woman wore would depend upon her husband's ability to buy her fine things. Care of her hair and body often occupied a lengthy period in the morning. Maidservants were very useful at bath times, and for coaxing a woman's long hair into the elaborate styles favored in classical Greece. Women also shaved their bodies regularly; razors were regarded as part of the female rather than the male toilet. Perfumed oils and cosmetics provided the final touch, and then a lady was ready to face the day — a day in which, ironically enough, she would see almost no one beyond the members of her household.
But not all women were wives or domestic servants. A significant number in Greek society — mostly slaves, but also some freeborn women — were known as hetaerae, or "companions." They made up a disparate group of escorts and courtesans who could at one extreme be the fashionable companions of leading statesmen and at the other ordinary prostitutes. The more fortunate moved freely in the privileged public society of the men and, having no reputation to lose, could follow immodest careers as dancers or musicians. They alone were able to dine with the men, and were often taken home for that purpose, even by married men. The hetaerae were another fact of life that the Greek wife had to cope with.
Because their prospects declined rapidly as they grew older, some hetaerae married as soon as they could. Others retired on the money they had managed to wring from their male customers — an understandable objective but one that caused some men to view them as excessively mercenary. Always in demand, hetaerae achieved a worldliness and cultivation denied to the housebound wives.
The fifth-century-BC Athenian statesman Pericles declared that "the best reputation a woman can have is not to be spoken of among men either for good or evil." Aristotle was even more blunt: "By nature the male is superior, the woman inferior"— although what this donnish philosopher knew of women is open to question: He once claimed they had fewer teeth than men. In the fourth century BC, the orator Demosthenes summed up the conventional attitude of his time: "Hetaerae we keep for the sake of pleasure, female slaves for the daily care of our persons, wives to bear our legitimate children and to be the trusted guardians of our households."
While their women were virtually domestic prisoners, men enjoyed considerable sexual freedom. Intercourse with both slave girls and hetaerae was considered unremarkable and normal; one of the few ways of creating sexual scandal was to attempt a liaison with a married woman. And pederasty — homosexual relations between adult men and adolescent boys, ideally wellborn youths from the ages of twelve to about sixteen — was commonly regarded as part of the education of the aristocratic citizen.
To many people, pederasty was just another aspect of everyday behavior. Others did not approve: Aristotle, for example, regarded it as an aberration, albeit one that sprang from habit rather than any innate defect of character. And for the Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes, pederasty was not just the mark of the dissipated and idle aristocrat, but the identifying characteristic of the whole class. In the face of such disapproval the Athenians blamed the Spartans, among whose all-male military enclaves the practice was endemic. Later, the Romans, whose taste for the so-called Greek vice was no less marked than that of their Greek forebears, blamed the practice on the Athenians.
In general it was not so much pederasty itself that attracted moral disapproval as the scale on which it was practiced. To indulge in any sexual behavior to excess - with either sex — was regarded as weakening. Incontinence, or lack of self-control, did not befit the pursuit of virtue, for to control others, whether as aristocrat or cultivated democrat, first required control of the self. The conventional Roman view was that sexual activity was enervating and that in excess it would lead to effeminacy. Worst of all was any sexual activity — again, with men or women — that put the citizen in a passive role. Because sexual relations between the men of the house — especially the husband — and the female slaves were routine, homes quite frequently contained both the legitimate offspring of the wife and the children of her servants. The latter were not always destined to be slaves themselves: A man was relatively free to decide whom to bring up and whom to adopt as an heir, and the child of a servant, especially if it was a boy, could supplant the legitimate children of the household. A rejected child might continue to live with the family but could be sent away for adoption elsewhere.
So important were children to both the Creeks and the Romans that the alleged barrenness of a wife was a ground for divorce. A wife could be renounced fairly informally, because divorce, like marriage, was a private arrangement rather than a public one. There were virtually no grounds available to wives seeking divorces from husbands until the later days of the Roman Empire.
Family size was regulated by natural factors as well as by the whim of the master of the house. The short childbearing life of many women, perinatal and childhood mortality, and the sexual habits of the day all contrived to keep numbers down. Birth control was also practiced. Aristotle recommended one contraceptive method that has reputedly proved effective under modern conditions: A concoction based on olive oil should be applied to "that part of the womb where the seed falls." Other methods were more bizarre: The Roman historian Pliny the Elder recommended an ointment based on mouse droppings and potions containing the excrement of snails. A remedy from the second century AD advises the woman to squat immediately after intercourse and then to sneeze violently in an effort to expel the semen.
