Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

14 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
surrounding Athens) quadrupled and that in the next half-century
it almost doubled again. Others, however, interpret the increase in
the number of graves as evidence of an unusually high mortality
rate, perhaps occasioned by drought and disease. Whatever the
truth, it is important to bear in mind for our investigation that epidemics
were a perpetual hazard in the summer months throughout
Greek history, even though we rarely hear about them in our
sources. For all ancient and premodern peoples, as well as for those
living in the developing world today, deadly disease was an almost
daily occurrence.
Over time, the population of mainland Greece did undoubtedly
experience considerable growth, and this would have had a profound
impact on daily life. An agrarian economy now began to
replace one previously based mainly on animal husbandry as much
of the land was converted to the production of grain, because grain
can sustain a large population more effectively. It was an economy
and a society that was dominated by aristocrats with large estates.
The World of the Homeric Poems
The Iliad and The Odyssey are among the greatest achievements
of the Greek renaissance. Although their origins as oral poems—
poems handed down by word of mouth—probably lie in the Dark
Age, they were brought to completion around 700 b.c.e. The world
described by these poems is that of an imaginary Mycenaean past
as envisioned by an impoverished and vastly reduced society that is
looking back nostalgically to an epoch of military power and material
prosperity. Yet the poems also interestingly reveal the beginnings
of an instinct for democracy that is a central feature of the
Greek character and that significantly shaped its history, as in The
Odyssey Book 2, when Telemachos calls an assembly of fellow citizens
to complain about the behavior of his mother’s suitors, who
are eating him out of house and home.
Although The Iliad and The Odyssey are the earliest surviving
examples of epic poetry relating to the Trojan War, they come at
the end of a long tradition. Paradoxically, it was their success that
killed off this flourishing genre. Other epic poems on the same subject,
known generically as the Epic Cycle, have survived only in
fragments. We know nothing about Homer, not even whether he
(possibly even she) was blind. We do not know whether he was a
single person or whether Homer was the name for the many singers
who composed oral epic around 700 b.c.e.