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HOMES IN ANCIENT GREECE
model of Greek House from 400 BC Many Greek homes, whether they belonged to rich city dwellers or poor farmers, were built around a courtyard. The openings of the house faced inward towards the courtyard rather than outward towards the street and other buildings. [Source: "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum]
We must not assume that everyone had his own house in ancient Athens. It is true that a house could be acquired for a very low price, as is proved by the example of Socrates, whose whole wealth was taxed as five minae (something under twenty pounds), and yet included a house; but still there were a great number of poorer citizens who hired their dwellings. The upper storey, which no doubt had a special entrance, and which occasionally projected beyond the ground-floor, was let to lodgers, while the owner lived on the ground-floor. Large lodging-houses, many storeys high, such as existed at Rome, were probably not found at Athens in the classical period. [Source “The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks” by Hugo Blümner, translated by Alice Zimmern, 1895]
In Olynthos and Halieis, street plans in the classical city were rectilinear, and thus houses were of regular shapes and sizes. By contrast, in Athens houses appear to have varied much more in size and shape. In the classical period, houses excavated from Olynthos were "invariably" organised around a colonnaded courtyard. Likewise, of the houses excavated at Halieis in the Argolid, most of the houses seem to have had a single entrance which gave access to a court, and Nevett also cites three buildings excavated on Thasos as being similarly arranged around a courtyard. [Source: Wikipedia]
Oikos
The ancient Greek word oikos refers to three related but distinct concepts: the family, the family's property, and the house. Its meaning shifts even within texts, which can lead to confusion. The oikos was the basic unit of society in most Greek city-states. In normal Attic usage the oikos, in the context of families, referred to a line of descent from father to son from generation to generation. Alternatively, as Aristotle used it in his Politics, the term was sometimes used to refer to everybody living in a given house. Thus, the head of the oikos, along with his immediate family and his slaves, would all be encompassed. Large oikoi also had farms that were usually tended by the slaves, which were also the basic agricultural unit of the ancient economy. [Source: Wikipedia +]
Traditional interpretations of the layout of the oikos in Classical Athens have divided into men's and women's spaces, with an area known as the gynaikon or gynaikonitis associated with women's activities such as cooking and textiles work, and an area restricted to men called the andron. In Lysias' speech On the Murder of Eratosthenes, the women's rooms were said to be situated above the men's quarters, while in Xenophon the women's and men's quarters are next to one another. +
More recent scholarship from historians such as Lisa Nevett and Lin Foxhall has argued for a more flexible approach to household space, with rooms not simply having a single fixed function, and gendering of space not being as simple as some rooms being for men and others for women. It has been argued that instead of dividing the household space into "male" and "female" areas, it is more accurate to look at areas as being private or public. In this model, private areas were restricted to the family, while public areas were open to visitors but not to the women of the household. +
Parts of an Ancient Greek House
ancient toilet seats in Dion, Greece
Most private houses were quite plain outside; the ground-floor generally had no windows; there were no splendid porticoes, or elaborate façades, and they were low, seldom having more than two storeys. According to the University of Pennsylvania: “Greek city houses of the 6th and 5th century b.c. were usually modest in scale and built of relatively inexpensive materials. They varied from two or three rooms clustered around a small court to a dozen or so rooms. City house exteriors presented a plain facade to the street, broken only by the door and a few small windows set high. In larger houses the main rooms included a kitchen, a small room for bathing, several bedrooms which usually occupied a second floor, the men's andron for dining, and perhaps a separate suite of rooms known as the gynaikonitis for the use of women.”
As regards the interior of ancient Greek houses, we know very little about the arrangement and appointment of the rooms. Naturally these were liable to variations, since a small family might inhabit a modest little dwelling, or there might be larger houses, containing numerous apartments. The front door, which opened (sometimes outwards) into the street, at which those who desired entrance knocked with their fingers or the knocker, was opened by a slave, acting as porter, and generally led to a hall, through which, either direct or through a second door, an open hall surrounded with a colonnade (Peristylium) was reached, which in the dwelling-houses of the historic period corresponded to the open courtyard of the Homeric palace, and bears an analogy to the Atrium of the Roman house. This space, which was uncovered in the middle, and surrounded by colonnades, was the usual dwelling-place of the family; sometimes they took their meals there, and the altar to Zeus Herkeios generally stood there. [Source “The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks” by Hugo Blümner, translated by Alice Zimmern, 1895]
The roof of a typical house was covered by pottery tiles and designed so it directed water into a storage basin. Rural houses were surrounded by sheep pens, small orchards and gardens that varied in size depending on how rich the owner was. Many families kept bees in pottery hives. [Source: "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum]
Materials Used to Make Ancient Greek Houses
Ancient houses, for the most part, were made of sun dried bricks placed on a stone foundation, like dwelling in the third world today. The walls and roofs were probably supported and reinforced by timbers and beams, but we can't say for sure because wood and mud bricks decompose rapidly, which is also why there are hardly ever any houses at archaeological sites. Generally only temples and monuments were built of marble and stone. [Source: "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum]
The roofs were often flat and were sometimes covered with hardened mud, but tile roofs were also common. For Americans the simplest comparison to make would be with the Spanish type of dwelling in California and other parts of the Southwest, since all three have the common characteristic of looking in, rather than out. The exterior presented a blank wall, usually of brick, broken by a door and a few windows.[Source: “The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans”, Helen McClees Ph.D, Gilliss Press, 1924]
Walls were covered with stucco, which was frequently painted. There was no wall-paper, of course, and pictures were painted directly on the walls. Fashions in decoration changed as they do at present, though more slowly. Stucco reliefs, of which there are several graceful examples, were used in Greek houses of the Hellenistic period as well as in Italy.
Floors in early times were of hardened earth, paving stones, or plaster. In the fifth century pebbles set in cement came into use in Greece, and from this kind of floor mosaic, plain and patterned, was derived. Pictures or decorative designs made of fine glass mosaic were also used as wall decorations.
Rooms in an Ancient Greek House
Around the central room of an ancient Greek house were apartments whose doors, and probably windows, too, opened into the central hall; for it was not customary to have ground-floor windows opening on the street, and the sides of the houses usually touched the walls of the neighbouring buildings, so that the rooms on the ground-floor could, as a rule, only obtain their light from the central hall. Some of these apartments were destined for the men, and others for the women, but there was no general room. If the house was built on a considerable space, and had only one storey, the men’s rooms generally opened direct on the central hall, while the women’s were placed behind these, and were separate from them, having a special door, and doubtless, too, a special corridor, through which the women could reach the street without passing through the men’s apartments. [Source “The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks” by Hugo Blümner, translated by Alice Zimmern, 1895]
Bronze mirror 150 AD If the house was small it was built in two storeys, and the women’s apartments were then situated in the upper storey. This latter arrangement appears to have been the more frequent. We often find allusions to women looking down on to the street from the windows of the upper storeys, and we also often find women represented on vase pictures sitting at upper-storey windows. These window openings were closed either by bars or wooden shutters, since glass panes were unknown in the Greek period. Where there were a good many slaves, it seems that the male slaves slept in the men’s apartments, and the female in the women’s apartments, except in those cases where the master allowed certain couples to live together. In larger houses, which contained a great number of rooms, we must imagine not only special sleeping and dining apartments, along with guest-chambers, rooms for the slaves, store-rooms, work-rooms, library, bathroom, etc., but also a second hall in the center of the women’s apartments, and gardens connected with this; though flower gardens seem to have been a late introduction at Athens — it is said, indeed, that they date from the time of Epicurus.
The kitchen was probably always on the ground-floor, and was certainly the only room in the house which had a chimney, since there was no heating apparatus in the dwelling rooms.Historians have identified a "hearth-room" in ancient Greek houses as a centre of female activity. However, Lin Foxhall has argued that Greek houses often had no permanent kitchens. For example, a house in Attica known as the Vari House had multiple possible places which may have been used for cooking, but no fixed fireplace, and no one place was used for the entire lifetime of the house. Lisa Nevett points out that houses frequently had a "complex pattern of spatial usage", with rooms being used for multiple purposes. [Source: Wikipedia]
Ancient Greek Toilets
The world's oldest toilet is generally thought to be a seat-like structure excavated in Iraq's Tell Asmar. According to Cambridge archeologist Augusta McMahon, the first simple toilets were Mesopotamian pits, about 1 meter in diameter, over which users would squat. The pits were lined with hollow ceramic cylinders that prevented excrement from escaping. Approximately 1000 years later the Minoans invented the flush. The first flushing toilet, excavated at the palace of Knossos in Crete, washed waste from the toilet to the sewer. By the Hellenistic period large-scale public latrines brought toilets to the effluent masses. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, November 20, 2016]
Some houses had water piped in but most homeowners had to have their water fetched and carried, one of the main duties of household slaves. During Roman times sewers were developed but few people had access to them. The majority of the people urinated and defecated in clay pots.
