The Power of Individual and Community in Ancient Athens and Beyond: Essays in Honour of John K. Davies Jan Haywood (Editor)

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98004_Fest_Davies_Prelims:Layout 1 19/12/18 15:43 Page i
THE POWER OF INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY

IN ANCIENT ATHENS AND BEYOND
ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF JOHN K. DAVIES
98004_Fest_Davies_Prelims:Layout 1 19/12/18 15:43 Page ii
98004_Fest_Davies_Prelims:Layout 1 19/12/18 15:43 Page iii
T HE
P OWER OF I NDIVIDUAL
AND C OMMUNITY
IN
A NCIENT A THENS
AND B EYOND
E SSAYS IN HONOUR OF
J OHN K. D AVIES
edited by
Zosia Archibald
and
Jan Haywood
98004_Fest_Davies_Prelims:Layout 1 19/12/18 15:43 Page iv
First published in 2019 by

The Classical Press of Wales
15 Rosehill Terrace, Swansea SA1 6JN
Tel: +44 (0)1792 458397
www.classicalpressofwales.co.uk
Distributor
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© 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-910589-73-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset by Louise Jones, and printed and bound in the UK by Gomer Press, Llandysul,
Ceredigion, Wales
–––––––––––––––––
The Classical Press of Wales, an independent venture, was founded in 1993, initially to
support the work of classicists and ancient historians in Wales and their collaborators from
further afield. More recently it has published work initiated by scholars internationally . While
retaining a special loyalty to Wales and the Celtic countries, the Press welcomes scholarly
contributions from all parts of the world.
The symbol of the Press is the Red Kite. This bird, once widespread in Britain, was reduced by
1905 to some five individuals confined to a small area known as ‘The Desert of Wales’ – the
upper Tywi valley. Geneticists report that the stock was saved from terminal inbreeding by the
arrival of one stray female bird from Germany. After much careful protection, the Red Kite now
thrives – in Wales and beyond.
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CONTENTS
Page
Preface vii
Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood
1 Imaginary propertied families: kinship in epic poetry 1
S. C. Humphreys
2 ‘Charis, sweetest of gods’: wealth and reciprocity in

Classical Athens 49
Nick Fisher
3 Herodotus and the social contexts of memory in Ancient

Greece: the individual historian and his community 79
Edward M. Harris
4 From Croesus to Pausanias: tragic individuals in early

Greek historiography 115
Jan Haywood
5 Euergetism and the public economy of Classical Athens:

the initiative of the deme 147
Robin Osborne
6 The priesthoods of the Eteoboutadai 163

Stephen Lambert
7 Tegeas from Torone and some truths about ancient markets 177
Zosia Halina Archibald
8 At the roots of a revolution. Land ownership, citizenship

and military service in Macedonia before and after Philip II 213
Manuela Mari
9 A twenty-first century Philippic 241

A. J. N. W. Prag with J. H. Musgrave and R. A. H. Neave
v
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Contents
10 Apollo, the tutelary god of the Seleucids, and Demodamas

of Miletus 261
Krzysztof Nawotka
11 From Xerxes to Mithridates: kings, coins and economic life

at Kelainai-Apameia 285
Alain Bresson
12 John Davies, Greek historian 311

P. J. Rhodes
Bibliography 317
Index of sources 325
General Index 331
vi
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LIST OF FIGURES
1.1. Resource movement in a modified version of ‘household autarky’

in the ancient state: John Davies’ Model 01 (© Stanford University
Press). As John has emphasised, spatial boundaries may apply to
public economies, but not to real economies, so an economic model
needs to reflect this (Davies 2005, 142; 143 Fig. 6.8).
1.2. Complex flows in the ancient state: John Davies’ Model 02, showing
how the principal resources ‘flow’ within, between, and beyond the
agents (Davies 2005, 144 Fig. 6.9; © Stanford University Press).
1.3. Interactions of the various agents involved, public and private, with
the public economy – Model 03 of resource movement in John Davies’
conception of the ancient state, corresponding to the Classical
period (Davies 2005, 145 Fig. 6.10; © Stanford University Press).
1.4 A ‘cantonal’ economy: Model 04 of John Davies’ ancient state
economic dynamics (Davies 2005, 148 Fig. 6.12; © Stanford
University Press). The thick lines represent the level of resource flow
in certain sectors: JKD’s concept of ‘bandwidth’ in ancient economies.
In small, ‘cantonal’ economies, there may be strong exchanges in
some sectors only, the remaining flows being relatively weaker.
1.5 A temple economy: Model 05 of John Davies’ articulation of the
ancient state economy (© Stanford University Press). The flows in
a temple economy may again reflect the dominance of some ‘flows’
over others. In a more developed form of the model, representing
the Classical state, these flows should be more varied, but also need
to incorporate ‘motors’, such as public pay or intensification of
land use; ‘gates’ (social or political impediments); and ‘reservoirs’
(accumulations of resource); (Davies 2005, 149 Fig. 6.13; pp.146-52).
7.1. View of woodland in central Chalkidice, looking northwards,
showing mixed stands of deciduous and coniferous trees beyond
low shrubs (© Z. H. Archibald).
7.2. View looking south from Stageiros (modern Stageira) towards the
Athos peninsula, showing heavily wooded slopes (© Z.H. Archibald).
9.1. The extended skeleton of the occupant of the main chamber of
Tomb II at Vergina (© J. H. Musgrave).
9.2. Heat-generated flaring outwards of this subject’s left temporal and
parietal bones (© J. H. Musgrave).
vii
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List of figures
9.3. Similar damage to the occipital and posterior portion of the left
parietal bone, viewed from the right (© J. H. Musgrave).
9.4. Photocomparison of portraits of Philip II (the Vergina ivory
and the Copenhagen marble, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 2466), with
the facial reconstruction of the skull from Tomb II at Vergina
(© A. J. N. W.Prag, J. H. Musgrave, R. A. H. Neave).
9.5. Photocomparison of the portrait, said to be of Philip III Arrhidaios
(Naples, Mus. Naz. 187 [138]), with marble head in Copenhagen
(Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 2466; © Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek).
9.6. Photocomparison of the portrait said to be of Philip III Arrhidaios
(Naples, Mus. Naz. 187 [138]) with the ivory head from Vergina
(© authors and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek; Mus. Naz. Naples).
9.7. Photocomparison of the portrait said to be of Philip III Arrhidaios
(Naples, Mus. Naz. 187 [138]) with the facial reconstruction of the
skull from Tomb II at Vergina (© authors and Mus. Naz. Naples).
11.1. A selection of coins found at Kelainai or from the mint of Apameia
(© American Numismatic Society).
viii
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PREFACE
John Kenyon Davies is a phenomenon as an ancient historian. Like many

Classicists, who have developed their linguistic skills in a historical
direction, he is equally at home in epigraphic documents as in the texts of
Greek and Latin authors; but unlike many of his peers, he has never been
bound by texts. He has considered them as artefacts of the historical
process, objects of study that need to be integrated into a broad, conceptual
and inter-disciplinary canvas, coloured as much by processes as by events;
by individuals as much as by groups; and by structures as by definite places.
John’s huge intellectual curiosity has enabled him to make connections
between fields of study that are usually treated as distinct, and to develop
a visionary approach to the study of the remote past that has assured his
continuing presence at international conferences well past formal
retirement, and an energy of academic production that seems unabated
even beyond his eighty-first year.
The essays in this volume originated around a core of papers read
at a colloquium, organised in John’s honour on 5th July 2003, by Zosia
Archibald and Graham Oliver, under the title: ‘The Power of the
Individual’. The title of the colloquium alluded to John’s masterpiece,
Athenian Propertied Families [APF ], and its associated, book-length analytical
discussion, Wealth and the Power of Wealth (= WATPOW, discussed further
below). The aim of discussion at the colloquium was to focus on what the
organisers felt was the creative value of John’s approach to historical data,
namely the attempt to bring together evidence of different kinds, using a
range of methods, suited to the research questions posed at a particular
instance. By studying historical individuals, against the backdrop of the
fluctuating fortunes of their reconstructed families, John had revealed a
dimension of ancient history that was new and sufficiently particular to
lend itself both to statistical and other forms of analysis.1 He had shown
that discrete data, starting from records about individuals and their actions,
1 Beyond the analyses that John Davies himself made from the accumulated data
in APF, and published in 1981 (as WATPOW ), interest in the statistical value of the
data has re-emerged in the digital age. See now e.g. Kierstead and Klapaukh 2018 for
a clear example (with John’s own comments, p. 566, of the same volume).
ix
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could yield real insights about societies as inter-related entities. The

contributors to the colloquium were invited to explore the relationships
between discrete data sets that could highlight relationships between
individuals and their close associates, their families, and their communities.
Not all the papers submitted to the colloquium are printed here. Some
have been published elsewhere,2 while two authors, Sally Humphreys and
Manuela Mari, have offered different texts.
Neither in APF nor in WATPOW did John himself directly address the
question of the power of the individual. But the importance of his work for
enabling the power of the individual to be understood without treating the
individual as operating outside society is well seen when we set what he
did alongside recent critiques of ‘great man history’, such as that in a book-
length study by Sarah Brown Ferrario (2014).3 Ferrario is principally
concerned with the ways in which individuals have been commemorated
in Classical history, whether through biography, or memorials, or, indeed,
inscriptions. She explores the different ways in which agency is attributed
to groups and individuals in key historical episodes, notably at the origins
of Athenian democracy; in the Persian Wars; and in the crucial military
conflicts of the 4th century BCE, which ushered in extraordinary agents,
among whom the names of Philip II and Alexander III are naturally
prominent. While acknowledging the actions that gave rise to these
formidable reputations, it is the reputations, rather than the actions, that
Ferrario amplifies. Her discussion about who owns history, and how
individuals could and did manipulate their reputations, is nevertheless
entirely apposite to the subject matter examined in the essays below. We
owe much of our information about historical agents, individual or
collective, to the various types of documents that have been consciously
created to preserve a record of such acts. John Davies has ever been
conscious of this challenge to the ancient historian.
John’s manifest star quality as a scholar assured his early success
in a string of junior, then senior academic appointments: Harmsworth
senior scholar, Merton College, Oxford, 1960–61, 62–63; junior fellow,
Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, Washington, 1961–62;
2
Faraguna 2012; Rhodes 2016.
3
Ferrario does not refer to John Davies’ research in her book, beginning, as she
does, from a very different set of premises. L. Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual. The
Origins of Western Liberalism, 2014, creates a broad sweep through philosophical, ethical,
and legal history from Classical Antiquity to the early modern era in Europe. The
thesis of Siedentop’s book opens up many other themes, which move well outside
the scope of our volume.
x
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Preface
Dyson Junior Research Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford, 1963–65;
lecturer, University of St Andrews, 1965–68; Fellow, Oriel College,
Oxford, 1968–77. This culminated in his appointment as the Rathbone
Chair of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at the University of
Liverpool, at the age of 40, in succession to Frank Walbank. Peter Rhodes
has sketched out a brief survey of his career, which closes the essays
presented in this volume, so there is no need to repeat an outline; but
instead we offer here, in these introductory reflections, some thoughts on
John's contributions to academic study, and an idea of what it has been
like to work with him.
John Davies retired in 2003, having held most of the then key roles in
university administration (as Head of Department, Dean, and Pro Vice-
Chancellor), as well as academic leadership, to devote his time to research.
This did not mean that he ceased to be involved in strategic roles. On the
contrary, in the decade after 2003 he was closely involved in such tasks, in
his capacity as Chairman of the Advisory Committee to the Institute of
Classical Studies, University of London (2005–2013); as a reviewer for the
Leverhulme Trust; and on committees of the British Academy. The
substantive value that his broad intellectual interests delivered to the
academic community at large can be seen in the text of his Barron lecture,
of which series he was the first speaker (Davies 2010b).
John has long been concerned with promoting the wider place of
Ancient History in, and beyond, the academy. A knowledge of ancient
languages, notably (but by no means exclusively) Greek and Latin, is a
prerequisite for the discipline. It is a field too small to stand on its own in
academic departments, or in institutional classifications. From an
institutional perspective, whether we are talking about Higher Education,
or about other institutions that support research in the Humanities and
social sciences in the UK, such as the British Academy, and the foreign
schools overseen by the latter, ancient history is often lost among the
competing presences of Classics (philology and literature) and History
(modern, global). This tendency is understandable, from the perspective of
national and international institutions; yet it conceals the enormous power
of ancient history as an engine of social and national identities in the
modern world. The mesmeric force of stories preserved in ancient texts
explains why Martin Bernal’s Black Athena continues to exert an influence
well beyond its original thesis, and why Japanese and Chinese scholars are
interested in comparative approaches to the study of the world’s most
ancient historical societies in Eurasia.
John’s astute understanding of the fact that there are meta-narratives to
be discovered, which overlie the discrete narratives preserved in Herodotus
xi
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and Thucydides, in the Attic Orators and Aristotle, and in other prose
authors, explains why he has, for most of his career, sought to put his
research questions into as broad a context as he felt possible. It also
explains why he has sought out theoretical and methodological ideas that
might help to put his intuitions onto a firmer footing. For John, there is no
easy way of separating the social from the political, the economic from the
social. His holistic vision of ancient societies, as dynamic phenomena in
time and space, is illustrated most vividly in a series of diagrams,
reproduced in an essay published in the edited volume put together by Joe
Manning and Ian Morris, a book that consciously built on, and moved
away from, the models implicit in the work of Moses Finley (Davies 2005a).
We reproduce five of these diagrams here (pp. xxiii–xxvii), to show how
imaginative and full of extraordinary insight these images continue to be.
Moses Finley was John Davies’ external DPhil examiner, and the
difficulties that Finley grappled with in evaluating John’s doctoral work
are no secret. As an Oxford scholar, John was trained in the close reading
of texts, a technique that attunes students to language, phrasing, and
terminology in a way second to none. Nevertheless, this method offers
little assistance to the historian attempting to move beyond terminology,
towards societies and their behaviours in the remote past. Moses Finley
pioneered and proselytised for a theoretically-informed approach to
ancient Classical history. Finley was an immensely gifted communicator, as
well as a distinguished scholar and teacher, and his books and collected
papers continue to be read and reprinted regularly. Finley was sympathetic
to a left-wing position in the study of ancient history – he believed in being
an ‘engaged’ scholar – and, as a consequence, made some specific political
assumptions about how the societies of the ‘Greek and Roman world’
worked, and which the texts of ancient authors, and carved inscriptions,
were used to highlight. Political positions are certainly not irrelevant to the
study of the remote past. But what does nevertheless need to be admitted
is how scholars make connections between their own political views and
evidence from history. Readers are entitled to know how economic
phenomena in remote times may or may not be connected to things
observed in the present.
Some of Finley’s most important ideas, such as his proposition that status
groups, rather than class, dominated ancient societies, were consciously
derived from the work of Max Weber. Whereas Finley’s emphasis on the
‘embedded’ nature of ancient economies captured something important
for the understanding of ancient (and indeed modern) economic behaviour,
his scepticism towards market mechanisms, and his vision of ancient
societies as entirely static, ideas which were applied in his synthetic analyses,
xii
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Preface
including The Ancient Economy (1973) and its successor volume, Ancient
History, Evidence and Models (1985), have not stood the test of time.4
He assumed that, in most ancient communities, ‘rich’ people formed a
dominant social group, élites that successfully maintained their interests in
a permanent way; whilst the ‘poor’ were in effect excluded from economic
control.5 ‘Rich’ and ‘poor’ were not clearly defined, and Finley eschewed
approximations of a quantitative kind. A recent collection of essays on
Finley’s American background, as well as his scholarly career in Cambridge,
has revealed the degree to which Finley’s approach to the past was shaped
by the economic and social problems of the 1930s.6
John Davies did not begin with any specific political assumptions about
ancient Athenian society, when he began his doctoral research.
Nevertheless, what emerged from his systematic exploration of historical
Athenians and their relations in the pre-Hellenistic age was a dynamic
picture, which begins to become clearly visible in the later decades of the
sixth century BCE, with the dominant presence of a tight group of wealthy
families, whose members competed fiercely for the main offices of state,
and for social prestige (embodied in priesthoods, marriages, and athletic
contests). Over the course of the fifth and particularly in the fourth
century BCE, the original membership of this narrow group of families was
dissolved, and it was superseded by others, becoming in the process an
enlarged and more heterogeneous group, whose energies became more
centrally absorbed by public liturgies, involving substantial expenditure,
and very practical responsibilities.
The meat of John’s research was published in two ways. The primary
data appeared in the 688 pages of Athenian Propertied Families (1971;
conventionally abbreviated as APF ), while the analysis of this data
appeared a decade later in a separate volume, entitled Wealth and the Power
of Wealth in Classical Athens (1981; = WATPOW ). The findings of this latter
volume are less well known than APF (which quickly became a standard
work of reference for all Classicists and ancient historians); so, without
having absorbed the conclusions of WATPOW , it has not been easy for
4
See esp. Morris in Finley 1985 [1999], xvi–xvii and n.10; for Finley’s own important
qualifications, written in response to critics of the earlier edition, see pp. 177–207; for
an evaluation of Finley’s concepts on economies, see now Launaro 2016, 231–32.
5
Claire Taylor has re-examined the application of the term ‘poor’ in the context of
ancient Athenian society, and found that it could refer to many, if not most Athenian
citizens (Taylor 2017, 2-29; 69–114).
6
The contributions of Daniel Tompkins, Paul Millett, and Robin Osborne in Jew,
Osborne, and Scott 2016 are particularly apposite in this respect.
xiii
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students of Classical antiquity to appreciate the differences between