Whatever the method of birth control, it is clear that there was a high rate of failure. The exposure of unwanted babies in baskets and earthenware crocks was widely practiced in Greece. The ancient laws of Rome required all boys and firstborn girls to be brought up, but exposure also continued there until it was outlawed in the fourth century AD. It was not considered particularly immoral or inhumane. In Sparta the state decided who would survive, and unwanted female babies, as well as the weak and deformed, were exposed at birth or thrown over a cliff. Elsewhere, exposure might not mean death if the child was found and taken away, although it would probably end up as a slave. Children could also be intentionally given away or sold; a childless noble who craved an heir might supplement the income of a poor family by buying its unwanted children.
A Roman father signaled his acceptance of a newborn child simply by lifting it from the floor where the midwife had placed it after the birth. There would then follow a period of about ten days before the child was named, in case some new reason emerged for not accepting it. Then, provided its health was good, the Greek or Roman child could often look forward to a happy five or six years before its education began. In the case of Greece, large numbers of vase paintings and literary references testify to the undoubted affection in which children were held.
The education of Greek and Roman children was organized along similar lines, differing only in detail. In most of Greece, children were reared by the mother: The father's outdoor life kept him away from the house. The care of grandparents was considered to be valuable and was easy to manage since they frequently lived in the same house. At about the age of seven, boys were put into the charge of a tutor who either was hired for the purpose or was a responsible slave who was already a member of the household. He would supervise a boy's education until adolescence. How much teaching a boy received would depend on the wealth of the household. By the fifth century BC in Greece, especially in Athens, teachers who were specialists offered their services in such subjects as grammar and music; outside the home, in the agora, itinerant professional teachers made a living by teaching rhetoric and argument to those who could afford to pay. Youths also practiced military and athletic skills, such as wrestling.
As in so many other areas of lite in classical Greece, Sparta was an exception. The most important values of Spartan culture were discipline, courage, obedience, modesty; the intellectual aspects of life were not considered important. Boys lived at home with their families until they were seven years old and then left to enter a strict, communal military life until the age of thirty. Toward the end of his training, a Spartan youth spent a period of time living alone in the countryside, where he preyed on the unfortunate slaves who worked the land; he was required to kill at least one of them before being admitted to manhood. Then he resumed his barracks existence as part of Sparta's standing army.
Spartan girls and women were allowed to indulge in naked exercise in the gymnasium, an exclusively male pastime in most poleis. Elsewhere, however, Creek girls received no education other than in housekeeping skills, probably at the hands of a trusted slave. Secluded in the women's quarters, girl children were brought up to be good wives and mothers, and competent housekeepers—the only fit roles for females in the eyes of Greek society.
In Rome, where many teachers were Greek immigrants, part of the purpose of an expensive education was to set the elite apart from the common people. Teachers sought to inculcate a knowledge of both Greek-inspired culture and an appropriate superior manner — right down to the smallest physical gesture — to fit the wellborn for future power. The emphasis on this rigid notion of cultural attainment did not completely overshadow the still-valued athletic and martial skills, but these were no longer designed to prepare every citizen for military service.
Wellborn Roman girls, like their mothers, enjoyed a little more freedom than was thought proper in Greece, but they too were reared with only one eventual aim in mind: a good marriage. These were usually arranged without consulting the parties:The closeted Athenian bride, for example, probably saw her future husband for the first time only on her wedding day. Throughout, the woman was treated virtually as property; she would pass from the "ownership" of her father's family into that of her husband's kin and would become the responsibility of her husband. With her came a dowry of cash or possessions, an important and expensive consideration for a man with a daughter.
As a girl passed from one family to another, so she also passed from virginity to wifehood, a transition marked by various rituals in the wedding ceremony. After a day of feasting in the separate houses, the bride was symbolically seized from her old home and taken at night in a cart—its quality appropriate to her station — to the groom's house. Once across the threshold, the bride and groom moved to the hearth, the symbolic center of the home. There, in the Greek version of the ceremony, they were showered with nuts and small cakes for good luck. At last, the marriage could be consummated. The terrors that this might hold for a girl — often no more than twelve or thirteen years old, and away from her childhood home for the very first time — can only be imagined.