Ancient Greek and Roman chamber pots were taken to disposal areas which, according to Greek scholar Ian Jenkins, "was often no further than an open window." Roman public baths had a pubic sanitation system with water piped in and piped out. Baths at home were generally only big enough to sit up in and they were filled with water from pottery buckets by slaves. [Source: "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum,||]
Furniture in Ancient Greece
The Greek furniture which has come down to us is necessarily small in amount and fragmentary because, like most modern furniture, it was made of wood and consequently has been destroyed by damp. There remain, however, some fairly complete pieces, and a considerable number of metal fittings and casings, as well as some models and many illustrations from vases. Among the objects from Cyprus are two bronze tripods, and three ornaments consisting of goats’ feet and bulls’ heads from another. The bronze lions’ paws were feet for a large chair or chest. [Source: “The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans”, Helen McClees Ph.D, Gilliss Press, 1924]
We have also a little terracotta chair with a diminutive figure in it and a three-legged table of the kind used to set beside a dining-couch, both from Cyprus, as well as a round table on three legs, of much later date. Two lekythoi, decorated with interior scenes, show chairs of a very graceful and comfortable type, the Greek klismos, and the same kind of chair is seen on the grave-monument of a lady and on a large amphora. A lady playing a kithara in the wall-painting is seated in a large armchair, the thronos. There is a bronze casing of beautiful work for a piece of furniture and a bronze chair-leg and an ornament terminating in the head of a young bullock. Two tripods and some bronze mountings from Cyprus will be found in wall-cases in the corridor.
A typical bedroom in 600 B.C. contained a bed made of wicker or wood, a coffer for valuables and a simple chair. Bedsteads, which were similar to this couch in shape, were merely frames on which thongs were stretched, like the old-fashioned corded beds, the interlaced leather bands acting as springs. The wooden frames were frequently decorated with bronze fittings, and in the Hellenistic and Roman periods inlay and mountings of silver, gold, ivory, and tortoise-shell were employed for the rich. Couches and beds were usually supplied with a raised head-rest, often finished with bronze animal-heads, such as the mule-heads.
Clothing was kept in chests, which were well adapted to the large pieces of cloth composing a costume. One chest on an amphora is decorated with a scene from the story of Danaë and Perseus. There exists a miniature chest of white stone from which the cover has been lost.
Ancient Greek Household Possessions
bowls Clay jars as tall as 1½ meters were used for storing grain, oil and wine. Pine tar was valuable stuff. It was used for everything from caulking wooden ships to a flavoring for wine. Greeks and Romans used umbrellas for protection from the sun. Men regarded them as effeminate and they were used primarily by women, who also used ones water-proofed with oil in the rain. The Greeks had schools for mirror making, where students were taught the finer points of sand polishing.
Household utensils, since they were made of metal or pottery, exist in considerable numbers. Cooking was usually done over an open fire, though stoves of a simple type came into use in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The bronze cauldrons used for boiling were valued highly, and were offered frequently as prizes in athletic contests. At the funeral games of Patroklos (Iliad XXIII, vv. 267-268) Achilles gives a ‘bronze cauldron untouched by fire’ as a prize for the chariot race, and records of later contests prove that the custom was a common one. [Source: “The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans”, Helen McClees Ph.D, Gilliss Press, 1924]
An amphora is decorated with the figure of a youth, evidently a victor in the games, carrying away upon his shoulders a cauldron which he has won. The metal hook was used for drawing pieces of meat from the cauldron. Pails, finely made and decorated, especially as to the handles and their attachments, probably served some purpose at table, as, for example, to hold cold water or snow in which a vessel of wine was placed to cool.
The pottery shows the kinds of dishes in use in Greek and Italian houses. There are cups of different shapes, pitchers and jugs for water, wine, and other liquids, kraters (large bowls for mixing water and wine), plates for food, and lekythoi (oil-cruets). The modern china, that is, high-fired pottery covered with a vitreous glaze, was not known, and glass did not become common until the Imperial Roman period.
Ancient Greek Pottery
Ceramics created by the Greeks were far superior to anything made by civilizations that preceded it. The Greeks produced vases, urns and bowls. They were known for their craftsmanship. The most famous pieces were vases with paintings such as Apollo playing a tortoise shell lyre. Unlike oriental pottery which came in all kinds of shapes, ancient Greek pottery was more limited, comprised of only a few dozen shapes that changed little over time.
Many things — including grain, olive oil or wine — were stored and carried amphorae (large clay jars) with two handles near the mouth that made it possible to pick them up and carry them. They generally were two to three feet tall and carried about seven gallons. Their shapes and markings were unique and these helped archaeologists date them and identify their place of origin.
Most Greek pottery was connected with wine. Large two-handled amphorae (from the Greek “ amphi” , “on both sides,” and “ phero” , “to carry”) was used to transport wine. Smaller, flat bottom amphorae were used to hold wine on the table. Kraters were amphora-like vessels with a wide mouth used to mix water and wine. From a krater wine and water were retrieved with a metal ladle and placed into pitcher and from the pitcher poured into two-handled drinking cups.