rhetoric and substance; between statements in forensic speeches about
economic status, and the relative economic capacities of agents; or between
ideology and status on the one hand, and economic performance on the
other. The working assumptions that John proposed have largely been
absorbed through his synthesis of Classical history, Democracy and Classical
Greece (1978), which has appeared in Spanish, German, Italian (twice),
Polish, Russian, and modern Greek editions.
APF begins with a series of bold statements on the distinction between
Athenian political theory about equality in the fifth-century BCE democracy,
and the realities of political practice, which enabled wealthier, shrewder,
and cannier individual Athenians to exercise their generosity, and their
willingness to subscribe to public liturgies and levies, as a means of
leveraging public popularity. ‘The motivation’, the author tells us, ‘was
philotimia, the objective lamprotēs, and the reward a steady income of charis
from one’s fellow-citizens’ (Davies 1971, xvii). Not everyone in the city
necessarily thought that this kind of attitude was a desirable one for
exceptional individuals to adopt; but, as John himself emphasised, the topos
of generous public expenditure, for which there were many opportunities,
is sufficiently widespread in forensic oratory to have become deeply
embedded in the Athenian imagination. Indeed, it was even given ample
justification in philosophical circles, notably by Aristotle himself, who
considered megaloprepeia, or the propensity to spend on a large scale, to be
the quality balanced equally between banausia (vulgarity and inappropriate
spending), on the one hand, and mikroprepeia (variously translated as
stinginess, illiberality, pettiness; Ar. Eth.Nic. 1122a18–1123a33; APF xviii,
n.5), on the other.
It is worth reflecting for a moment on Aristotle’s thoughts in this early
part of Book IV of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle sketches out the profile
of the magnificent man, who acquires his qualities of magnificence in his
choice of objectives, the level of expenditure he is prepared to make; and
in the style with which his actions are carried out. To be magnificent, the
philosopher says, is to be a sort of connoisseur (Eth.Nic. 1122a30).
The philosopher’s focus is on the honourable and worthy character of
the objectives, regardless of cost. He even compares the results of the
magnificent man’s actions to votive objects (Eth.Nic. 1123a5), not least
because his actions are aimed at the public, not private good; and he
emphasises that magnificence seeks not success or wealth per se, but
honours, with such levels of power and wealth as will deliver this honour
(Eth.Nic. 1124a5). Tellingly, Aristotle says that modesty is not a virtue,
because of its associations with shame (Eth.Nic. 1128b20–35). If we needed
xiv
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Preface
a flag to signal the anthropological dimensions of the philosopher’s brand
of rationality in this discussion, surely it is in this rich discussion of what it
means to be an honourable man in contemporary Greek/Athenian society.
Behind the facade of propriety and rationality, there lurks an uncomfortable
figure, who is anxious to ensure his social status by appearing suitably
superior. Power and resources are, the philosopher is telling his readers,
useful means to the very important ends of social standing. For Finley,
social status was, indeed, the key to understanding the ancient societies of
the Classical Mediterranean; but, as John has consistently shown, in
a wide range of studies, social status had to be, perhaps could only be,
maintained by energetic activity on behalf of a man’s social group. It was
the active man who had status among his peers; not the passive recipient
of unearned income.
The contributors to this volume represent only a small group of those
whose work has been profoundly influenced by John’s approach to
ancient history. Some of these, former students and close collaborators,
directly take up a number of the themes that were explored in APF and in
WATPOW. Nick Fisher resumes John’s exploration of charis as the quality
attributed to magnanimous individuals, showing that the Athenian demos
accepted the logic that philotimia was a legitimate aspiration of those who
were engaged in energetic expenditure on the state’s behalf, and were quite
willing to accord charis, as a fitting embodiment of the reciprocal gestures
that such willing expenditure deserved. Charis normally operated, Fisher
observes, in a shared or collective context, and was thus a reciprocal
experience. Nor should we think of charis as a quality or characteristic
distinct from, or sullied by, association with market exchange, Fisher
argues; since there is, in the common understanding of this term, an
equivalence in the word charis to social pleasures, which often require the
provision of resource first. Fisher is keen to underscore the ways in which
public entertainment, whether athletic or musical, contributed to the shared
experience of pleasures, and contributed to social cohesion at Athens.
Robin Osborne takes up the theme of megaloprepeia and explores its
operation in the Attic demes, which formed the original focus of his
doctoral research. Yet Osborne’s paper is much more than ‘footnotes to
WATPOW ’. The most important message that he wants to convey, from
his close analysis of deme epigraphy, is that the demes offered
opportunities for ‘euergetism’ and for conspicuous display of the honours
granted by grateful deme members, which the city neither would nor could
give. Surviving documents from the Attic demes confirm other kinds of
evidence about rural Attica, to wit, that demes were highly variable in their
size, resources, and in the number of wealth-giving, or wealth-generating
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individuals, capable of offering sums of money, or other material resources,

to their local communities. Individuals had particular opportunities in small
communities to affect the resources and opportunities that could be
experienced there. Sometimes these individuals could exploit such
situations in a disproportionate way. The demes continue to offer a rich
resource of new ideas about Athenian society, which is less visible in the
city itself.
Stephen Lambert’s study of the Eteoboutadai highlights another
dimension of John’s work in APF. John sketched out the probable
bifurcation of the genos of the Eteoboutadai, which is associated with the
priesthoods of Athena Polias and Poseidon Erechtheus. Lambert believes
that the principle behind succession within the two priesthoods was not,
as John thought, simple heredity, but that the descendants of Drakontides
of Bate formed the aspirants to the priesthood of Athena Polias, and
descendants of Lykomedes, (probably) great-grandfather of the orator
Lykourgos, were eligible for the priesthood of Poseidon Erechtheus. It is
likely that the genos also filled other priesthoods, on the pattern of the best
known of genē, the Salaminioi; and the priesthoods of Boutes, and of
Poseidon Erichthonios, are obvious candidates. Others might be priesthoods
of Hephaistos and Ge. The religious status of the Eteoboutadai reflects
exactly the kind of appropriateness of social objectives that Aristotle
reflected on, and to which we alluded above. The religious status of these
social groups, who continued to function for centuries, may appear, to the
modern scholar, an anachronism in a democratic society; but this simply
shows how much there is still to learn about the behaviour and self-
understanding of ancient societies in the ‘Old World’.
Sally Humphreys offers a refreshingly original approach to APF, by
looking at the imaginary families in the Homeric epics, and their successor
poems, by Hesiod and others. Marriages in Homer reflect surprisingly
distant connections (Penelope’s father, living in Akarnania, sent one
daughter to Ithake, the other to Thessaly; Menelaos sends his daughter
Hermione from Sparta to marry Neoptolemos in Phthia, Thessaly). There
are various nuances in the complex marriage alliances to which the
Homeric poems refer, echoes that are quite different from dominant
patterns in Classical Greece. Sibling relationships are given prominence,
whether legitimate children or half-brothers and sisters; but it is not
possible to draw any conclusions about kin obligations from the range of
antique kin terms that survive in epic. Homeric families either seem to be
prolific, or ‘sub-fertile’. There are also less prominent references to the
ways in which families could ‘share’ members. Antenor of Troy married
Theano, daughter of Kisseus, of Thrace, to whom he sent their son,
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Preface
Iphidamas, since Kisseus had no son. There is a great deal of epic content
concerned with bride wealth. Suitors offer hedna, while the bride’s father
provided a dowry, which could be returned if the wife left her husband’s
house. Humphreys is resolute in asserting that sixth and fifth century BCE
or later writers re-worked epic genealogical material to their own ends.
John has been particularly interested in the connections between religion,
notably in major sanctuaries, on the one hand, and socio-economic policy
on the other. He has explored the role of sanctuaries as sources of credit;
the Phokian hierosylia, and what we can learn from these thefts about temple
treasures; as well as the historiography of sanctuary origins, notably of
Delphi. Krzysztof Nawotka’s paper illustrates the ways in which Hellenistic
rulers, in this case, Seleukos and his wife, Apame, together with their son,
Antiochos, developed close connections with the shrine of Apollo at
Didyma, and founded Apollo’s shrine at Daphne. At Didyma, Seleukos
proposed, and Antiochos executed, probably in the late 290s, a stoa,
located prominently in one of the principal agoras flanking the Sacred Way,
which was intended to provide an income for the sanctuary from shops to
be opened there. A prominent citizen of Miletos, Demodamas, son of
Aristeides, who is known to have been among the philoi of Seleukos I, was
active in writing to the council of Miletos, in support of Seleukos’, and later
Apame’s offers to the city, and to the sanctuary of Apollo, and it was he,
in Nawotka’s view, who was among those Milesians who enabled the
sanctuary at Didyma to revive after a long period of decline, following the
Persian sack of 479 BCE.
Nawotka’s paper gives us a case study of how honourable acts by a
‘magnanimous man’, following Aristotle’s definition, actually worked. Both
the Seleukid kings, and Demodamas, who seems to have initiated, and
followed through as an epistatēs, honours for Antiochos and for Apame
respectively, acted to facilitate the revival of Didyma. Demodamas was not
simply a functionary, but an explorer (he took part in an expedition beyond
the Jaxartes, and probably to India, with Seleukos); a writer, and a Milesian
who acted energetically on his city’s behalf. We can see some similarities
between Nawotka’s subject matter, and the chapter by Alain Bresson, who
explores what we know, from historical and especially from numismatic
sources, about the city of Kelainai, renamed Apameia, after Seleukos’ wife.
Bresson is interested in teasing out the importance of Kelainai/Apameia
as a key city on the frontier of Phrygia and Lydia, in the Hellenistic period.
The coins found in the civic area reflect the economic significance of this
city as a satrapal headquarters, with its own garrison and two Persian
palaces, even before the arrival of Alexander the Great’s general,
Antigonos, and his Seleukid successors, who made it their residence in Asia
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Minor. Bresson suggests that the coinage that can be associated with this
city was probably used not just for the payment of garrison troops, but
also for construction purposes. The range of coins minted on the city’s
behalf, in the shared form of the Attalid ‘cistophoric’ issues, from the time
of Eumenes II onwards, reflects Apameia’s leading position as the second
city of Asia Minor after Ephesos, as Strabo stated. The coins in circulation,
right down to the final series issued by Roman pro-consular officials, up to
49/48 BCE, facilitated economic transactions, which included construction,
and reconstruction, in this earthquake-prone area, activities that can be
documented indirectly from the honours granted to significant benefactors,
such as Polystratos, in the years 80–50 BCE.
Three of the contributors here have chosen themes that link John’s
work with the British School at Athens, and with the explosion of data,
epigraphic, and archaeological that has emerged in the past half century in
Macedonia. John Prag, who succeeded John Davies as editor of
Archaeological Reports, on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic
Studies and the British School at Athens, in 1974, recalls how he first met
the formidable Greek archaeologist, Manolis Andronikos (who, his students
say, was most reluctant, at first, to excavate Macedonian kings, being
convinced that such barbarian autocrats could offer little to those
who preferred Demosthenes’ kind of freedom). In 1979 Andronikos had
excavated the remains of several individuals in Tomb II at Vergina, but
the identities of these persons had not yet been determined. Prag, with his
colleagues Jonathan Musgrave and Richard Neave, describes the most
recent scientific data that helps to refine and clarify the work carried out by
the team from the University of Manchester, which originally analysed the
skeletal remains in Vergina, reconstructed the cranium of the middle-aged
man from Tomb II, and published the findings in a very timely way in the
Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1984. As the authors emphasise, the inter-
disciplinary nature of their research, which was still very unusual at the
time, continues to be one of the chief strengths of their project. They
continue to argue that the chief occupant of the tomb was Philip II, and
present cogent technical reasons, in response to comments made by a
number of critics, who favour Philip Arrhidaios as the candidate. In this
paper Prag and his colleagues add a further argument to those arising from
the scientific study of the bones and cranium, as well as analyses of the
physical state of the skeletal remains. Photo-comparison, a computer-based
technique that scans the skull of an individual, is a method used in forensic
studies to identify criminal suspects. Here Prag and his colleagues have applied
it to the skull from the main chamber of Tomb II at Vergina, and compared
it closely to the shape and proportions of the portrait heads of Philip II in
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Preface
Copenhagen and of Philip Arrhidaios in Naples. There can be little doubt
that the skull from Tomb II resembles the former, not the latter.
John Davies has always been interested in the ways in which epigraphy
can illuminate socio-economic conditions in Classical antiquity. Manuela
Mari’s paper on Macedonians and Macedonian land (χώρα Μακεδόνων) aims
to clarify scholarly understanding of the juridical status of land allocations
in the kingdom of Macedonia, both before and after the momentous reigns
of Philip II and Alexander III. Mari shows that the legal procedure for the
apportioning of land, which enabled Macedonian kings to donate land to
a changing social network of followers, was not an innovation of Philip II.
What is more, the legal framework for allocations, which is illuminated
particularly in the epigraphic records of Amphipolis and in central
Chalkidike, shows how similar the Macedonian principles are to those used
by Athenians in their overseas territories. The fluid terms used to describe
new landholders, such as ‘Macedonians from Amphipolis’, have long
puzzled historians. What emerges from Mari’s analysis is that, as historians,
we need to think more seriously about the legal implications of land transfers.
Even kings had to operate within a legal framework, which recognised
private land ownership, even if the king made grants on particular terms,
and such lands could, in some cases, revert to the king’s authority.
John Davies was not just the titular Rathbone Professor of Ancient
History and Classical Archaeology. He is actively interested in the historical
value of material culture, and was closely involved in the development of
inter-disciplinary course work as well as research, in the UK as well as
abroad. ( John’s active support of a project to publish the sculptures from
Ince Blundell Hall, north of Liverpool, is commemorated in the cover
photo.) His participation in numerous conferences, in which his comments
have been eagerly sought, is a good reflection of his personal contribution
to archaeological practice. In this volume, the chapters by Archibald,
Bresson, and Prag engage with material culture in different ways. Zosia
Archibald follows the terms of a contract on a lead tablet, made by an
unknown purchaser, and an agent, named Tegeas, for a consignment of
wood, which is likely to have been used for pyrotechnic purposes. The
quantity of wood is considered in the context of the pyrotechnology of
bronze and iron, and the kinds of functions that such wood-burning would
have provided for, whether weapons, or tools, or a one-off commission.
There are interesting socio-economic ramifications in the contract
itself, which implies that a client could purchase raw materials in a
straightforward way through an overseas agent in a distant market. This is
how a man like Andokides could get hold of Macedonian timber for oars
on behalf of the Athenians at Samos (Andok. 2.11).
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As the discussion above has highlighted, another of John’s long-standing

