Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

4 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Some scholars regard the investigation of such questions as
“What did the Greeks eat for breakfast?” (“not much” is the probable
answer!) as an irrelevant distraction to the serious study of history,
thereby adopting a Thukydidean rather than an Herodotean
approach to historical inquiry by privileging political events over
customs. They have a point. Viewed in a vacuum, many questions
having to do with daily life do not help us understand what makes
the Greeks so different from (and in some ways so similar to) ourselves.
It is all too easy to depict the Greeks as nineteenth-century
gentlemen of refined artistic taste who had a regrettable penchant
for homosexuality, waxed philosophical all hours of the day, and
seriously mistreated their wives. I have tried to do better than that.
What I have attempted here under the general heading of daily life
is to investigate what the French call the mentalité (or mental structures)
of the Greeks, a branch of structuralist inquiry that is associated
with the Annales school of historical inquiry founded by Marc
Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Simply put, it is a school of inquiry that
believes in a close relationship between mental processes on the one
hand and climate, the physical environment, biology, language, ties
of kinship, and so on, on the other, and that these so-called structures
condition and set limits upon human behavior. In the same
way, albeit at a more mundane level, I believe we can better comprehend
the mentalité of the Greeks by grappling with the conditions
of their daily lives. The fact that Perikles, like most Athenians,
probably ate very little for breakfast tells us relatively little; the fact
that, like so many Athenians, he lost two sons to the great plague
before succumbing to it himself tells us a great deal, and both circumstances
in the end are woven into the texture of daily life.
Some of the questions I consider to be especially important are the
following: What did the Greeks do with their income? How did they
treat their slaves? How did they treat their wives? How did wives
treat their husbands? How stable was the family? How were old people
treated? How did the young treat the elderly? Were the Greeks
afraid of death? Did they share our notion of romantic love? What
did they think of foreigners? Were they racist? Did they engage in
premarital sex? How commonly did they perform abortions? Did
they practice euthanasia? Were they all unquestioningly patriotic?
Did they believe in progress—social, economic, or other? How did
they relax? Were they in general more highly cultivated than we
are? Questions like these are inherently worth asking, regardless of
whether we consider the Greeks our spiritual, cultural, or intellectual
ancestors, which, whether we like it or not, they are.