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Gender relations in the classical Greek household: the archaeological evidence1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

L. C. Nevett
L. C. Nevett
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Abstract

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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 90 , November 1995 , pp. 363 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1995

References

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27 Nevett (n. 1), 63–85; ead., House and Society: Domestic Space in the Classical and Hellenistic Greek World (Cambridge; in preparation).

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29 e.g. houses AV 3, Robinson and Graham (n. 19), 90, pl. 95, and AV I 7, Ibid. 109–11, pl. 97.

30 Nevett (n. 1), 47–52.

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40 Nevett (n. 1), 79, although the problems of distinguishing between one- and two-storey houses, noted above, render this conclusion rather tentative.

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43 e.g. houses AV III 10 west, Robinson 1946 (n. 19), 54–7; DV 6, Ibid. 160–7; but contrast AV 8, Robinson and Graham (n. 19), 95–6, which does have an andron and ante-room despite its small size.

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87 Id. 1986 (n. 80), 127; id. 1989 (n. 74), 46.

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93 This will be especially the case if Vickers is correct to argue that pottery vessels as a class would have been of relatively low value: Vickers, M., ‘The influence of exotic materials on Attic white-ground pottery’, in Ancient Greek and Related Pottery: Proceedings of the International Vase Symposium (Amsterdam, 1984), 88–97Google Scholar; id., ‘Artful crafts: the influence of metal work on Athenian painted pottery’, JHS 105 (1985), 108–28.