interests has been the significance of the individual in the ancient world,
since various exceptional individuals were able to ‘wield immense power in
their face-to-face societies’. This concern with the individual underlies a
number of the contributions in this volume. Jan Haywood explores the
influence exerted by certain powerful individuals in the histories of
Herodotus and Thucydides. The discussion centres on the important roles
that figures such as Croesus, Xerxes and Pausanias play in these historians’
narratives, and it explores the different ways that their stories are suffused
with tragic elements. The Lydian king Croesus failed to learn the lessons
dispensed by the ‘wise adviser’ Solon, and Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, but
Haywood shows how Herodotus’ Croesus continually attempts to make
sense of such ambiguous sources. Ambiguity is also at the heart of Xerxes’
interactions with his adviser Artabanus, prior to his expedition to Greece,
in which they conflict over whether or not to march against the Greeks, as
well as Thucydides’ memorable excursus on the Spartan Regent Pausanias,
who quickly fell from public favour following Greek victory over Persia in
479 BCE. Ultimately, Haywood argues for the centrality of the tragic
individual motif in early classical Greek historiography, a motif that is
applied to numerous individuals, shaping these two historians’ views on,
and records of, the past.
Early Greek historiography is also the focus of Edward Harris’s chapter,
which considers several stories in Herodotus’ Histories as evidence of the
different social contexts in which memories were preserved in ancient
Greece. Interacting with John’s work on the traditions that surround the
Trojan War and the First Sacred War,8 Harris focuses on oral traditions
that were attached to various physical objects in Herodotus’ work, from
tombs to buildings to dedications in shrines to pieces of land. For instance,
the preservation of two temples that were constructed by Alyattes at
Assessos ensured the associated set of traditions reported to Herodotus
by the Delphians and the Milesians; and, in a secular context, Herodotus
records how the Athenians awarded the Lemnian Antidoros a piece of
Samian land, since he had defected from the Persian side during the Battle
of Artemision: the impetus to preserve this tradition would stem as much
from the Athenians – those who conferred honour on Antidoros – as from
the honorand himself. The analysis of multiple social contexts for memory
preservation thus leads Harris to conclude that Herodotus made use of
many kinds of oral traditions, and that his work serves as a repository for
7
Davies 2018, 61.
8
Davies 1984; Davies 1994.
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Preface
the way that such information was ‘stored, retained and used in the late
Archaic and early Classical periods’.
At the time of John’s retirement in 2003, he had many plans for
completing research projects, and for developing others that were still in
progress. Graham Oliver and Zosia had worked closely with John on the
preparation of the first conference at Liverpool on Hellenistic Economies,
in June 1998, the outcomes of which were published in 2001; and on the
second such conference, also in Liverpool, held in 2002. Graham had
recently been one of the select researchers (along with another contributor
here, Stephen Lambert), commissioned through a major award from the
Arts and Humanities Research Council, to produce a new edition of
Inscriptiones Graecae volume II, that is, the inscriptions of Athens in the
4th century BCE, in collaboration with the Berlin Academy of Sciences and
Humanities. John Davies was the Principal Investigator. Both Graham and
Zosia continued to collaborate with John on a number of projects that
emerged from their work on the two Liverpool conferences on Hellenistic
economies (including a third conference, hosted by the University of
Copenhagen, in 2007; and a range of related international initiatives
exploring economic phenomena).
The originality of John’s ideas is one of the reasons why he continues to
be a much sought-after contributor and interlocutor. Two of his most
recent contributions illustrate this talent very clearly. In the closing
pages of Claire Taylor’s and Kostas Vlassopoulos’ collection of essays on
Communities and Networks, John points to the wider, inter-cultural (as well
as intra-cultural) framework that this key new methodology demands; while
his latest words on state formation are published in a book that shows
his influence in almost every chapter (Davies 2018). John has been an
admirable teacher and colleague, whose generosity, modesty, and good
humour make him among the most simpatico of academic figures, as well as
one of the sharpest minds of his generation.
Acknowledgements
It remains to express our deep appreciation of the active engagement of our
publisher, Anton Powell, in this project. Anton agreed to take on the manuscript
in the autumn of 2016. Many of the papers in this collection were planned and
composed between 2007 and 2013. The original editors were Graham Oliver and
Zosia Archibald. Discussions with Steiner in Stuttgart, which were well under way
in 2013, unfortunately foundered. Graham moved to Brown University, USA, in
that year and completion was impractical. Once Anton Powell became involved,
a new timetable was drawn up. Jan Haywood very kindly agreed to become
co-editor. Prospective contributors revised their chapters, or wrote new ones, in
the course of 2017. Louise Jones (of Gomer Press) has worked with astonishing
speed and admirable flexibility to set the pages for printing. As editors, we are
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immensely grateful to Anton, and to Louise, for making the publication of this
book possible. We are also grateful to Joe Manning, and to Ian Morris, as well as
to Stanford University Press, for permission to reproduce five of John’s diagrams;
to the Museo Nazionale, Naples, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, for the images
of sculptures in their collections used by John Prag and colleagues in Chapter 7;
to the American Numismatic Society for permission to reproduce the coins in
Figure 11.1, and to Chrissy Patheni, and the World Museum Liverpool, for
permission to reproduce the cover photo.
Bibliography
Davies, J. K.
1984 ‘The reliability of the oral tradition’, in L. Foxhall and J. K. Davies (eds),
The Trojan War: Its Historicity and Context, Bristol, 87–110.
1994 ‘The tradition about the First Sacred War’, in S. Hornblower (ed.),
Greek Historiography, Oxford, 193–212.
2005a ‘Linear and non-linear flow models for ancient economies’, in J. G.
Manning and I. Morris (eds) The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models,
Stanford, 127–156.
2010b ‘Building on Barron: the prospects for the study of pre-Islamic antiquity
in the 21st century’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 53, 1–16.
2015 ‘Retrospect and prospect’, in C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (eds),
Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World, Oxford, 239–256.
2018 ‘State formation in early Iron Age Greece: the operative forces’, in
A. Duplouy and R. Brock (eds), Defining Citizenship in Ancient Greece,
Oxford, 51-78.
Faraguna, M.
2012 ‘Pistis and apistia: aspects of the development of social and economic
relations in Classical Greece’, Mediterraneo Antico 15, 355–74.
Ferrario, S. Brown
2014 Historical Agency and the ‘Great Man’ in Classical Greece, Cambridge.
Finley, M. I.
1985 The Ancient Economy2, updated with a new foreword by Ian Morris,
Berkeley and London, 1999.
Jew, D., Osborne, R. and Scott, M. (eds)
2016 M. I. Finley. An Ancient Historian and his Impact, Cambridge.
Kierstead, J. and Klapaukh, R.
2018 ‘The distribution of wealthy Athenians in the Attic demes’, in
M. Canevaro, A. Erskine, B. Gray, and J. Ober (eds), Ancient Greek
History and Contemporary Social Science, Edinburgh, 376–401.
Launaro, A.
2016 ‘Finley and the ancient economy’, in Jew, Osborne, and Scott (eds), 227–49.
Rhodes, P. J.
2016 ‘Demagogues and demos in Athens’, Polis 33, 243–64.
Taylor, C.
2017 Poverty, Wealth and Well-Being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens, Oxford.
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1.1. Resource movement in a modified version of ‘household autarky’ in the ancient state: John Davies’ Model 01 (© Stanford University
Press). As John has emphasised, spatial boundaries may apply to public economies, but not to real economies, so an economic model needs
to reflect this (Davies 2005, 142; 143 Fig. 6.8).
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Gifts from
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‘out of region’
1.2. Complex flows in the ancient state: John Davies’ Model 02, showing how the principal resources ‘flow’ within, between, and beyond the
agents (Davies 2005, 144 Fig. 6.9; © Stanford University Press).
Tribute Booty/tribute from
‘out of region’ ‘out of region’
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Exchanges with ‘Market’-defined Private or

