A town frozen in 348 BCE
Most histories of Greek architecture are about temples, because temples were built to last. Houses were rebuilt again and again, so in most Greek cities the older ones vanished under later ones. Olynthus, in Chalkidiki, is the great exception. In 348 BCE Philip II of Macedon besieged the town, took it through the treachery of two of its chief officials, plundered it and sold its people as slaves. Its houses have become our best source on Greek domestic life.
From 1928 the American archaeologist David Robinson excavated houses on the North Hill, and the plans he and his collaborator J. Walter Graham published became the standard picture of the Greek house. Since 2014 the Olynthos Project, run with the Greek Archaeological Service and the universities of Liverpool and Michigan, has gone back to the site with modern methods to test that picture.
A blank wall outside, a courtyard inside
What would you see from the street? Very little: a wall and a door. The house looked inwards. In the type found at Olynthus, called the pastas house, an open courtyard lay at the centre or the south of the plot, bordered on one or more sides by a roofed colonnade, the pastas itself (a portico). Most rooms opened onto this court one by one, so the courtyard worked like the hall and the garden of a modern house rolled into one: the place you crossed to go anywhere, and the brightest spot to work in.
Many houses had an upper floor. Archaeologists know because they find a stone base in the courtyard or under the pastas, where a flight of wooden stairs once stood. The staircase itself burned or rotted, but the stone that carried it stayed put.
Which room was which?
This is harder than it sounds. A Greek house had few fixed fittings, no built-in kitchen and no plumbing, so the purpose of most rooms has to be guessed from what was found in them. A few rooms can be identified with confidence.
The first is the andron (from aner, andros, man), a square room with its door set off-centre. Its shape left space for couches arranged all around the walls, on which guests reclined to drink and dine in the symposium, the drinking party of Greek men. A room of this kind held seven to fifteen couches. In the middle stood a krater, a large bowl in which wine was mixed with water, usually three or four parts water to one of wine. The andron was the best-finished room of the house: its floor was often red plaster or a mosaic of small pebbles set in a pattern, and its walls could be painted red, yellow or white.
The second is what Graham called the oikos unit (from oikos, house): one large room with two small ones beside it. The large room sometimes had a hearth or stone shelves; one side room, full of ash and rubbish, was probably where fires were lit; the other sometimes had a mortar floor and even a terracotta bathtub, filled and emptied by hand with jugs. Large rooms with their own door onto the street may have been shops or stables.
Were there really “women’s quarters”?
Greek texts say so. In a speech written by Lysias for a murder trial, an Athenian called Euphiletos describes his house in court: two floors of equal size, the men’s rooms downstairs and the women’s upstairs, until the baby arrived and he swapped floors so his wife would not have to go down the stairs every time the child needed washing. The Greek name for the women’s part of the house is gynaikonitis (from gyne, woman).
Do the houses confirm it? Only partly. At Olynthus most rooms have no fixed fittings and the finds were not all kept and studied, so no room can be labelled as female with confidence. The Olynthos Project now works on the assumption that a single space hosted several activities, which changed during the day and over the years. So the verdict is mixed: the separation existed in Athenian ideas and in some homes, as Euphiletos shows, but it was a matter of who met whom and when, more than of walls.
A house was also a workshop
For an Athenian woman the most constant occupation was making cloth for the family. A small oil flask painted by the Amasis Painter around 550-530 BCE shows the work: women spin wool on hand-held spindles and two smaller figures work a loom. Textile historians have used this scene to reconstruct how the Greeks wove. Above the loom a seated woman holds out her veil like a bride, and the flask may have been a wedding present: in Athens a good weaver was considered a good wife. The cloth woven at home became the family’s clothes, blankets and shrouds.
Storage was the other constant. Wine and food were kept in jars, and the courtyard and its rooms were full of the pottery you now see in museums, from plain cooking pots to the painted cups of the symposium. Looking at the vases in a museum case, it helps to picture them on a shelf in a room like these.
Painted houses on the funerary vases
Painters sometimes set their scenes inside the house. In the fifth century white-ground lekythoi, oil flasks with a pale painted surface, served as funerary vases, and a lekythos by the Achilles Painter (about 440 BCE) shows a woman and a youth, probably saying goodbye in the women’s rooms of a house.
So how did a family live? Inside a box of rooms around a courtyard that let in the light, with a showroom for the men’s parties and the rest of the house shared, room by room and hour by hour, between cooking, weaving, storage and sleep.
Where to see it
The archaeological site of Olynthus, in Chalkidiki, south-east of Thessaloniki, shows the houses of the North Hill and some of the pebble mosaics in place. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum’s Greek galleries have the Amasis Painter’s lekythoi (gallery 154) and the white-ground lekythos by the Achilles Painter (gallery 159). Check opening times and gallery closures before you go.
Sources
- Olynthos Project (Universities of Liverpool and Michigan, Greek Archaeological Service), “Houses” and “Introduction”.
- Diodorus Siculus, Library 16.53; Lysias 1, On the Murder of Eratosthenes 9 (Perseus Digital Library).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Symposium in Ancient Greece”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2002); “Ancient Greek Dress” (2003).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 31.11.10, 56.11.1, 08.258.18.
- N. Cahill, Household and City Organization at Olynthus, New Haven.