Rich or poor, a wife had little opportunity to vary her family's diet or experiment with new foods. Barley was the mainstay of ancient Greece, and because the grains had a coarse outer husk they had to be roasted and then pounded in a wooden mortar before being ground between the two stones of a quern, a simple hand mill. Barley meal found its way into cakes and a porridgelike gruel, but did not make good bread — "fodder fit only for slaves," as one Greek commentator put it. The Romans preferred wheat, much of it imported from North Africa and other parts of the empire to satisfy the enormous demands of Rome and other major cities. So great was the importance of wheat in keeping the populace of Rome well-fed and contented that emperors organized free distribution of grain to Roman citizens. The emperor Tiberius warned the Roman Senate in the early decades of the first century AD that if the wheat dole were discontinued, "the utter ruin of the state will follow." At that time around 330,000 tons of grain were being shipped yearly to the port of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber River, from where it was ferried about twenty miles upstream to Rome by a shuttle service of specially built flat-bottomed boats. Even so, there were constant grain shortages in Rome and other major cities.
Two kinds of wheat were in general use. The superior husk-free varieties that could be ground without prior processing, and that made good bread, were reserved for the rich. Poorer people still lived on a kind of porridge, usually eaten with vegetables, that was made from a primitive and inferior husked wheat that had all the drawbacks of barley. After the first century AD, flour and bread were increasingly produced by donkey-powered stone grinding mills and public bakeries, and the strenuous pounding of husked grains fell to gangs of prisoners shackled together.
The Greek and Roman diet was supplemented by vegetables and fruit, meat and fish. For the Greeks, the olive was as important as it had been as early as the third millennium BC for the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete. Valued because of its resistance to the droughts that killed off cereal crops and its ability to thrive in barren soil on hillsides where little else could grow, the olive tree's berries yielded oil that — as well as fuel for lamps and a basis for perfumes and cosmetics — provided a nutritious food that was far more dependable than grain. The Romans, in their turn, began to develop better varieties of fruits and nuts, including walnuts, sweet chestnuts, cherries, and apples. The elaborate network of paved Roman roads that crisscrossed most of the empire also made it possible for a much wider range of produce, including exotic spices from distant provinces, to find its way to Roman tables. Under favorable conditions, reasonably fresh fish could be enjoyed by Romans living fifty miles from the sea; most Greeks living away from the coast, however, had had to be content with dried or salted fish.
Throughout the classical period, meat was eaten in large amounts only on special occasions such as religious festivals, which usually involved the sacrifice of animals. The celebration of the founding day of a city, for example, held in honor of the town's patron god, would warrant at least one ox. All the gods needed was the smoke from the roasting fire; the officiating priests sometimes reserved a share of a sacrificed animal for their own private use, but most of the carcass was divided up among the crowd. Women and slaves attended public festivals even in Greece; for the latter, and for the poorest among the free citizens, these celebrations provided what was probably the only meat they tasted. When the festival was over, the priests would leave a small selection of poorer cuts of meat on the altar, ostensibly for the gods. Under cover of darkness these would be spirited away by beggars.
If grain was the staple food, the most important drink, after water, was wine. The milk of sheep and goats was quickly made into cheese, which gave it a longer life; beer was known to the Romans after their conquest of the beer-drinking Germanic tribes to the north, but wine remained the principal drink of all classes in both Greece and Rome. Beer had been a common drink in early civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia, where it had been used to form part of the army's pay, and where a significant proportion of the grain production had been reserved for brewing into alcohol rather than making food. Vines had grown wild on the island of Crete, where the stimulating effects of the fermented juice of their grapes were discovered by the Minoans, for whom wine became one of their chief exports. The grapes were usually trodden by foot, but by Roman times, a mechanical press was used to squeeze the juice from the resultant mash.
In both Greece and Rome the wine was usually combined with water, in proportions that probably varied from class to class — slaves could expect a very high water content. There were various types: One was a resinous wine not unlike the retsina of modern Greece, while the Romans preferred madeira-like sweet wines. Haphazard and often unsanitary wine-making techniques produced a harsh end product, so Roman vintners added grape syrup. This sweetener was made by the dangerous expedient of boiling the grape liquid in lead pots. Modern estimates put the alcohol content of Roman wines as much as 50 percent higher than their modern equivalents, so drinking this strong, lead-rich brew was doubly risky.