‘out of region’ exchanges with reciprocal exchanges with
‘out of region’ exchanges with ‘out of region’
‘out of region’
1.3. Interactions of the various agents involved, public and private, with the public economy – Model 03 of resource movement in John Davies’
Preface
conception of the ancient state, corresponding to the Classical period (Davies 2005, 145 Fig. 6.10; © Stanford University Press)
Tribute Booty/tribute

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Exchanges with ‘Market’-defined Private or Gifts from

‘out of region’ exchanges with reciprocal exchanges with ‘out of region’
‘out of region’
1.4 A ‘cantonal’ economy: Model 04 of John Davies’ ancient state economic dynamics (Davies 2005, 148 Fig. 6.12; © Stanford University Press).
The thick lines represent the level of resource flow in certain sectors: JKD’s concept of ‘bandwidth’ in ancient economies. In small, ‘cantonal’
economies, there may be strong exchanges in some sectors only, the remaining flows being relatively weaker.
Tribute Booty/tribute
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Exchanges with ‘Market’-defined Private or Gifts from

‘out of region’ exchanges with reciprocal exchanges with ‘out of region’
‘out of region’
1.5 A temple economy: Model 05 of John Davies’ articulation of the ancient state economy (© Stanford University Press). The flows in a
temple economy may again reflect the dominance of some ‘flows’ over others. In a more developed form of the model, representing the
Preface
Classical state, these flows should be more varied, but also need to incorporate ‘motors’, such as public pay or intensification of
land use; ‘gates’ (social or political impediments); and ‘reservoirs’.
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IMAGINARY PROPERTIED FAMILIES:

KINSHIP IN EPIC POETRY
S. C. Humphreys
Though the poets and their audiences took epic songs as true accounts of
the past – indeed, Demodokos in Phaiakia sings about the Trojan wars in
an audience with the survivor Odysseus – the modern historian has to treat
them as fiction. This means that if we believe that epic poems contain
accurate memories of social institutions no longer current in the poet’s
own time we must explain how they were handed down; that we must
assess the role of appeals to shared fantasies as well as common experience
in the poet’s construction of a believable world (Van Wees 1992); and that
we need to understand the conventions controlling the representation of
the conflicts and contradictions of the contemporary world as well as the
representation of the audience’s ideals and ambitions. We need a sense of
what the audience preferred not to hear as well as what it enjoyed hearing.
Most recent work on Homeric society assumes that the poet started
from a social experience shared with his hearers, selecting and manipulating
familiar matter to fit the needs of his plots and the belief that the heroes
had been superior to the ordinary mortals of the contemporary world.1
Though we still lack a comprehensive study of epic formulae for social
institutions, no-one has so far demonstrated convincingly that references
to institutions unfamiliar to the poet and his audience remained as fossils
in the oral singer’s stock of formulaic phrases.2 Indeed, the current
tendency in Homeric studies is to stress the poet’s skill in manipulating
this conventional stock rather than its constricting force (Taplin 1992,
Alden 2000, West 2011). We know, moreover, that Greek poets had
considerable freedom to modify the plots of traditional stories. Although
I shall at the end of this chapter consider a few possible cases of evidence
for ‘prehomeric’ institutions preserved in early versions of Greek myths,
comparative studies show that such preservation can by no means be taken
for granted. Lévi-Strauss’ analyses of American myths show that myths
adapt to changes in social as well as physical habitat.
Note: Although John has not concerned himself much with Homer, a prosopographical gift
seemed appropriate, from an intensive and appreciative user of APF.
1
S. C. Humphreys
On the other hand, the world of Homer and his audience was neither
uniform, static, nor narrow in its horizons. It was socially stratified, locally
variable in settlement type and political organization (Whitley 1991a,
1991b), and in contact with other cultures. The early Greek sailor could
reasonably hope not to meet Circe or the Sirens, but without leaving the
Aegean he could see well-built cities like those of the Phaiakians (e.g. Old
Smyrna, Akurgal 1983) and shepherds living like the Cyclopes.
Some of our problems in interpreting Homeric institutions may very
well be due to such variations. It seems likely enough that communities in
the early Greek world exhibited a gumsa/gumlao (Leach 1954) variation in
political organization, some tending towards dominance by a single dynasty
while in others a number of aristocratic families shared power. While there
was a certain cultural preference for the model of the single pre-eminent
leader (perhaps influenced in part by Mycenaean memories), there is no
sign in the Homeric poems that kingship was institutionalized as an office:
no accession ritual, no strong ideological distinction between the authority
peculiar to kings and the charisma shared by all members of the nobility.
Dynastic succession is problematic. Telemachos does not automatically
step into his father’s shoes, nor is any regent appointed to rule for him
until he comes of age; Hektor’s death leaves Priam feeling that he has no
heir, although at least nine of his fifty sons are still alive (Iliad 24. 248–51);
Achilles challenges the authority of Agamemnon; in the myths of Oedipus
and Jason it is the stranger who wins the throne by his heroic exploits who
subsequently turns out to be also the legitimate dynastic heir.3 Zeus, too,
had acquired his position by force as well as heredity. He ruled – with the
threat of violence always in the background – as a father, an image also
used of the mortal king (Odyssey 2. 47, 234). Paternal authority and the
charisma of the exceptional warrior were the two dominant models of
leadership, and the contradictions they generated provided ample space
for story-telling.4
Here, then, I shall be looking at Homer, Hesiod and other epic poets for
evidence on residence, marriage, and cooperation or conflict between kin
and affines outside the household, and trying to decide whether variations
correspond to the variability of eighth/seventh-century experience and the
transformations we can expect them to undergo in poetry, or whether we
have to assume that some of the material reflects earlier practices.
Residence
The evidence on residence immediately raises the most puzzling question
in the study of Homeric kinship. On the whole the residence pattern seems
to be neolocal; each married couple has its own home. In Iliad 6. 313–71,
2
Imaginary propertied families: kinship in epic poetry

when Hektor returns to Troy from the battlefield, he visits the house of
Paris, whom he finds at home with Helen, and then goes to his own house,
to look for his wife Andromache. Even the fact that Priam’s palace (to which
we shall return) has to be supplied with 62 bedrooms, so that each married
couple may have its own (6. 242–50), may suggest a neolocal norm. Paris
is said to have built his own house, with the help of skilled carpenters
(6. 314–15); and Odysseus built his own bed, the secret of its construction
known only to himself and Penelope, in a new room which enclosed a tree
(Odyssey 23. 177–204). In this case a new room is perhaps being added to
the existing palace when the son and heir marries; there are hints that
Laertes still lived in the city when Odysseus married, and only retired to the
country after his son had left for Troy, although this is not stated explicitly
(Odyssey 11. 174–203, cf. 18. 267). Still in the Odyssey, Nestor’s married sons
go to their own homes to sleep, leaving the unmarried Peisistratos to doss
down with Telemachos in the porch (aithousa) of the palace (3. 395–401).
The five sons of Alkinoos still live at home and expect their sister to do
their washing, but the poet carefully explains that two are married, or on
the point of marriage (opuiontes), while the others are still young bachelors
(ēitheoi, 6. 62–3).5 Hesiod envisages the peasant farmer living alone on his
personal holding, with a wife when he can find one who will be a help to
him and not a drain on his resources; the suitor Eurylochos (Odyssey 18. 357)
claims to be looking for hired men to help him clear a plot of marginal
land (eschatiē), which perhaps hardly suits his ambition to carry off Penelope
as his wife, but may be appropriate in more general terms for a young
man reaching the age of marriage, who needs to establish some financial
independence.6
On the other hand, the poet also describes joint family households. The
most impressive is that of Priam, who can house in a single palace his fifty
sons and their wives, plus his twelve daughters with their husbands. Priam
has, or has had, three wives and an unspecified number of concubines. His
principal wife was of course Hekabe, and presumably she is the one who
bore him nineteen sons (Iliad 24. 496); but he was probably also married to
Kastianeira, mother of Gorgythion (8. 302–8), and certainly to Laothoe
daughter of Altes, mother of Lykaon and of Priam’s youngest son Polydoros,
whose dowry was available for use in ransoming her sons (21. 84–8, 22. 46–
51).7 Four of the twenty sons named in the Iliad are said to be illegitimate,
nothoi (Demokoon, Doryklos, Isos, and Kebriones).
The ambiguity in the representation of Priam’s household – all sons
sleep under one roof, yet Hektor and Paris have their own houses – is
paralleled in the account of Nestor’s family in the Odyssey. Although the
married sons have gone to their own homes to sleep, they come ‘from their
3
S. C. Humphreys
rooms’ (ek thalamōn) the next morning (3. 413). Nestor’s wife, daughters,
and daughters-in-law (nuoi) are all present at the domestic sacrifice (351).
The situation is less clear on Olympos, but again the general impression
of a large polygynous household ruled by Zeus is contradicted by a
representation of Hephaistos and Aphrodite as having their own house
(Odyssey 8. 321).8 Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon have however divided their
father’s estate and live separately, though the earth is still common ground
for all of them (Iliad 15. 187–93).9
If this evidence were all, we might well argue that the type of joint family
household depicted by the poet was imaginary or at least exceptional and
probably unstable. Indeed, the poet perhaps hints as much when he tells
us that one of Priam’s twelve sons-in-law, Imbrios, husband of the nothē
Medesikaste, had only come from his home in Pedaios (in the Troad)
because of the war (Iliad 13. 173). Priam’s household would combine the
father’s fantasy of life-long authority over a houseful of obedient and
deferential children (illustrated also by the households of Nestor and, at
times, Zeus) with the political leader’s fantasy of limitless power to attract
and house followers and supporters (cf. Van Wees 1992).
I have no doubt that fantasy is involved, but there is an additional
problem. In the context of Priam’s household, and almost nowhere else,10
the poet uses a cluster of women’s terms for affines, inherited from the
Indo-European stock of kin terms, which subsequently drop out of use in
Greek and reappear only in inscriptions of the Roman period from western
Anatolia, where they were perhaps revived to translate local terms.11
When Helen goes to the walls to look at the Greek army (Iliad 3. 121–
242) she is summoned by Iris, disguised as her galoōs (HZ) Laodike.12 She
addresses Priam as phile hekure (HF), and identifies Agamemnon as her daēr
(HB; Iliad 3. 172, 180). When Hektor returns to Troy in Iliad 6, Helen
addresses him as daēr (344, 35); in his own house he asks whether his wife
has gone to the houses of her sisters-in-law (galoōn ē einaterōn eupeplōn), or to
the temple of Athena; the housekeeper replies with the same formula,
explaining that Andromache is not with her sisters-in-law (HZ, HBW),
but on the walls (376–86). In the mourning scenes of Iliad 22 and 24,
Andromache hears the cries of her hekurē (HM) and goes to see what is
happening; when she sees Hektor’s corpse and faints, her sisters-in-law
(galoōi te kai einateres) gather round her; when Helen mourns Hektor she
calls him dearest of all her brothers-in-law (daerōn), since if any of her other
affines attacked her – here we have the whole list of terms, daēr, galoōs,
einatēr, hekurē, hekuros – he would restrain them (Priam, whom Hektor could
hardly have rebuked, was, she says, always kind to her).13
The poet uses daēr in Iliad 14. 156 of Hera’s relationship to Poseidon,
4

