Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

80 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
distaff, spindle, and spindle whorls in what is known as the dropand-spin
method. Finally, it was woven into fabric on a loom. The
warp was suspended from a crossbar, and its strands, known as the
weft, held taut at its ends by loom weights, were threaded together
by means of a shuttle.
Escaping from the Daily Grind
The traditional view, as noted earlier, is that women spent most
of their time at home. To what extent this was true is impossible
to determine, but it is unlikely to have been universally the case.
During the Peloponnesian War, say, when men were away for
long stretches at a time, women must surely have enjoyed considerable
freedom. There are even a few vase paintings depicting
women holding a symposium. What is likely to have been true at
all times, however, is that when a respectable woman went out of
doors, she rarely did so unaccompanied, if only for her safety’s
sake.
There were also a number of socially approved outlets for
women, primarily those connected with religion. Although most
festivals were attended by both men and women, there were a
few, such as the Thesmophoria, a festival held in the fall in honor
of Demeter, from which men were rigorously excluded. Funerals
provided another important occasion for women to associate with
one another. Women played the major part in preparing the body
for burial, as they do in most Mediterranean countries to this day.
Some women may even have looked forward to the next death
in the family as an opportunity to meet with their relatives and
friends. The defendant in Lysias’s On the Murder of Eratosthenes
(1.8) claims that his adulterous wife first met her lover at a funeral.
A frustrated Greek wife and her would-be lover had to seize whatever
opportunity they could! Women were also permitted to leave
the home to make visits to the cemetery to attend periodically to
the needs of the dead.
The following extract from Idyll 15 by the Syracusan poet Theokritos provides
a fascinating insight into the lives of two women who are planning to spend the
day together at a festival in honor of Adonis, a handsome young man who was
the beloved of Aphrodite. The poem, which was written in the first half of the
third century B.C.E., is set in Alexandria, Egypt, but the dialogue could be imagined
as taking place almost anywhere in the metropolitan Greek world.