Gender relations in the classical Greek household: the archaeological evidence

Abstract

Despite the amount of textual material surviving from classical Greece, our knowledge of the household has remained limited because of the selectivity and orientation of those texts. In this paper, archaeological remains of late 5th- to late 4th-cent. houses are explored in order to shed light on aspects of domestic relations that recur most frequently in the sources: the relationship between male and female household members, and the way in which this was reinforced through the organization of the domestic environment. The traditional picture of a house divided into male and female areas is an over-simplification of a complex pattern of social relationships. A broader approach focuses on interaction between men and women, rather than on women's activity in isolation. The resultant, more detailed model for gender relations offers a glimpse of variability through space and time in how relationships were expressed spatially, and suggests the possibility of differences in the relationships themselves at different levels of the social hierarchy.

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