also said to be her autokasignētos (full brother); she is here allied with
Poseidon against her husband Zeus, who of course is also her full brother.
The term is appropriate because a woman’s relationship with her daēr was
probably one in which she could expect support; Helen’s relationship with
Hektor is represented as affectionate and mildly flirtatious (Iliad 24. 761–75,
6. 354–60). A widow would depend on her HB for support, and a young
wife would have a warm relationship with her husband’s younger brothers,
closer to her own age than her spouse.14
Einatēr even in the Iliad appears only in formulas in which it is linked
with galoōs, and neither term is found in Greece in later texts. Hekuros and
hekura become rare and when used are treated as synonyms of pentheros and
penthera, a man’s terms for his parents-in-law (WF, WM). Corinna says that
Asopos by marrying his daughters to gods is father-in-lawing them,
hekureuōn; Terence’s play Hecyra, based on a Greek comedy by Apollodoros
of Karystos, is about a man’s relations with his WM.15
It seems, then, that Homer is using a cluster of women’s affinal terms,
all of well-attested Indo-European origin, in the context of the joint family
household. Galoōs and einatēr are formulaically linked; the poet also finds it
natural to link nuoi and thugateres, daughters-in-law and daughters, and sons
and gambroi (sons-in-law) which would fit a joint-family context.16 On the
other hand, although he has a vague sense of both the mutual support and
the friction which women would experience in such a context, he seems to
have less sense of what joint-family residence would be like for men. The
only detailed vignette we seem to be given is the account of Priam railing
at his surviving sons in Iliad 24. 247–80. As we have seen, the poet has only
a very schematic and artificial idea of the organization of internal space in
a joint-family household, and has a tendency to assume that when a man
marries he will construct himself a new house, or at least an extension to
his parents’ dwelling.
It is difficult to deduce residence patterns from archaeological materials:
often hard to be sure where one dwelling ends and another begins, probably
impossible to tell whether a large complex with ample storage space housed
a joint family, or a powerful and ambitious individual who supported only
a nuclear family and a modest group of servants, but entertained lavishly.
Indeed we hardly know how to distinguish a communal prytaneion or leschē,
in which the men of an eighth- or seventh-century community gathered to
eat, drink, and talk, from a private megaron. There is, however, as far as I
know, nothing in either the archaeological or the historical evidence to
suggest a marked shift from joint-family to neolocal residence either shortly
before or during this period. The east Greek communities of the Aegean
and Anatolia were presumably settled, like other Greek colonies, by
5
S. C. Humphreys
individuals rather than joint families (see n. 70). Excavations do not suggest
that joint family residence was common in the Dark Ages.
Is the set of women’s affinal terms then a fossil preserved in poetic
speech from Mycenaean times, like the boar’s-tusk helmet? Well – perhaps
we need to think more deeply about these ‘fossils’. The boar’s-tusk helmet
lent by the Cretan Meriones to Odysseus in Iliad 10. 260–71 was an antique,
at least two generations old, useful for a secret expedition at night because
it was close-fitting and lacked the crest that normally topped a hero’s
helmet. It was a tangible link with an older world, it had its own history and
pedigree which travelled with it each time it passed to a new owner in gift-
exchange. To give or own such an object was to make a claim to status
honour, to assert membership of an elite community in which the memory
of the great deeds and the graceful manners of the aristocratic tradition
were preserved.
Women circulated like pieces of armour and other valuable objects.
As we shall see, Homer’s men seem particularly to value marriage with
women who come from a distance. Such a bride comes with a pedigree
and with accompanying gifts, but she must also demonstrate her own
breeding. Preservation of an archaic mode of address might be a way of
doing this. The poet, whose audience takes a profound pleasure in well-
rounded representations of the niceties of aristocratic life, must show that
he knows how great ladies address their affines.17 In subsequent centuries,
audiences and poets were less interested in manners, aristocratic marriage
alliances gradually became more local in range, new marks of distinction
and breeding developed, and memory of women’s affinal terms and their
precise meaning gradually faded.
It is also possible that the joint-family household corresponded to new
male ambitions in the eighth/seventh century. Ritual and decision-making
centred in the city was probably growing in importance; there were
occasions when a leading man would like to gather his sons and sons-in-
law about him in a show of strength. Perhaps in some cities leading men
were maintaining houses in which they could temporarily lodge adult
children and their families, and attaching considerable importance to these
short-term manifestations of family unity and strength. It was easy to
imagine the heroes as living perpetually in these exceptional circumstances:
Nestor feasting and sacrificing (Odyssey 3. 418–72), Priam always at war.
There are certainly gaps in the presentation of the joint-family household,
which should discourage us from thinking of it as a widespread feature of
recent experience. Legitimate polygyny is not realistically represented even
on Olympos: we are told nothing about the relations between co-wives,
and references to half-brothers always refer to nothoi, sons of concubines.
6

Legitimate polygyny seems to be a fantasy. The dynamics of relations
between brothers in a joint-family household are ignored; in Iliad 6 Hektor
and Andromache are contrasted with Paris and Helen as if both couples are
living independently, and it is noticeable that when Hektor listens to or
disregards good advice it comes from his alter ego Poulydamas (born on the
same day, but unrelated to Priam’s family) and not from any of his
brothers. Helen, it is true, refers to hard words from her mother- and
sisters-in-law: but the plot of the Iliad put her in an especially vulnerable
position. The problematic relation between the paterfamilias of a joint-family
household and his grown sons, so prominent in Roman law and tradition,
seems to be deliberately avoided by Homer, as by later Greek poets
(cf. Humphreys 1983/1993, ch. 4, n. 23).
We may start with Zeus. He protects his mortal son Sarpedon (a nothos)
once, and considers doing so again; when Hera objects to this, he sends
Sleep and Death to rescue Sarpedon’s corpse (Iliad 5. 662, 16. 431–61,
666–83). But he scarcely interacts at all with his divine sons. Herakles and
Dionysos (both born of mortal mothers) play no part in the plot of the
Iliad or Odyssey. Hermes is sent as a messenger to tell Kalypso to let
Odysseus go, and Apollo is sent to fight for the Trojans (Iliad 15. 53–61,
220–33), but there are no accounts of the father-son relation to parallel
Homer’s lively descriptions of Zeus’ relationships with his brother
Poseidon, his wife and sister Hera, his daughters, or his cousin Thetis. Zeus
does not clash openly even with his stepson Hephaistos, son of Hera;18
though Hephaistos is also his son-in-law, Zeus does not appear in the story
of Hephaistos’ capture of Ares and Aphrodite in adultery, told in Odyssey 8,
in which Poseidon mediates. Zeus speaks harshly to his son Ares in Iliad 5.
864–906, but elsewhere, when Ares has to be persuaded to leave the
battlefield or restrained from returning there, it is Athena who deals with
him (Iliad 5. 29–36, 15. 110–42).
Below, on earth, we have an idealized portrayal of the relationship
between Priam and Hektor. Priam never criticizes or offers advice, except
when he begs Hektor not to fight Achilles (Iliad 22. 32–78). It is rare in the
poems, and was presumably rare in reality, for fathers and sons to serve
together on a campaign that took them far from home: it is a mark of
Nestor’s age and Antilochos’ youth that they both fight at Troy,19 and here
we have a picture of the father dictating tactics, for the chariot-race in the
funeral games in honour of Patroklos, and the son faithfully obeying (Iliad
23. 301ff.). In the representation of Nestor’s family in the Odyssey it is only
the unmarried Peisistratos who is given a role of any prominence. We get
a moving picture of Odysseus as a small boy trotting round the orchard
after his father and choosing the trees which would become especially his
7
S. C. Humphreys
(Odyssey 24. 336–44); as in the episode of Penelope and the bed, proof
of identity comes from an intimate memory shared by no-one else.20
As adolescents, sons would attend their fathers in public contexts,
performing minor roles in sacrificial ritual, carving and serving meat,
harnessing horses, running errands. Watching and listening to their fathers
and the other older men of the community was an important part of their
education; but their roles were servant roles, only their prospects
distinguished them from hangers-on who would be followers and servants,
therapontes, all their lives.21 To establish himself as a full adult member of the
community a son had to detach himself from his father.
This problem is not portrayed by Homer as a constant element in Greek
society. It is central both to the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it is both treated
indirectly and singled out as exceptional by its role in the epic plot. Achilles,
as a young bachelor (neanias) newly able to demonstrate his prowess on the
battlefield, challenges the authority of Agamemnon not only as a member
of the younger generation but also as a potential political rival. The
challenge is magnified by Achilles’ charisma and divine descent; on the other
hand it is depoliticized by his youth, the triviality of the quarrel over Briseis,
and the audience’s knowledge that he will die young. Telemachos grows to
maturity in Odysseus’ absence; Laertes exercises no authority, and fathers
and sons are represented together in the joy of reunion or the emergency
of the fight against the suitors rather than in everyday circumstances.
It does not seem to me that this is the picture one would expect from a
society in which adult married sons routinely lived with their fathers.22
In general, the audience of the epic poets does not seem to have wanted
to be presented with a world in which structural conflict was endemic. The
poet can hinge his plot on conflict, but by doing so he implicitly reassures
the audience that conflict is abnormal. Achilles’ conflict with Agamemnon
and Telemachos’ struggles with the suitors are not part of the normal
process of political competition; the rivalries between Aineias and the sons
of Priam, or Priam’s family and that of Antenor, in Troy, which presumably
were closer to normal experience, are only hinted at in occasional passing
references. Trouble from below is rapidly suppressed when Thersites
speaks up in the assembly meeting of Iliad 2, and the episode ends in a
burst of unifying laughter. Homer stresses what his heroes shared – the
aristocratic way of life, the prospect of confronting death – rather than the
structural tensions that divided them.
Allies and affines