Perhaps not surprisingly, drunkenness was common. Poets celebrated the virtues of wine, and it was universally associated with conviviality and well-being. Wealthy people could afford to drink it in vast quantities: The Roman poet Martial talked casually of drinking three quarts at one sitting.
In Greece, wine was frequentlv enjoyed at a form of evening supper party known as a symposium, characterized by good conversation and music. Such occasions were strictly for men — usually, the only women there would be hetaerae, as companions or entertainers. The Romans took over this custom and provided lavish banquets at which male guests reclined on couches; any wives attending usually sat upright as a mark of their inferiority. This status distinction was preserved right down the social scale: The poorer Roman sat upright at mealtimes, while his wife served him and remained standing.
Several courses, interspersed with entertainment provided by hired musicians, were served during the eating phase of a banquet. Joints of meat were usually boiled and served with elaborate sauces that were often spicy and — in line with Roman tastes—sweet. Then the drinking began, sometimes continuing until dawn. Because wheeled transportation was hardly ever used in Greek and Roman cities, slaves were left with the problem of escorting their hopelessly drunk masters through the dark and dangerous streets on foot.
In spite of the obvious appeal of banquets, there was an unwritten convention that the good Roman citizen should eat at home. For the poor people, living in overcrowded tenements in the large urban areas, this was unfortunate: Their homes usually had no ovens, and public taverns were the only source of warm food. During the period of the Roman Empire, however, the men of the poorer classes did manage to enjoy an occasional night out: In every town and city, groups of artisans, tradesmen, and even slaves banded together in collegia — dining clubs that also functioned as mutual-aid associations. Members of the club paid a subscription fee, which allowed them to attend the tavern drinking sessions and feasts — and also entitled them to a
decent funeral.
The frequency of disease, the uncertainty of cure, the ever-present possibility of wars and skirmishes — all made death a commonplace event for Greek and Roman families. And a funeral was an important opportunity to display a family's status: People probably worried more about the quality of their own funeral than about any supposed afterlife. The procedure began with the washing and anointing of the body, a task for the women of the household. The body was then wrapped in a shroud, and a coin was placed in the mouth — this was for the ferryman, who would take the deceased across the river separating the world of the living from the underworld of the dead. While the body lay on its bier, bereaved relatives clad in black indulged in bouts of wailing and lamentation to mark the passage of the deceased; women often cut their hair short, and cut and scratched their own flesh as further dramatic marks of the occasion. Finally, the body was carried in procession to its tomb. For the housebound Greek wife, a funeral was one of the few occasions on which she could wear her finest clothes in public.
A major cause of disease and death was poor personal hygiene and lack of sanitation facilities. For bathing, washing clothes, and good sanitation, a constant supply of clean running water is essential — and in the dry Mediterranean world, water was a precious commodity.
Small settlements had originally grown up around natural sources of water — streams, springs, or wells — but the developed polis, and especially the large Roman city, needed something more. The Greeks were knowledgeable water engineers but built nothing to rival the great Roman aqueducts whose remains still stand in France, Spain, and Italy. The Romans enjoyed political as well as technological advantages.
A highly visible external water supply is vulnerable to sabotage in times of war; a Roman city was part of the republic, later the empire, and was not likely to be attacked by its neighboring cities. The same was not true for the Greek polis, even in its heyday, and what water systems there were in ancient Greece were short and usually buried underground.
In the Greek polis, water supplies were taken to public fountain houses, where individuals could fill containers for their own use. Public buildings and larger houses usually had their own cisterns, or at least large jars, for short-term storage. Bathhouses were available but were usually small establishments in side streets, their baths merely shallow tubs containing water heated by a variation on the potter's kiln. They were not considered proper places for the polite citizen; bathhouse attendants, who probably also made and sold soap, were socially on a par with brothelkeepers. Moreover, bathing was not associated with health, and the dramatist Aristophanes ridiculed the Athenian aristocratic youth for their love of warm water. To them the bath was a symbol of leisure, and hence of the aristocratic life; to Aristophanes it meant the idleness and effeminacy of men who bathed daily, kept their hair long, and used scented cosmetics.
