Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The People 99
than half the length that is common in Western societies today.
Explicit evidence is very hard to come by, however. Paleontology
provides only a rough indication of age at death. Funerary monuments
rarely record age at death except in the case of those who
survived to extreme old age. Infant mortality was at least as high
as 25 percent. Those who reached their tenth birthday, however,
had a reasonable chance of surviving another twenty years or more.
It is estimated that, in the Roman world, only about 21 percent of
the population attained the age of 50 and 13 percent the age of 60.
Probably these averages were comparable in the Greek world. This
meant that there was a preponderance of teenagers and a paucity
of the elderly. The satirist Lucian wrote a book called Longlivers
—“Geriatrics” might be an appropriate equivalent—in which
he listed famous people who had achieved 80 or more. The oldest
Athenian whose age is recorded was a man named Euphranor,
whose gravestone records that he lived to the ripe old age of 105.
Because birth certificates did not exist except in Egypt, such claims
should be treated with caution, however, particularly in view of the
widely reported tendency in preliterate societies to “round up” age
at death into pentads and decades (i.e., 35, 40, 45, etc.).
Women’s life expectancy seems to have been about ten years lower
than that of men. There were many reasons for the disparity. First,
other than in Sparta, girls were not as well fed as boys. This made
them more susceptible to disease and, in some cases, permanently
impaired their health. Second, the early age at which many girls
became pregnant—shortly after puberty—imposed severe strains
upon their bodies, as did the frequency with which they became
pregnant. Third, women at the lower end of the social scale were
required to do manual work, often of a highly demanding nature.
Men, by contrast, tended to lead less strenuous lives than women,
except when they went to war, the conduct of which in most parts
of the Greek world was limited to the summer months.
Despite the brevity of human life, three score years and ten
nonetheless constituted the proper quota of years, as is indicated
in a fragmentary poem by the Athenian lawgiver Solon: “If a man
finally reaches the full measure of his years [i.e., 70], let him receive
the apportionment of death, without dying prematurely.”
Literary Portraits of the Elderly
One of the most memorable literary portraits of old age is that of
Nestor, king of Pylos, who is a major character in The Iliad. Nestor
claims to have “seen two generations pass away . . . and now be