It’s good to see ‘Domesticity and Domestic Life’ as the topic of a joint event by the Hellenic and Roman societies on 9 March 2021. Recognition of the scope and significance of the domestic realm in classical societies has become increasingly widely acknowledged since the 1990s. And yet, as we have learned more about houses and households in the Greek world, it has become increasingly difficult to silo ‘the domestic’; to represent it as the realm of private life, which fed into, but was largely a thing apart from, the realm of male-dominated civic and political activity, traditionally valued as more important.

Several outstanding articles in JHS since the mid-2000s (and now part of a new collection by Cambridge) have picked up on various aspects of the complex entanglements between different conceptual and physical spaces of social interaction, and the activities associated with them, which don’t divide neatly into public and private or domestic and civic. An excellent example is Julia Kindt’s (2015) paper ‘Personal religion: a productive category for the study of ancient Greek religion?’, where she establishes that traditional categories of polis/public and oikos/private religion work very poorly for typologising many kinds of religious activities and behaviours which cross-cut, or even contravene these conceptual categories. Analogously, Kostas Vlassopoulos (2011) in ‘Greek slavery: from domination to property and back again’ is able to tease out the agency of slaves, limited as it was, operating across a range of interlinked domestic, communal and civic arenas by suggesting that Greek societies conceptualised slavery primarily a relationship of domination rather than as a relationship of property.

In a completely different domain, the simultaneously domestic and communal spaces of elite hospitality in the seventh century BC Cyclades were united in the use, meanings and messaging resonating from a class of beautiful relief pithoi. These are insightfully discussed by Susanne Ebbinghaus (2005) ‘Protector of the city, or the art of storage in early Greece’. Here she argues that the epic scenes represented on these storage vessels, including our earliest representation of the Trojan Horse (see image), suggest that unlike normal ‘domestic’ pithoi hidden in a storeroom or buried in the ground to their necks, these pots were designed for display, perhaps in the reception/dining area of a large house where they functioned as ‘conspicuous storage’. In effect, putting storage on display in this way showed off the wealth and resources of a household to visitors and thereby community at large. It also demonstrates the complex intermingling of everyday life and domestic activities with communal political rivalries for prestige and power.

What these examples show is that domestic life ranged far beyond the house and household, underpinning and permeating many aspects and institutions of ancient Greek societies.

The Journal of Hellenic Studies articles cited are currently free to access alongside selected research from the Journal of Roman Studies in a new collection from Cambridge (free to access until 30 April 2021).

Photo credit: Villa Romana del Casale – Vestibule of the Domina, wikimedia.org