Even the relation with allies is occasional rather than quotidian. The typical
guest-friend lives far away, marriage alliances are often far-flung, especially
8

for the Greeks (cf. Rudhardt 1978). Penelope’s father, living in Akarnania,
had sent one daughter to marriage in Ithaka and the other to Thessaly.
He has made no attempt to intervene in affairs on Ithaka during Odysseus’
absence; he will only become responsible for Penelope if she returns to
his household.23 Proitos of Argos, according to the story of Bellerophon,
had married a wife from Lykia; he sends Bellerophon with a letter to his
father-in-law (pentheros) only as a way of getting rid of him (Iliad 6. 152–70).
Menelaos was sending his daughter Hermione from Sparta to Phthia in
Thessaly to marry Achilles’ son Neoptolemos (Odyssey 4. 3–9). An ideal but
unrealistic image of marriage alliance is represented by the story that suitors
came from all over Greece to woo Helen, and swore to help the winner in
the contest if he ever lost her. Here a single marriage creates enough
alliances to produce a panhellenic army. A real father could not hope to do
this, but the poems suggest that the remote possibility of calling on a
prestigious but distant ally for military help might count for more than
more frequent collaboration with a closer man.
In other marriages the possibility of alliance is closed off because the
bride’s kin have been killed in war. When Hektor married Andromache he
was taking a bride from the ruling house of a nearby community, Thebe,
but the death of her parents and brothers does not make him value her
less; rather, it ensures that he is the sole focus of her love and concern
(Iliad 6. 410–30). Paris’ union with Helen has brought war rather than
alliance, but the Trojans do not want to give her back. Briseis has been
captured in war, losing her husband and three brothers when Achilles
sacked their city; she had hoped to be recognized as Achilles’ wife when he
returned home after the war (Iliad 19. 291–9).
When contacts between affines are mentioned, they sometimes seem to
be represented as exceptional. Odysseus’ mother Antikleia had come to
Ithaka from a home in the region of Mt Parnassos. Her father Autolykos
had visited Ithaka at the time of Odysseus’ birth, and had named him, but
this visit seems to be represented as a coincidence rather than the norm.
Odysseus had made one visit to Autolykos’ home in adolescence (Odyssey 19.
292–466).
Marriage alliance plays a larger and perhaps more realistic role on the
Trojan side than on the Greek. Antenor, patriarch of one of the leading
Trojan families, had married Theano, daughter of the Thracian ruler
Kisseus, and had sent Iphidamas, one of his twelve sons, to live with
Kisseus, who apparently had no son of his own. Iphidamas returned to
Troy to fight beside his brothers. Priam’s wife Hekabe had come from
Phrygia, and her brother Asios had presumably come to fight for Troy,
since Hektor is deceived by an image of him (Iliad 16. 714–19). A second
9
S. C. Humphreys
wife, Kastianeira, came from Aisyme in Trace, and the third, Laothoe, from
an allied town in the Troad. There is, however, no mention of warriors
from their families fighting for Troy in the Iliad (much of the Troad seems
to have been overrun by the Greeks). Priam’s illegitimate daughter
Medesikaste was married to Imbrios, who lived in another town of the
Troad but came to Troy and lived in Priam’s palace during the fighting
(Iliad 13. 170–6). Another daughter had married into a prominent Trojan
family, that of Antenor (3. 121–4).
Hektor had been known to boast that he could defend Troy with his
brothers and brothers-in-law alone (5. 473–4, gambroi, ZHs). The ideal
position for a powerful man is to have numerous sons (or brothers) and
numerous affines. Homer’s description of Priam’s household with its fifty
sons and twelve sons-in-law (6. 242–50), each sleeping in a separate room
with his wife, seems to imply permanent residence of the sons-in-law under
Priam’s roof but, as we have seen, details supplied elsewhere in the poem
contradict this impression. Othryoneus had persuaded Priam to offer him
Kassandra as bride in return for his services in the war (13. 363–9); he
presumably intended to take her home with him when it was over. Imbrios
was only temporarily resident in Troy, and Laodike, married to Antenor’s
son Helikaon, must surely have left her father’s household. In other
contexts the son-in-law who lives with his wife’s father – the modern
Greek term is sōgambros – joins the household of a man who has no sons
of his own.
Though Odysseus is destitute when he arrives in Phaiakia, if he accepts
Alkinoos’ offer and marries Nausikaa (who has five brothers) he will be
given a house of his own (Odyssey 7. 311–15). Adrastos king of Sikyon
(or Argos) had married his daughters to Tydeus and to Polyneikes, both
exiles from their homelands who had settled with their father-in-law; we do
not hear that he had sons. Tydeus’ son Diomedes married a third daughter
of Adrastos, repeating the alliance made by his father (Iliad 14. 112–25, 5.
412–15).24
Another MZ marriage was made by Iphidamas, the son of Antenor who
was fostered by his maternal grandfather (MF) Kisseus in Thrace, and had
returned to Troy to take part in the war. Kisseus had no sons; he married
one daughter into a powerful Trojan family, took one of her eleven25 sons
back into his own household and, when the boy was old enough, married
him to a second daughter, Iphidamas’ mother’s sister. These MZ marriages
are, of course, surprising, since prima facie they seem to contravene the
Greek norm that the husband should be older than his wife; in the classical
period the gap in age between spouses in a woman’s first marriage was
usually considerable (fifteen years or more), though it narrowed in
10

subsequent unions. Iphidamas’ wife is referred to as kouridiē, but this hardly
authorizes us to speculate about late children or half-sisterhood. It is
perhaps more likely that men were willing to take older wives for strong
dynastic reasons in a society that readily tolerated concubinage within the
household. It is noteworthy that while in Homeric society brotherless
daughters are more often married to immigrants than (as later) to collateral
patrikin, these MZ marriages show concern to limit competition between
the sons of epikleric daughters, a problem experienced but never directly
tackled in classical Athens.26 It is odd, however, that Iphidamas gives
bridewealth to his foster-father and prospective father-in-law; we shall
return to this problem (see n. 32).
Bellerophon became the son-in-law of the king of Lykia as a reward for
his heroic achievements, and was immediately given a half-share in the
royal prerogatives and a temenos (estate) granted by the Lykians (6. 150–95).
The gambros of the king of the Epeians, husband of the eldest daughter,
who is the leader of their horsemen and their best fighter (11. 739), may be
the sōgambros of a man without sons. Odysseus, when presenting himself as
a Cretan, claims that although as a nothos he inherited only a small part of
his father’s estate, his success in war and raiding enabled him to marry into
a rich family (Odyssey 14. 199–212). He would perhaps have become the
sōgambros of a man without sons, although he does not say so.27
The sōgambros gave up independence, he had no base of his own, and
the position was essentially lacking in honour, although this fact could be
more or less concealed if the endowment was sufficiently generous and
the sōgambros himself sufficiently charismatic. The unfortunate Tithonos,
taken to Olympos as a sōgambros by the goddess Dawn, represented the
extreme of dependence (cf. King 1986; Vernant 2004, 105). At the other
end of the scale, Agamemnon, trying to placate Achilles, offers to confer
one of his three daughters on Achilles in marriage without requiring
bridewealth (anaednon), to treat him as the equal of Orestes, to dower him
with seven towns on the borders of the kingdom and – in contradiction
with the previous provisions, all of which suggest the position of a
particularly honoured sōgambros – to allow him to take his wife back home
to Phthia (Iliad 9. 141–56, 291–8). This is fantasy, an exaggeration
demanded by the plot and permissible because we know that Achilles will
not accept the offer.
Marriage with kin, and repeated alliances with the same affines, are rare
in the Homeric poems, if we set aside the exceptional households of
Aiolos, whose six sons marry his six daughters, and of Zeus. It is
noteworthy that Hephaistos is said to have given bridewealth, hedna, when
he married his stepsister Aphrodite (Odyssey 8. 318); this clearly improves
11
S. C. Humphreys
the story of the legal predicament in which Ares is embroiled when caught
in adultery with her, but may also imply – like the reference to hedna given
by Iphidamas when he married his mother’s sister – that marriages with kin
were not common enough among the aristocracy to have their own norms
concerning gift-exchange (see n. 32). Arete, an only daughter, married her
father’s brother Alkinoos, the only example in Homer of a pattern which
was to become common for later epiklēroi.28 The alliance sets the royal
couple off from the other basileis of Phaiakia; but such isolation is difficult
to maintain over a long perid. Nausikaa does not want to be seen in the
streets with Odysseus because many noble Phaiakians are wooing her and
there will be resentment if she is suspected of preferring a foreigner (Odyssey
6. 273–84, cf. Cairns 1990).
The story of Iphidamas (Iliad 11. 221–30) could be interpreted as a
marital exchange: Kisseus of Thrace gave his daughter as wife to Antenor
of Troy and received in return one of her sons, whom he fostered and
married to Theano’s sister. But this is an isolated reference; there is no
marital equivalent of the well-established epic pattern of references to gift-
exchange with xenoi and the expectation that the gift will eventually be
returned. And we have already seen that Homeric heroes do not seem
concerned to maintain regular contact with distant affines.
Marriage
It is against this background – of evidence that marriage creates claims to
political alliance but not expectations that affinal ties will be renewed by
further transfers of women, or that affines will necessarily remain in close
contact – that we must consider the controversial topic of transfers of
property on the occasion of marriage. Controversy on this point in
Homeric studies, while it takes the form of assertions or denials that the
data in the Iliad and Odyssey can be interpreted to form a single consistent
pattern, has reflected shifts in anthropological research. While
anthropologists were perceived as classifying societies as ‘having’
bridewealth (payments by the groom) or ‘having’ dowry, the Homeric data
seemed problematic (Snodgrass 1974, cf. Goody and Tambiah 1973). It is
now clear, however, that property very often moves in more than one
direction at marriage (Tambiah 1989), and a more nuanced reading of
Homeric marital exchanges has become possible. While it is possible to
situate the Homeric material in a broader framework of shift from
emphasis on bridewealth to emphasis on dowry, the poems do not require
this interpretation and do not present major inconsistencies.
Both Homer and Hesiod seem to distinguish between a ‘bought’
woman, who comes from a free family but does not acquire the status of
12

