‘Farm’ sites of various kinds have been a striking feature of survey archaeology in most areas of Greece and Italy in recent years, and a number of such sites dating to the Roman period have been located. In many parts of Greece there seem to be particularly large numbers of later Roman sites, with fewer which can be firmly dated to the earlier imperial period, while in a few areas the Imperial Roman period is one of dense occupation. In Italy, too, there seems to be considerable regional variation in peak periods of rural settlement, so that in some areas numbers of small sites are greatest for the Republican period (second to first centuries B.C.), while in other areas there are many small sites of the first century a.d. or even later. The tendency of archaeologists working in both Greece and Italy, especially in the early years of the survey boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was to categorize these smaller sites as peasant farms (generally assuming peasant free-holders), while larger, more opulent sites were classed as ‘villas’. This encouraged both archaeologists and historians to jump to the conclusion that the development of large estates attested in the literary record from the later second century B.C. onward had not effected the complete demise of small-scale, free subsistence farmers.
The idea that the household was the fundamental building block of ancient Greek society, explicit in the ancient sources, has now become widely accepted. It is no exaggeration to say that ancient Athenians would have found it almost inconceivable that individuals of any status existed who did not belong to some household; and the few who were in this position were almost certainly regarded as anomalous. In ancient Athens, as elsewhere, households ‘are a primary arena for the expression of age and sex roles, kinship, socialization and economic cooperation’. It has been suggested for modern Greece that our own cultural biases, along with the Greek ideology of male dominance, have led to the assumption that the foundations of power in Greek society lie solely in the public sphere, and that domestic power is ‘less important’. In a less simple reality the preeminent role of the household cannot be underestimated. Here I hope to question similar assumptions about ancient Greece, focusing in particular on the relationships that existed between Athenian households and the property of the individuals, particularly women, within these households.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.