I
ANCIENT AND MODERN HOUSEHOLDS
I. DEFINITIONS
The polis households analyzed by Aristotle in his Politics and Ethics had little in common with the households of contemporary developed states. For Aristotle as for most Greeks, modern households would not have been households at all. Just as citizenship in the modern state is a weak shadow of polis citizenship, modern households are weak reflections of the powerful, independent institutions that were the oikoi of poleis.1
The differences were profound and manifold. In the eyes of Greeks, most modern households would have been seen as deficient, incomplete economic entities failing in the all-important aspect of being, at least minimally, self-sustaining. In this regard, modern households are the reverse of polis households in that they are, by and large, dependent for their subsistence on income originating from outside the household. Without jobs provided by the disembedded, non-household economy, modern households could not exist. Households of this type are merely consumer and reproductive units.2 By contrast, the Greek oikos was expected to be a self-sustaining joint enterprise, almost invariably agricultural, undertaken by husband and wife for the specific goal of the perpetuation of the oikos and the passing on of its resources to the next generation.3
However, it was much more than a business enterprise. The driving force of the oikos economy was not profit in the modern sense of the term.4 The oikos was a moral and religious entity in its own right whose purpose was not just the generation of legally recognizable citizens, but the proper formation of morally acceptable members of the particular polis community where it was located, and the passing on of the household’s religious cults to future generations. Material resources were intended primarily to sustain this enterprise; they were to be held in trust for the next generation. In that sense, even the property of the oikos was not purely private.5
It might be objected that polis households of this type did not differ all that much from the kinds of households found in other pre-modern societies. A recent authoritative social-anthropological survey of households identifies five elements as characteristic of households generally: production, distribution, transmission, reproduction, and co-residence.6 The domestic group or household in this perspective should not be thought of as a single entity, but as a combination of several. The “familial” dimensions of the household are defined by the “origin of links between its members, links that have their source in culturally defined relations of birth, adoption and marriage.” On the other hand the “household” dimensions are defined “by shared tasks of production and/or consumption, regardless of whether its members are linked by kinship or marriage or are co-resident.”7 The distinction between the kin and consumption or production aspects of the domestic group are particularly relevant to the study of premodern household (and among them, although not mentioned in Netting’s survey, polis) households. The following is a definition offered by one of the contributors:
In general a household is a collection of persons who work together to provide mutual care, including the provision of food, shelter, clothing and health care as well as socialization. But though households everywhere may be defined as task-oriented social units, the precise pattern of allocation is variable. In protoindustrial economies...as well as in agrarian communities, households generally function both as units of production and as units of consumption, while in industrial economies households tend to lose their role as productive units.8
Another contributor distinguishes between the conjugal family unit (the “family”) and the household. The conjugal family unit consists of the married couple and their offspring. This is sometimes called the simple, elementary family. This unit “may be thought of as the set of cultural expectations of what domestic groups and domestic relations should be like.” It establishes normative rules such as those of recruitment and devolution. The “household,” on the other hand, “is a dynamic empirical unity...in which reproduction and other important tasks, commonly including production, transmission, pooling and distribution take place.”9 Aristotle and Greeks generally would have had no difficulty in understanding these distinctions, although they would have been puzzled by comments regarding industrial economies where “households tend to lose their role as productive units.” For Greeks, households without productive capacities would have been anomalies, not true, functional households.
Thomas Gallant, in his groundbreaking work, Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece: Reconstructing the Rural Domestic Economy, accepts the descriptions offered by the contributors to Netting’s volume and defines the Greek household as a “collectivity of individuals who were usually, but not necessarily, related to one another and who formed the central unit of production/consumption and reproduction.”10 Still, for Gallant, such a definition is inadequate given the dynamic nature of the household and its morphology as an entity that was constantly in a state of flux, changing over time to the rhythm of its life cycle as new members were introduced and others left.11
Inadequacies of Modern Definitions of the Household
Neither Netting’s definition nor Gallant’s adaptation of it is an adequate basis for fully grasping Greek understanding of the household and, in turn, Aristotle’s analysis of it. In their introduction, Netting et al. note that they do not discuss “household activities that fall outside [the] five spheres – such as defense or political action – although these can be of overriding importance in some cases.”12 This brief statement speaks volumes about modern assumptions regarding the household. For Netting and his contributors, politics and defense are not central to “households” but peripheral, whereas their five other characteristics – production, distribution, transmission, reproduction and co-residence – are definitional. This is intelligible enough in terms of their perspective, which focused on societies, where it can be taken for granted that “politics and defense” belong in another realm independent of and disconnected from the household. In short, the household in Netting’s cross-cultural perspective falls into the category of the private realm. In none of the contemporary or historical societies reviewed by the contributors was there an immediate connection between the household and the political, judicial, and military realms. Yet it was precisely its involvement in the areas of defense, law, and politics that distinguished the polis and other city-state households from households in other societies, and provided them with their unique character.
