Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

130 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Interior walls were generally covered with a coat of plaster,
whitewashed or painted red, though a few wealthy Athenians
may have decorated their rooms with frescoes. There was evidently
a shortage of good interior decorators in fifth-century Athens,
however, for the politician Alkibiades took the drastic step of
locking his house painter inside his house for three months until
he had finished the job. Floors consisted of beaten earth, clay, or
paving stones occasionally covered in animal skins or reed matting.
From the fourth century b.c.e. onward, they were commonly
decorated with mosaics made out of small pebbles. Roofs were
made of wood with terra-cotta tiling. Windows were very small
and set close to the ceiling to afford maximum protection against
the weather. In the winter, they were covered with boards or sacking
to keep out the wind and rain, supplemented by shutters if the
householder could afford them, because wood was both scarce
and expensive. Doors were solidly made and supplied with locks
and bars. When the Athenians residing in the countryside evacuated
to the city at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, they
took their doors and shutters with them.
Literary evidence suggests that men and women may, for some purposes, have
had separate quarters. The speaker in an oration by Lysias describes his domestic
arrangements as follows:
My small house has two stories. The layout was the same upstairs as downstairs,
with the women’s quarters upstairs and the men’s quarters downstairs.
Then our child was born, whom my wife decided to nurse herself. However,
every time she wanted to bathe it, she had to come downstairs at the risk of falling
down the staircase. So I decided to move upstairs and put the women downstairs.
I soon adjusted to the new arrangement and my wife was frequently able
to sleep with the baby, so that she could breast-feed it and stop it from crying.
(1.9–10)
The Greek words for men’s quarters and women’s quarters are
andrôn (or andrônitis ) and gynaikôn (or gynaikônitis ), respectively.
Scholars used to believe that women were largely confined to the
gynaikôn on the grounds that Greek men regarded it as a matter of
honor that their wives and daughters not be exposed to the public
gaze. By contrast, the houses of the poor consisted of only one
room, divided into different living spaces by makeshift partitions.
However, gynaika cannot be securely identified in the archaeologi-