Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

70 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
the army. The lowest group of all was the thêtes, literally “hired
laborers.”
The right of citizenship went hand in hand with the requirement
to serve in the army, although military service was regarded as a
privilege rather than a duty throughout the Greek world. From the
time of Solon onward, all Athenian citizens had the right to attend
the assembly. The belief nonetheless persisted that the attainment
of full citizen rights was dependent on wealth. The political importance
of the thêtes, the most impoverished section of Athenian society,
rose dramatically when Athens became a naval power, because
it was they who constituted the bulk of the sailors. Even so, members
of this group were not permitted to stand for political office,
either as magistrates or as members of the council, until the second
half of the fourth century b.c.e.
The Sense of Nationhood
Although the Greeks differentiated themselves from those who
did not speak Greek by the pejorative term barbaroi, a word of
uncertain etymology that may seek to reproduce the incoherent
speech of non-Greeks, the idea of “Greekness” played little part
in politics. The Greeks never had a shared capital, a single ruling
family, or even a clearly defined boundary. As noted earlier,
although they did occasionally form alliances against a common
enemy, these were invariably fragile and short lived. On the cultural
front, the idea of Greekness was promoted by common blood,
a common language, a common set of gods, a common mythology,
and a common set of institutions, such as the symposium and the
gymnasium. There also were a number of panhellenic sanctuaries,
including Olympia, Delphi, and Eleusis, home of the Eleusinian
Mysteries. (Only Greek-speakers could be initiated into these mysteries.)
On an everyday basis, however, being a Greek meant far
less politically and culturally than being an Athenian or a Corinthian
or a Macedonian.
WOMEN
In Book 1 of The Odyssey, Odysseus’s son Telemachos delivers
this stern rebuke to his mother Penelope, who, understandably
pained by an allusion to her missing husband, has asked the bard
Phemios to choose a theme other than that of the Greeks’ homecoming
from Troy: