Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

60 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
was a truly multicultural society, as evidenced by the fact that a
number of documents are bilingual.
Many documentary papyri are written on scraps that contain
fragments of Greek literature on the reverse. In fact, it is thanks
to papyrology (i.e., the study of papyri) that several lost works of
Greek literature have come to light. Among the most important
finds are Sophokles’ satyr play Detectives, Menander’s comedy The
Ill-Tempered Man, and Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens. On the basis
of the total number of literary papyri, the most popular author by
far was Homer, with The Iliad outnumbering The Odyssey by three
to one. This means that if a Greek owned any author’s work at all,
it was most likely to be that of Homer. Although the data pertain
only to Egypt in the Hellenistic era, there is no reason to suppose
that Homer would have been any less popular anywhere else in the
Greek world.
Papyrology has been an important branch of historical inquiry
since the final decades of the nineteenth century. Its discoveries
provide us with a slice of Greek life that would otherwise be completely
unknown to us. It is a life that sometimes comes across to
us in heart-rending detail. We hear, for instance, of a slave called
Epaphroditos, eight years old, who fell to his death out of a bedroom
window when he was leaning out to watch castanet players
down below in the street. On a more light-hearted note, we
also hear of a schoolmaster named Lollianos who complained that
he never received his salary “except sometimes in sour wine and
worm-ridden corn.”
OSTRAKA
Because sheets of papyri were relatively expensive to purchase,
broken pieces of pottery, known as ostraka, frequently served for
writing as well. Thousands of ostraka have been preserved in the
soil of Greece because, unlike papyri, they are practically indestructible.
Most are incised, though in Egypt the majority are written in
ink. Although ostraka were mainly used for lists or official receipts,
some were used for correspondence.
From ostrakon comes ostrakismos, which give us our word ostracism.
An ostrakismos was a vote cast by the Athenian assembly to
banish one of two leading politicians whose rivalry was judged to
be harmful to the state. The ballot papers took the form of ostraka
on which the citizens wrote the name of the candidate of their
choice—or rather nonchoice. If more than 6,000 votes were cast, the