Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

16 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
The poems of Hesiod, a peasant farmer from Boiotia who was
perhaps a younger contemporary of Homer, testify to a new
power struggle, this time between the aristocrats and the common
people, or dêmos. In Works and Days, Hesiod warns aristocrats
who pervert justice that they will not escape the “all-seeing
eye of Zeus.”
The challenge to aristocratic authority at the beginning of the seventh
century b.c.e. was caused by many factors. One of the most
important of these was writing, which makes it possible to codify
laws and establish a constitution. Writing also makes it easier to
detect evasion and malpractice on the part of those in power. The
first written laws date to the seventh century b.c.e. Literacy in the
Greek world was not confined to a particular social group, as it
was in Egypt, for instance, where only members of the priesthood
were literate. This made for far greater openness, transparency, and
accountability in all aspects of Greek life—civic, political, administrative,
and religious. Writing had a profound effect upon the
development of Greek history, for without it democracy could not
have come to fruition.
THE RISE OF THE CITY-STATE
From 750 b.c.e. onward, the most distinctive political unit in the
Greek world was the polis or city-state, from which the word politics
is derived. As Aristotle remarked, “Man is a zôon politikon, a
political animal,” meaning “Man is an animal that is designed to
live in a polis,” and, we might add, parsing the wording more fully,
designed to achieve his maximum potential under this system of
government and no other. Although no two poleis were identical
in physical layout, all by definition possessed an urbanized center
and surrounding territory. Each polis formulated its own law code,
kept its own army, developed its own system of government, and
recognized its own set of gods. These gods were variations primarily
on the 12 basic Olympian gods, but they were also particular to
any given polis.
The polis system prevailed in the heartland of mainland Greece.
Around its fringes lived peoples such as the Ambraciots, Thessalians,
and Macedonians, who had no urban center and were organized
much more loosely into tribes or ethnê, from which the word
ethnic derives. Since, however, ethnê have left no literature and few
artifacts, it is virtually impossible to investigate the lives of their
peoples. So when investigating the daily life of the Greeks, as noted