In the public gymnasium, men washed in cold water after exercising their military and athletic skills, but bathing was generally a private affair, to be indulged in as often as individual conscience dictated. For Greek wives in better-off homes, bathing would have been part of the morning beautification ritual. A small, shallow tub was used. Without abundant water a deep bath was not possible; maidservants poured water over their mistresses instead.
Few Greek houses had any sanitary provision other than a narrow passageway between the backs of adjoining rows that probably served as an open sewer. Most people used latrines dug somewhere in the yard or on a communal site nearby. All domestic wastewater was simply thrown out of the window into the streets, which were always in poor condition, dusty when dry and muddy when wet. In rural surroundings this primitive arrangement may have been tolerable; in the crowded residential areas of the polis it must have created foul smells and squalid conditions. Nor were the interiors of Greek houses notably clean: Dogs and chickens wandered freely through the house, and even pigs were kept indoors. Flies, rats, and mice would have found conditions congenial. And because neither Greek nor Roman homes had chimneys — at best there was a hole in the roof — cooking always filled the house with wood smoke.
In Roman times matters improved: Every city and town of any size throughout the sphere of Roman influence had at least one public bath, and the old associations of idleness and weakness largely disappeared. Roman baths contained a variety of rooms at different temperatures and humidities, from steam rooms to cold pools. Romans of both sexes cleansed themselves with the strigil, a blunt metal scraper, and olive oil, using a method that had not changed since the early days of Greece. The scraper removed the dirt and the dead outer skin, while the olive oil cleansed, lubricated, and soothed. Men and women paid regular, sometimes daily, visits to the baths, which became important social centers and meeting places.
Cleanliness was clearly an important matter to most Roman citizens. Servants and slaves were sent to the baths, and also accompanied their masters and mistresses there — the sweet-smelling citizen was unlikely to tolerate an unwashed household. The Roman poet Catullus showed no mercy to some of his personal enemies who neglected to wash: He wrote of one man, "plagued by a goat under his armpits," whose unfortunate lover "passes out under the malodor," and mocks one of Julius Caesar's entourage for his "half-washed legs." Other victims, with bad teeth or halitosis, fared no better.
As for teeth, the large proportion of grain in the Greek and Roman diet, much of it coarsely ground flour, doubtless caused rapid wear, and many people must have suffered from dental problems. Greek dentists tied loose teeth with gold wire and used ligatures to bind artificial ones to adjacent teeth. The Roman poet Martial alluded to artificial teeth of ivory, bone, and wood, and also testified to the use of dentures: Addressing a lady named Galla, he wrote, "And you lay aside your teeth at night as you do your silken dress." Other dental techniques were less advanced: Pliny the Elder recorded the beliefs that a frog tied to the jaws would make loose teeth firm and that toothaches could be relieved with drops of an oil in which earthworms had been boiled.
All water supply systems in classical times were of the constant-flow type—water flowed into the city without interruption, not only when it was needed, as is the case in a modern demand-based system. It was up to the ingenuity of the water engineers to make the best use of the water as it flowed through. Unused water at one Greek fountain would be piped to another a little way down the hill; and in Rome, wastewater from the bathhouses and fountains was often channeled into tanneries, dyeworks, or underground sewers. The sewers flowed into the Tiber River, where the effluent must have created a noticeable stench when times of low river flow coincided with hot weather.
Sewers permitted the development of rudimentary water-flushed toilets. These were little more than open channels kept clean by the constant water flow, but they were more advanced than anything achieved by other societies until the mass production of the flush toilet began at the end of the nineteenth century. Large, communal versions could be found in public places; on a smaller scale they were also a feature of well-appointed homes. The Romans used a shared brush, which was rinsed in the running water after use, rather than any kind of toilet paper. However, few of the multistory apartments of the Roman poor had running water, and those that did had it only at ground level. Upstairs residents had to carry their water up flights of steps and resorted to the traditional expedient of throwing the contents of chamber pots out of the window.
In spite of the Roman interest in cleanliness, little was known about the principles of hygiene. Disease was often rampant, and returning cargo vessels and soldiers coming home from foreign campaigns introduced new diseases to populations that had no natural immunity. In the second century AD, some Italian cities lost one-third of their population to smallpox; in Rome itself, at the height of a measles epidemic in the third century AD, 5,000 people a day died from the disease.
Methods of medical treatment were haphazard. The Romans inherited their medical theories from the Greeks, and these theories were an often-dangerous mixture of scientific understanding and ancient doctrine. If a man's wife was sick, he would mix her a remedy himself or buy one from a local herbalist. Physicians applied poultices and fomentations, and tool kits unearthed by archaeologists suggest that surgeons could perform some drastic operations. Beyond these remedies, there was little that could be done for those who were very ill — except perhaps the hopeful sacrifice of a rooster to Asclepius, the god of healing.
In the early years of the first century BC, Rome — originally a small, polislike city in central Italy — extended its citizenship throughout Italy, all of which it then controlled, and thereby shed the last vestiges of the old city-state. It was then the hub of a nation and an expanding empire. It was to become, in the heyday of the empire, the world's first megalopolis, a city whose population exceeded one million. (The next city to reach this figure was London in the nineteenth century.) Nor was Rome the only major city: The urban centers of the Greek world were Romanized and expanded, and new towns and cities were established, often to serve as regional and commercial centers in the new empire. More than ever before, the city was the place where life was lived and experienced to the full, the site of modernity and progress.
The small houses of the working population were not much of an improvement on their Greek counterparts; many of the multistory apartment houses, cramming as many people as possible into small areas of land, were probably worse. But the rich lived elsewhere, some of their marbled mansions occupying whole blocks. They created their own exclusive residential areas, wishing to emphasize their separateness from the urban poor. And Roman technology, less restricted by terrain and technique than its Greek counterpart, could not only oblige their wishes, it could also be exported to alien climates and lands where it functioned just as successfully as on the Italian mainland.
The Greek tradition of architecture was turned inside out. It is as though Greek buildings were intended to be experienced from the outside, Roman ones from the inside. Two deceptively simple developments made the change possible: the arch and reliable forms of concrete. Neither of these was a Roman invention — like much of Roman civilization, they were forceful developments of the existing knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Etruscans, and other peoples. The semicircular arch and its three-dimensional derivatives, the tunnel vault and the dome, allowed the Romans to capture internal space on a scale much greater than that permitted by Greek post-and-lintel construction. And new and durable cements, especially a strong waterproof variety that used volcanic dust from the Naples area, allowed the new forms great scope.
As far as official culture was concerned, the Romans simply poured old wine into new bottles. Roman gods were Greek gods under new names; Roman philosophy was Greek philosophy with a few minor additions; statuary was often slavishly copied from Greek originals. The Romans saw nothing strange in this: Much of the world they inherited was already run along Greek lines, and for the newcomers, Greek civilization was simply civilization itself, which the Romans embellished and promoted in their own distinctive manner. But beneath this guise of similarity, social changes were evident.
One change, facilitated by the new mastery of interior space, was a shift from public to private. This affected all walks of life, from the governmental down to the domestic. In terms of public life, state matters were now remote from the ordinary citizen: They were decided by senators or the emperor, administered by regional governors and a civil service, and enforced by a huge professional army. In professional life, commerce — deemed vulgar by the Greeks — was now respectable, and a multiplicity of urban trades thrived among the free and slaves alike, providing new opportunities for enterprising individuals. The countryside faded into the background, a mere service region whose sole function was to provide for the needs of the city and its expanding population. And in private life, the citizen now regarded his home as a fit place to inhabit during the day.
The well-off Roman citizen needed more than a residence, and certainly more than just a place to lay his head. He had private business to transact, private affairs to manage, his wealth and influence to oversee. His home therefore had to serve many purposes. It was a showplace of conspicuous consumption, proclaiming his wealth to the world. It also had to provide an appropriate setting for the family of which he was the autocratic head. And it needed to combine the functions of a business office with those of the state residence of a minor potentate.
Such a home was the domus, the urban residence of the successful Roman. Like the Greek house it looked inward, but onto courtyards and colonnades, and perhaps pools and fountains. The main room was called the triclinium—a combined dining room, banqueting hall, and reception chamber, designed to impress the visitors entertained there. Other, smaller rooms served as offices or private reception chambers. As in Greece, there was no clutter of furniture, but there were plenty of painted statues and other works of art. Plain, bare surfaces were buried under a profusion of decoration and color—wall paintings, mosaics, shell-encrusted plasterwork, elaborate draperies. Some of the draperies served to divide rooms and other spaces; the imaginative use of curtains and doors created an adaptable and versatile interior. Curtains were no less potent symbols of privacy than doors; a Roman would not dream of passing through a closed curtain uninvited.