Unique Households in Unique States
From earliest times to the beginning of the modern era, peasant households formed the basis of all complex societies around the Mediterranean basin and in western Asia. In all cases, with the exceptions noted, the principles laid down by Netting’s scholars would have been valid. Peasant households from Morocco to Iran exhibited, in one form or another, the five characteristics claimed by Netting to be found in households universally. This, however, would not have been true of city-state institutions, whether Greek or non-Greek, which expected, or at least allowed, some measure of formal participation in civil, cultural, and military life by their constituent households.
The city-state was not a uniquely Greek institution, nor did Greeks invent it. Not all genuine city-states were Greek, though more than others, Greek city-states tended to exhibit what Hansen calls the characteristic of “city-state culture.”13 What Greeks did do was develop the form of the city-state more thoroughly, completely, and in greater variety over a longer period, and over a more widespread geographical landscape, than other city-state peoples. According to one scholar, what distinguished Greek poleis from other city-states was “the form of political rationality that the Greeks chose to substitute for other forms of communal tie, whether social, religious, military, or economic.”14
Mothers and Fathers
Making military and political affairs part of, and indeed central to, the agenda of the household understandably produced a radical restructuring of its internal relationships and its functional relationship to the larger polis community. Greek oikoi were expected to internalize and reproduce in their own micro-environments the ideology that characterized the constitution or politeia of their individual cities. The oikos of a particular city was supposed to embody the values of its politeia, and its corresponding characteristic bios, or life-style. Greek constitutions were not so much legal documents as comprehensive behavioral blueprints for daily life, politics, religion, social, economic, and cultural interactions. The impact of the intrusion into the household of what is usually thought to be proper to the public realm was not restricted to those who participated directly in military and political affairs, namely, the males of the household, but permeated all aspects of its relationships. Mothers in polis households were understood to be not merely responsible for the education of future farmers and their wives – as was true of all peasant households – but of property-owning, arms-bearing citizen-farmers and their wives.
The burden of education fell heaviest on the mothers of young children and other females of the household before fathers began to take over the socialization of their sons at some time around six or seven years of age. Their supervisory roles never ceased. Daughters had to be socialized into the bios of the community so that they, in their turn, could fulfill their responsibilities for the raising of citizen children. In the village-like community that was the average polis, the matrons were the primary guardians of behavior. In this, of course, they lacked the assistance of a formal “public” school system or any other aspect of the bureaucratic, custodial apparatus characteristic of modern states. Instead, kin networks, local, village-level supervision, the festivals, and the institutional structures of supra-household associations such as the deme, phratry, genos, tribe, and religious associations in which the polis was rich, provided a general structure for the education of children above and beyond what the oikos itself was capable of providing. The education of Greek children was incidental, not formal.
The opening up of the public realm of political, judicial, and military life to citizens of the polis, directly to its male population but indirectly to its female population, represented an enormous expansion of human experience for all members of the household. The customary comments regarding the political disabilities of female members of the polis need to be offset by considerations of their high social standing vis-à-vis other members of the community, such as male and female metics. While the internal hierarchy of the household was at least formally clear to all, it was equally clear that a citizen oikos outranked all other households. Another frequently underestimated aspect of female participation in the life of the political and not just the social community of the polis was the public role of women in religion.15 As one scholar has put it, the religious realm was the equivalent of the political realm for males.16
Politics and Defense
For Greek polis dwellers, Netting’s spheres of “politics and defense” were not peripheral but central to all aspects of their lives, from ideological self-understanding to the ways they structured their economic existence.17 Depending on the individual constitution or politeia, military and political activities were integrated in varying degrees of depth with the economic, social, and cultural aspects of polis life. These military and political activities were central to the value system of the polis, not distractions from the main purpose of life.18 They were not periodic interruptions of a life otherwise devoted to some other kind of activity, such as the pursuit of a profession, or the running of a business, or holding down a job. It was the way the public spheres of life – the military, the judicial, and the political – interacted with the constituent households of the community that made the polis household a distinct institution. Military and political affairs pervaded every aspect of life. Households in poleis and non-poleis differed precisely because the states in which they were embedded were different. To approach this from another angle, it was the absence of shared ruling and participation in security matters, or participation in these affairs at a very low level, that defined for Greeks (including Aristotle) the character of non-polis households and states19 For Aristotle, the fullest development of human nature occurred only in a polis context. Human flourishing, happiness, eudaimonia could not be readily achieved in any other environment. Correspondingly, the proper functioning of a household occurred only within a polis environment. Naturally, the best household was to be found in the best state, but even in a deficient polis, the household remained different from households in non-polis states.20
An Expanded Definition of the Household
I return now to the definition of the polis household in the light of Netting’s and Gallant’s analysis. The definition of the Greek polis household needs to be expanded beyond the five categories proposed by Netting to include formally those political and military dimensions that gave the household of these states its special character, its specific function and capacity, its ergon and dunamis.21 However, more than a single type of polis and household existed. The moral character of each individual polis was expressed in its constitution, its politeia and its specifically tailored educational system, its paideia, which existed to sustain this special character. There were as many constitutions as there were poleis. Correspondingly, the state’s constituent oikoi and their quality varied with the state. Households were expected to enshrine and inculcate the values of their individual polis. Good households reflected the character of, and were productive of, the character of the polis. Reflecting this common understanding, Aristotle, in his discussion of the ideal state comments that:
[Education (paideia)] ought to be adapted to the particular form of constitution (politeia), since the particular character (ēthos) belonging to each constitution both guards the constitution generally and originally establishes it – for instance the democratic ēthos promotes democracy and the oligarchic oligarchy; and a better ēthos always produces a better constitution (8.1337a14–17).22
This may seem to be a commonplace since it could be said that all polities aim at self-replication through their households. Although this is true to some extent, no other political entity possessed the degree of integration of public and private realms that were to be found in the polis, which in turn placed such a heavy burden, educational and otherwise, on the household.23 The interpenetration of economic, political, social, moral, and religious aspects of life – of public and private realms – was much more intense and complete in a polis than in any other form of state, ancient or modern.24 In turn, it was this unusual melding of public and private that gave the polis household its special character and imposed on it heavy responsibilities.
Public and Private
In emphasizing the integration of private and public sectors, of household and polis, I do not wish to return to an older view of the polis that saw the household’s privacy minimized and subordinated to the intrusive authority of the state.25 The private realm of the household was a culturally recognized space distinct from the public, although integrated with it in complex ways. A common designation of enemies was hoi thurathen, those outside the courtyard gate of the house.26 Yet the terms “public” and “private” (dēmosios/idios) were flexible concepts subject to a variety of interpretations depending on the particular polis and the matters at hand, more complementary than binary opposites.27 A recent interpretation, for instance, asserts the concept of “a protected private sphere as one of the constitutive characteristics of a democratic society.”28 An individual could play different roles in private and public without having to be a political figure in our sense of the word. Attending the assembly, serving as a juror or as a member of a chorus could all be viewed as public activities conducted by private individuals. Perceptions of what activities pertained to private and public differed considerably from modern assumptions in this regard. While adultery in developed countries is generally regarded as a private affair between consenting adults, laws prohibiting it notwithstanding, in democratic Athens, adultery was regarded as a dangerous violation of public order and a potential threat to the state because it destabilized the relationships between households and initiated intergenerational feuds. Yet, an adulterous wife was not punished directly. Her punishment was that she could not participate in public religious functions, which was a severe punishment in its own way because religion was of such importance to all aspects of life. Penalties for homosexuality were also indirect. They included prohibitions against participation in politics in the public realm and the holding of a wide range of public and administrative offices. Yet, actual homosexual activity between consenting adults was left unregulated in the private realm (it was a different matter if seduction was involved). Laws were directed at protecting boys and young men from seduction because it could affect their capacity at a later date to participate fully in the civic life of the city. Homosexuals were punished directly only if they violated the prohibition against their participation in politics. Although privacy was thus protected from the intrusion of the state, this did not protect practitioners from social and religious censure. Demosthenes reports a litigant as claiming that “in a democracy a man has a right to do and say whatever he likes as long as he does not care what reputation such conduct will bring him” (25.25).