The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks
9781465641632
281 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
If the account of Greek life and customs given in this work does not present all sides of life in due proportion, we must lay the blame on the insufficiency of the sources whence a description of this kind is derived. These are of three kinds: literary, artistic, and epigraphic. The literary sources supply us with a large amount of detail for the work in hand, but seldom give complete pictures or descriptions of social conditions. Those writers of the Free Age of Greece whom we still possess entirely, or in considerable fragments, are not all equally in a position to touch on matters of private or domestic life. The Homeric Epics give a good deal of insight into the life of those early times; but after Homer epic poetry disappears from the ranks of available testimony, and what remains to us of the Alexandrine Epic, which was essentially a learned style of poetry, supplies no useful material, if only because it seeks its subjects in the mythological period, and describes them on essentially Homeric lines. The lyric poets, too, afford little help; now and then they enable us to add a few details to our picture, but, as a rule, the results are small, and not till we reach the Alexandrine period, and there chiefly in bucolic and epigrammatic poetry, do we obtain richer results in this domain. Here the poems of Theocritus are of especial value. Unfortunately, very much of this period, which would have thrown most interesting lights on different aspects of Greek life, has been entirely lost, or survives only in small fragments. Tragedy again, which usually takes its subjects from mythology, cannot be considered at all. Ancient poetry possesses no “middle-class epic” like modern poetry, which will assuredly some day supply valuable material for the social historian. But ancient comedy is of the greatest value for our purpose, and may indubitably be regarded as the most fertile source of our knowledge of private life. The comedies of Aristophanes deal with the immediate present, and, although full of extravagant notions and fantastic inventions, yet treat of actual circumstances, and thus supply a mine of wealth for the student of Attic life. We can only judge, from numerous fragments of their comedies, how valuable would have been the other poets of the so-called “Older Comedy” of the fifth century B.C., who are, unfortunately, lost to us. Even though we must exercise some caution in the use of these authorities, distinguishing comic inventions and poetical exaggeration from actual fact, yet in the majority of cases it will not be very difficult to come to a decision on such questions. No less valuable, perhaps even more useful, for our purpose would be the so-called “New Comedy” of Menander and others, if we possessed more than a few scattered fragments of it. The imitations of Plautus and Terence compensate to some extent for the lost originals, yet even here we must be on our guard, since the Roman poets in their adaptation often introduced traits from Roman life. Still, as a rule they adhered to Greek, or, rather, Attic manners, upon which the original comedies were based.
