The patriarchal nature of the family is shown not only by the rules of inheritance. Marriages are arranged by the heads of the genos, often for reasons of political friendship; the bride comes from the same social class, but is not necessarily related or even from the same area. Achilles says that if he returns from Troy, his father Peleus will himself seek a wife for him; ‘for there are many Achaean women in Hellas and Phthia, daughters of nobles who defend their citadels, one of whom I shall make my beloved bride if I wish’ (Iliad 9.394ff). The arranging of the marriage seems to involve both the giving of bridegifts (for which there is a special word, hedna) by the family of the bridegroom to that of the bride, and the provision of a dowry for the bride by her relatives. It has been suggested that these practices are incompatible, and represent two different historical layers in Homer; but they are in fact found together in other societies. The purpose of the dowry is to endow the future household; the bridegift has a different aim, which is neither to purchase the bride nor to initiate a gift-exchange involving the bride: it is rather to impress the bride’s family with the wealth and status of the bridegroom’s family. This is shown by the competition for a particularly desirable bride: Penelope complains to her suitors, ‘this has not been established in the past as the right way for suitors to behave, who wish to woo a noble lady and the daughter of a rich man, and compete with one another; but they themselves bring oxen and fat sheep as a feast for the friends of the bride, and they give splendid gifts: they do not eat another’s livelihood without repayment’ (Odyssey 18.275ff). The gifts of such suitors are not conditional on winning the bride’s hand: the losers lose all, so that there is here no exchange agreed, merely a contest in giving. The bride joins the bridegroom’s genos: when Telemachus arrives at Menelaus’ palace, a double wedding feast is in progress: his (bastard) son is bringing home a bride; and his daughter, long ago promised by Menelaus to Achilles’ (bastard) son, is leaving home (Odyssey 4. 1ff). The submergence of the wife in the new family of her father-in-law is shown by the survival in the Iliad of a kinship term found also in other Indo-European languages, e(i)nater, for the relationship between the wives of brothers, who would normally have lived together in the same household. The greatest tragedy is the premature death of the head, leaving his sons too young to assert their rights; this is what Andromache fears for her son in Troy, now Hector is dead (Iliad 22.484ff), and it is this struggle which Telemachus faces on Ithaca as his father’s prolonged absence makes it more and more likely that he has died.
Lower down the social scale marriage was a more practical affair, closely related to inheritance. Hesiod regards women as a curse sent by Zeus, ‘a great pain for mortals, living with men, sharing not in dread poverty but in prosperity’, like drones in the hive, but necessary in order to avoid the worse fate of others sharing the inheritance (Theogony 590–612). A man will marry at thirty a virgin in her fifth year from puberty (Works and Days 695fr; rather old: 14–16 was later the common age of marriage for girls), and he will have only one son if possible; though if one lives long enough there are compensations in more (376ff). Despite the strength of certain incest tabus shown in myth, endogamy, marriage within a relatively restricted cycle of relations, was the rule in Greece, and served to preserve existing patterns of ownership: in classical Athens an heiress could legally be claimed in marriage by her father’s closest male relative, beginning with her uncle; the procedure involved a herald publicly inviting claimants to come forward.
Many of these differences between the aristocracy and the ordinary citizen survived. Throughout the archaic period marriage outside the community was common between aristocrats, and contributed considerably to their political power and to the development of relations between cities; when in the mid fifth century Athens passed a law that citizens must in future be of Athenian parentage on both sides, this was a popular, anti-aristocratic move; the proposer, Perikles, like other Athenian aristocrats, would have found many earlier members of his family debarred from citizenship by such a rule.
A similar tension between aristocracy and peasantry perhaps explains the development in the status of women in early Greece. Hesiod reflects the general attitude then and later; but, though the portraits of Penelope and Nausicaa are idealized, Homer suggests that there was a time when women of the aristocracy had a high social status and considerable freedom: they could move freely without escorts, discuss on equal terms with their husbands, and might even be present at the banquets in the great hall. They were responsible for a large part of the household’s economic activities, weaving, grinding corn, and the supervision of the women slaves and the storechamber. In later Greek society respectable women were largely confined to their quarters, and took little part in male social activities at home or in public. This change in status is probably related to the movement from an estate-centred life to a city-centred one: the urbanization of Greek culture in most communities saw the increasing exclusion of women from important activities such as athletics, politics, drinking parties and intellectual discussion; these characteristically group male activities resulted also in the growth in most areas of that typically aristocratic Greek phenomenon, male homosexuality – though in the Symposium (182a) Plato mentions Ionia as an exception. Apart perhaps from Achilles and Patroclus and Zeus and Ganymede, Homer portrays early Greek society as markedly heterosexual. Marriage customs seem to show a similar shift; the bridegifts so prominent in Homer disappear, and in classical Greece only the dowry is known. In other words women had once been valuable social assets in an age when family and marriage alliances were more important; in the developed city-state they were no longer at a premium.
Around the immediate family lay the oikos. The early Greek basileus worked his estate with the help of slaves and occasional hired labour. The status of hired labourer (thēs) is the worst on earth: ‘spare me your praise of death’, says Achilles to Odysseus in the underworld, ‘I would rather be on earth and hire myself to a landless man with little for himself to live on, than rule over all the corpses of the dead’ (Odyssey 11.488ff). The life of a labourer is scarcely different from that of a beggar, for both are free men who have lost their position in society as completely as they can, and are dependent on the charity of another – only the beggar is preserved from starvation by the protection of Zeus; as an insult one of Penelope’s suitors offers the beggar Odysseus a job on an upland farm in return for food and clothing (Odyssey 18.357ff). This attitude to wage labour as private misfortune and public disgrace was widely prevalent later, and had a profound effect in shaping the economy’s dependence on slave labour: casual labour or skilled labour were acceptable types of employment, but free men would not willingly put themselves in the power of another by hiring themselves out on a regular basis. By contrast the slave had a value and a recognized position in society; nor was he responsible for his own misfortune. ‘But at least I shall be master of my own house and of the slaves whom great Odysseus captured for me’, says Telemachus (Odyssey 1.397ff): in raiding and warfare it was traditional to kill the males of any captured city and enslave the women and children; kidnapping, piracy and trade were also sources of supply: the faithful swineherd Eumaeus tells how his city was not sacked, nor was he captured while tending the flocks: he was the son of a noble, stolen by Phoenician traders with the help of his Phoenician nurse (herself captured by Taphian pirates) and sold to Odysseus’ father, who had brought him up with his youngest child (Odyssey 15.352ff). For such reasons women were relatively common as household slaves; men were few, reared from childhood and highly valued: