Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Historical Outline 15
The Odyssey provides us with our first glimpse of the daily life
of the Greeks. From it we learn a great deal about a wide variety
of subjects including seafaring, farming, entertainment, burial
customs, judicial procedure, feasting, rules of hospitality, sexual
mores, slavery, attitudes toward work, and much more. For that
reason, it constitutes a major source for this study, and it shall be
referred to frequently in this work. Homer’s spotlight, however, is
almost exclusively on the aristocracy. A central feature of Homeric
society is the practice of gift exchange. The act of giving was a motivator
for all manner of actions and transactions, incumbent upon
the benefactor, not the beneficiary. When the goddess Athene, disguised
as a Taphian chieftain, is taking her leave from Telemachos
on Ithaka after receiving his hospitality, she says to him, “As for
the gift which a friend’s heart prompts you to give to me, give it
to me on my way back so that I can take it home with me. And let
it be a very nice one, so that you receive something equally nice in
due course” (The Odyssey 1.316–18).
The common people, the dêmos, hardly appear at all in the poem.
Even the slaves who are most prominently featured, including the
swineherd Eumaios and the nurse Eurykleia, come from noble
backgrounds, having been captured and then sold into slavery. We
do, however, gain an interesting insight into the lives of beggars
from the fact that Odysseus disguises himself as one and then competes
with the resident beggar Iros for the right to beg in his own
home. We also learn of the existence of specialized itinerants, who
do not permanently belong to the household but serve it periodically,
notably seers, architects, physicians, and—chiefly—singers.
We need to bear in mind that The Odyssey is a literary construct,
even though it possesses an inner coherence that suggests to some
that the picture of life it supplies is based on a closely observed
social reality. Moses Finley, author of one of the most engaging and
most imaginative books on ancient history ever written (The World
of Odysseus, 43), argues in favor of placing that social reality in the
tenth and ninth centuries b.c.e. Other scholars regard it as a conglomerate
that does not reflect any single historical epoch.
Social Unrest
Homer depicts a world in which monarchy prevails, although it
is possible to glimpse a power struggle between kings and rebellious
aristocrats. Probably about a century before Homer, aristocratic
rule had replaced monarchic rule in most parts of Greece.