The water that supplied the pools and fountains also served private baths and flush latrines—essential facilities in the eyes of wealthy Romans, and one more means of keeping apart from the public crowd. Sometimes the pools were used to breed exotic fish, a fashionable pastime for the man of affairs. Farther inside the house, the bedroom was a private inner sanctum at some distance from the more public rooms — a far cry from the Greek bedchamber, where a man was likely to be surprised by early-morning visitors.
Only the wealthy and the aristocratic could afford to build, furnish, and maintain an up-to-date domus—but the ideals of Roman domestic life were embodied in these mansions, and the less fortunate aped the homes of the rich as far as they could.
Outside the city limits, the domus was paralleled by the villa, a comfortable rural residence often surrounded by an agricultural estate. In the Italian homelands the villa served primarily as a retreat or holiday home; homebred Romans were city dwellers at heart. Pausanias, a geographer and historian of the second century AD, expressed a typical scorn for the countryside, being unable to understand the appeal of "a place that has neither public buildings, nor gymnasium, nor theater, nor square, nor water to supply a single fountain, and where people live in huts perched on the edge of a ravine." But farther away from the center of the empire things were different: The upper classes born and raised in provinces such as Gaul and Africa were unaccustomed to city life, and in those places small communities sprang up around the principal villa, probably the home of a local noble, which became a center for local industry, commerce, and security.
Overseas villas made free use of local materials and fostered a quality of life that was uniformly high. In colder climates, for example, where houses needed a form of heating more efficient than the portable braziers used by the Greeks, the Romans developed the hypocaust, a form of undergound furnace whose heat and exhaust gases were passed through ducts under the floors of rooms at ground level. Many villas had sophisticated bathing facilities: That belonging to Apollinaris Sidonius in Gaul, for instance, possessed, in the words of its owner, "a hot bathing room the same size as the adjoining anointing room, apart from the space taken up by the roomy semicircular bathing tub, where hot water in plenty gurgles through a maze of lead pipes coming through holes in the wall. In the hot room it is full daylight: Modest people feel more than naked!"
As wealthy Romans discovered the material pleasures of living apart from the masses, and of spending a greater portion of their lives within their private domains, time-honored social conventions gradually eroded. Although marriage was the fundamental institution of the domestic world, the only legitimate framework for raising the next generation of citizens, it was not universal: Many Roman men preferred to live alone or to enjoy the company of other men. Women, although in all spheres of life still less free than men, were eventually granted a comparable power to end an unsatisfactory marriage. By the first century AD, people were divorcing almost non-chalantly. And the cost of a divorce, whether initiated by the husband or the wife, was borne by the man, for the dowry brought by the wife when she married had to be repaid to her family. For the Roman consul and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, this was a hard lesson to learn. He was delighted, after divorcing his wife, to be able to say that he would never marry again, because he could not manage "philosophy and a wife at the same time." Nevertheless, he soon remarried — the only way he could repay his ex-wife's family was by getting his hands on another dowry.
The dowry system had other consequences. Fathers faced the prospect of large expense on the marriage of a daughter. This increased the likelihood that any infants exposed or killed would be girls, and the result was a serious shortage of marriageable women. Her scarcity value, the dowry, and the ability to divorce her husband gave a woman some power. Her husband was unlikely to view the loss of a wife and her dowry with equanimity, so prudence dictated that he treat her with some indulgence — indeed, if not with kindness.
Some women, pressing their new advantage, managed to lead scandalous lives in the heyday of the empire, and a minority acquired great power behind the scenes. Livia, the second wife of the emperor Augustus, not only managed to survive her husband and several of his successors, but was reputed to have had a hand in the deaths of some of them. Poison was suspected, and indeed was often associated with women: Among uneasy and suspicious men who were used to an unquestioned authority over women, and in an age of poor hygiene when food poisoning was doubtless a frequent occurrence, rumors of poison were all too eagerly believed.