Hydria, with two horizontal handles, were round jars used to carry water from a well to a fountain. Before glassblowing was developed in the 1st century B.C. “core glass” vessels were made by forming glass around a solid metal rod that was taken out as the glass cooled.
The largest ancient metal vessel ever found was bronze krater dated to the sixth century B.C. Found in the tomb of a Celtic warrior princess, it was buried with a chariot and other objects in a field near Vix, France. Almost as tall as a man and large enough to hold 300 gallons of wine, it had reliefs of soldiers and chariots around the neck and a bronze cover that fit snugly in the mouth. Ordinary amphora held only around a gallon of wine.
The pottery in museum collections is naturally the finer product of the workshop; receptacles for storing and for kitchen use were of undecorated clay and more carelessly made. In the Cesnola Collection are some of the tall jars, called pithoi by the Greeks, which were used for storing and exporting wine, grain, and many other articles, taking the place of the casks, barrels, and boxes, and the paper bags and cartons of modern times. The pointed ends were driven into earthen floors. [Source: “The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans”, Helen McClees Ph.D, Gilliss Press, 1924]
Lighting in Ancient Greece
The habit of rising and going to bed early which prevailed in Greece and Italy is easily understood when we see the meagre arrangements for lighting which they possessed. In the street torches were carried, and they were also used in the house in early times. A bronze torch-holder of the late sixth century from Cyprus in the corridor and a terracotta example appear to have been made so that they could be set on a table. The Romans and Etruscans made candles of pitch and also wax ones very similar to our own, but the Greeks were not acquainted with them until they were introduced by the Romans. The iron candelabrum was designed to hold candles on the prickets around the top. Lamps were commonly of terracotta or bronze. Olive oil was burnt in them with a wick of flax, but at best the light must have been poor and flickering. Candelabra were commonly made of wood, but handsomer ones were of bronze. [Source “The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks” by Hugo Blümner, translated by Alice Zimmern, 1895]
oil lamps The earliest lamps were made from sea shells. These were observed in Mesopotamia. Lamps made from man-made materials such as earthenware and alabaster appeared between 3500 and 2500 B.C. in Sumer, Egypt and the Indus Valley. Metal lamps were rare. As technology advanced a groove for the wick was added, the bottom of the lamp was titled to concentrate the oil and the place where the flame burned was moved away from the handle. Mostly animal fats and vegetable and fish oils were burned. In Sumer, seepage from petroleum deposits was used. The wicks were made from twisted natural fibers.
Houses were lit with oil lamps, and cooking was done with coals placed in a metal brazier. Fires were always a hazard and it was not unusual for entire towns to burn down after someone carelessly knocked over an oil lamp. Greeks and Romans used oil lamps made of bronze, with wicks of oakum or linen. They were fueled by edible animal fats and vegetables oils which could be consumed in times of food shortages. The Romans were perhaps the first people to use oil as a combustible material; they burned petroleum in their lamps instead of olive oil.
In ancient times, olive oil was used in everything from oil lamps, to religious anointments, to cooking and preparing condiments and medicines. It was in great demand and traveled well and people like the Philistines grew rich trading it.
Cooking in Ancient Greece
Food was usually cut into convenient pieces in the kitchen and eaten with the fingers. Silver table services were not common among the Greeks. There were was a a special plate for fish, made in Italy, which had a depression in the center for holding the sauce. These plates are decorated with interesting and surprisingly accurate drawings of fish.
In Greco-Roman times the rich ate and drank from gold plates, silver cups and glass bottles while commoners ate and drank from clay plates, hollowed ram's horns and hardwood jugs. Upper class Greeks used spoons of bronze and silver while poorer people used ones carved from wood. To clean themselves at mealtime the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans used towel-like napkins and finger bowls of water scented with thing like rose petals, herbs and rosemary.
Items found in ancient Greek and Roman kitchens included vessels for storing olive oil; bowls for mixing wine and water; bronze strainers for removing grape skins and seeds; and small bowls for salt and snacks. There were also ladles and large bowls for eating and serving food; mortars and pestles for grinding up food; and saucepans, baking pans and frying pans, all made out of bronze, for cooking food. Women and slaves both did the cooking. Women normally didn't fetch water, but when they did they sometimes carried the vessels sideways on their head to the well and upright on the way home. [Source: "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum]
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Hellenistic World sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Greeks bbc.co.uk/history/; Canadian Museum of History, Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; MIT Classics Online classics.mit.edu ; Gutenberg.org, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Live Science, Discover magazine, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Encyclopædia Britannica, "The Discoverers" and "The Creators" by Daniel Boorstin. "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP and various books and other publications.
Last updated September 2024