Despite the successes of women who could turn the system to their advantage, however, the system itself remained largely unchanged. The master of any house, the pater-familias, was an absolute authority in his own home and could deal with its members as he saw fit. He might have a mistress or two outside the house and would probably take his pleasure with the female servants as a matter of course. He might also dabble in pederasty, perhaps because of its old aristocratic associations. And if a man caught his adulterous wife in the act and murdered her on the spot he would almost certainly get away with it, although his fellow citizens might disapprove of his lack of self-control. The same general approach to morality applied as in Greek times, although by now the citizen would probably no longer link his pursuit of virtue to the needs of the state — it had become a purely private affair.
The simplest explanation for this survival of Greek patterns of social behavior was that it suited those in power, and therefore there was no reason to change. And the extent of this power now far exceeded the limits of Greek civilization. The territories ruled by Rome at its height covered the entire Mediterranean region and southern Europe, and its influence reached from Syria in the east to Spain and Britain in the west and north. From the death of Augustus in AD 14 to the death of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus in AD 180, this empire enjoyed an unprecedented period of stability, during which the ideals and mores of the Greco-Roman world were spread to the farthest provinces. This dissemination was not without its critics. Some more perceptive observers noted that along with the advantages of "civilization" the Romans were also exporting its disadvantages. The historian Tacitus, writing about the influence of the emperor Agricola on newly conquered Britain, recorded that "little by little, the Britons went astray into alluring vices: to the promenade, the bath, the well-appointed dinner table." As he summed up the situation: "The simple natives gave the name of 'culture' to this factor of their slavery." Generally, however, it was the Romans' positive contributions to the empire that were most visible.
In terms of domestic life also, more people than ever before shared in the material wealth created bv thriving urban industries. As the rich accumulated elegant items of furniture, some inlaid with ivory or metal, simpler furniture spread down the social scale to houses that had previously been bare. The mass production of pottery channeled simple consumer goods into the homes of increasing numbers. Glass, which in Greece had been a luxury item reserved for the wealthy, was now used to make large quantities of bottles and vases for sale at affordable prices.
The comforts enjoyed in the domus or villa, however, depended on the maintenance of economic prosperity, which in turn was dependent on the continued production of agricultural surpluses to feed the growing population and on military security. When the chain was broken, it was hard to repair without advances in technology — and in this field, neither the Romans nor the Greeks before them were conspicuously inventive.
From the beginning of the third century AD, the superstructure that supported the luxurious lives of the Roman rich began to fall apart. The empire broke into two halves, the Latin-speaking west and the Greek-speaking east. There were stirrings around the edge of the empire — in northern Europe, in Parthia, and in troublesome provinces such as Judaea and Egypt. The increasing gap between rich and poor, and the slow decline of rural life, created tensions that the overstretched administration could not resolve. It is even possible that lead — widely used to make water pipes, cooking utensils, and cosmetics — was slowly poisoning the citizens of the empire. As the old world sank into sterility, Christianity rushed in to fill the spiritual and cultural void. The borders of the empire shrank back in the face of barbarian invasions. And in AD 410 the unthinkable happened: Rome was sacked by the Visigoths.
The ruling elite and its culture had almost vanished. So too had one of its most characteristic social institutions: Slavery was never abolished, but as the empire broke up and Roman influence declined, it simply withered away. There was nothing to distinguish the freeborn poor from the slaves once the masters had gone.
The high material standards of the Romans hung on in some provinces. Villas continued to be built in the third and fourth centuries. But by the following century Roman-style life had retreated into the towns — now fortified against raiders — in remote areas such as Britain. The embattled populations of the old Roman world were now living on borrowed time. Cut off from any central government, they had to fend for themselves. And whereas towns could be surrounded by walls, farms in the countryside were easy prey to raiders. Farmers fled to the safety of the towns, and the economic basis of the precarious society broke up altogether.
When the towns finally fell, the high standards of Roman domestic life went with them. The conquerors who stepped or rode into the hastily abandoned houses and villas were mostly nomadic warriors, wholly unaccustomed to urban life, lacking the knowledge and experience necessary to keep the buildings and towns they had seized in working order. A modified version of the culture of Rome was preserved in local regions — in Byzantium, in parts of Italy, and within the monasteries of the Church — but elsewhere the turmoil of the Dark Ages had begun. The essential conditions for high standards of domestic life — for comfort and leisure, for decorative arts and fine food and conversation — had to be developed anew.
In "The Domestic World" (Timeframe),editor Charles Boyle, Time Life Books, USA, 1991, excerpts pp. 17-49. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.