a wife, and a woman who is given in marriage by her father or kin; the
‘given’ woman becomes a wife, her wedding is publicly celebrated, and
property is transferred with her. Although the terminology used to refer to
property given with women in marriage is not as specific, formulaic and
consistent as the references to the hedna given by the groom to his father-
in-law, the distinction between two types of union seems to be clear and
significant.29
Odysseus’ nurse Eurykleia was the daughter of a free man, Ops son of
Peisanor. Laertes bought her in her first youth (prōthēbē ), paying twenty
cattle for her, and honoured her equally with his wife, but did not sleep
with her, fearing his wife’s anger (Odyssey 1. 429–33). She was a household
servant (dmōē ), but in a position of especial trust and authority. If the wife
of a leading man appeared to be infertile, a commoner might well think it
advantageous to ‘sell’ a daughter to the household. The passage implies
that it was common for a woman in this situation to become a concubine,
and this is confirmed by Odysseus’ tale that he is a Cretan nothos, son of a
bought pallakē, who had to make his own way in the world (Odyssey 14.
199–213), and Phoinix’s reference to his father’s concubine (Iliad 9.
448–53). Eurykleia’s story may also imply that many of the women sold by
their families were past their first youth, although a high bid would secure
a young girl. The swineherd Eumaios had hoped that Odysseus (still, as
far as he knows, lost) would have rewarded him with a house and plot of
his own and a much-wooed wife (Odyssey 14. 64); there was competition for
nubile girls even at lower levels of society. Hesiod, however, advises buying
a woman, rather than marrying, because a bought woman will work in the
fields; presumably the much-wooed girl would expect a softer life.30
In normal marriage the groom was also expected to hand over property
to the girl’s father, but the father would make a counter-prestation to
legitimize the union. The groom’s prestations are called hedna, and the poet
uses formulaic phrases to refer to their value: ‘offering countless hedna’,
‘since he offered thousandfold hedna’. Alphesiboia, ‘cattle-bringing’, is a stock
epithet for the woman who makes a good marriage, alongside the more
general and more ambiguous polydōros, ‘bringing many gifts’ or, possibly,
‘well-dowered’.31 Cattle and livestock are mentioned as hedna in three
passages, but each of these is in some way problematic or exceptional.
Melampous stole the cattle of Phylakos because Nestor’s father Neleus
was demanding them as bride-price for his daughter (Odyssey 15. 225–38);
this was a challenge to suitors to compete in achieving a difficult feat, set
in a pre-heroic past. Iphidamas, who grew up in the house of his maternal
grandfather Kisseus and married his aunt (MZ), had given 100 cattle and
had promised a further 1,000 goats and sheep as bridewealth; it seems odd
13
S. C. Humphreys
that bridewealth would be required in this endogamous marriage.32 Finally,

Penelope complains that her suitors, instead of bringing cattle and sheep
to feast the kin of the woman they are wooing, and presenting fine gifts
(dōra), are eating up the resources of her own household at no expense to
themselves. The suitors’ response is to send for gifts of clothes and
jewellery (Odyssey 18. 275–80, 291–303). Penelope’s situation is in any case
anomalous, but the passage might seem to suggest that gifts of livestock
are here thought of as the suitor’s contribution to the feasting that
accompanied marriage negotiations and weddings, rather than as a major
item in the circulation of wealth that took place on the occasion of a
marriage.
The suitors’ gifts to Penelope seem to be intended for her personal use,
but this may well be due to the peculiarity of her situation. Even in this
case Athena can claim in talking to Telemachos that Penelope’s father and
brothers are urging her to marry Eurymachos, since he outdoes all the
other suitors in gifts and offers of hedna (15. 16–18), which might imply
that these prestations usually benefited the bride’s kin. Hephaistos, when
he catches Aphrodite in adultery, angrily demands that her father
Zeus return the many hedna he received when he betrothed the couple
(Odyssey 8. 318–20). It seems unlikely that any substantial fraction of the
groom’s hedna went to endow the newly married couple; thus the hedna
received for a daughter would be available for use by her brother when he
sought a wife, although Homer never mentions this possibility.
Apart from the suitors’ gifts to Penelope, the type of gifts bestowed as
hedna is not specified. Nor are we told what gifts the bride’s father would
provide in return, except that Penelope brought two slaves with her to
Ithaka, one male and one female. The man, Dolios, was summoned when
she eventually decided to send a message asking Laertes for help (4. 735–8);
it was clearly a valuable element of protection for a young bride to give her
a loyal manservant who could serve as a messenger if she needed one.33
The woman was her personal maid, the only member of the household
apart from Odysseus and Penelope who knew the secret of the bed
(23. 225–9). Loyalty was important here too, since the husband’s female
slaves might be sexually involved with him, or resent the arrival of a new
mistress (cf. Goldhill 2010, 120).
The dowered wife is entitled to take back her possessions if she leaves
her husband’s oikos. When Telemachos, in 2. 132–3, explains that he will
have to pay a large amount to Penelope’s father Ikarios, if he sends her
away against her will, the passage may imply that the father of a woman
who is dishonoured by dismissal could demand compensation (though
reference to return of dowry is perhaps more likely), but in Athena’s
14

fictitious argument to Telemachos that Penelope is about to give in to
pressure and marry Eurymachos (15. 16–23) she warns him that Penelope
may take property out of the house to which she is not entitled, since a
woman who remarries always wants to benefit her new husband and no
longer cares about her first husband and his children.
Penelope’s situation was anomalous because no-one knew whether
Odysseus was dead or alive, because Telemachos was on the threshold of
manhood but had difficulty in imposing his authority on the suitors, and
because her father was too far away to intervene. In the background of the
story there seem to be general assumptions that it was reasonable for her
to stay in Odysseus’ household while Telemachos was still a child (as she
claims Odysseus told her to do, 18. 270), but that she should remarry when
he reached maturity, or if definite news of Odysseus’ death arrived (1. 292).
The normal procedure for remarriage would be for her to return to her
father’s home and allow him to conduct the marriage negotiations and re-
dower her; however, Telemachos claims to be ready to dower her himself
if she decides to marry (20. 341–2). Telemachos asserts (2. 52–4) that the
suitors shrink from going to Penelope’s father to ask for her hand, but it
would presumably be odd and perhaps futile for them to do so while she
remained in Ithaka.
In two passages referring to Penelope (1. 277 = 2. 196, 2. 52–4), and in
one passage of the Iliad (13. 382), hedna and related terms have been
thought to be used of the prestations made by the bride’s family rather
than the groom, but Scheid-Tissinier (1994) shows that this is not the case;
hedna is always used of the groom’s prestations, and the term anaednon,
‘without hedna’, always refers to a marriage in which no bridewealth is
required, not one in which no dowry is given. Othryoneus was to marry
Kassandra anaednon in return for his services to Priam in the war (13. 366);
Agamemnon offers to give Achilles one of his daughters anaednon, and
specifies that he will dower her with gifts such as a father has never given
with his daughter before (9. 146–8).
As we have already seen, Agamemnon’s offer is exceptional, since he
offers Achilles seven cities of his kingdom but also promises that Achilles
can take his bride home with him. Normally the son-in-law accepted
without hedna was probably the sōgambros, who became a member of his
father-in-law’s household or depended on him for a new start in life. This,
however, was a position lacking in honour, and the poems only touch on
it discreetly.
It seems possible to argue, then, that in normal marriage gifts travelled
in both directions, dowry going to the newly established household with
the bride, while hedna went to the bride’s father. Neolocal marriage,
15
S. C. Humphreys
celebrated by feasting and a ceremonial passage of the bride to her new

home (Iliad 18. 491–6, Odyssey 4. 3–9), was distinguished both from the
purchase of free women as concubines,34 where the woman’s father gave
nothing, and from sōgambros marriage, where the groom was not obliged to
make a prestation. All these forms of union were distinguished from the
more extreme situations of the woman captured in war and of the son-in-
law whose claims were extraordinary enough for hedna to be waived. The
woman captured in war might be ransomed (Iliad 1. 11–32, 6. 425–8), but
otherwise became a slave. She might share her owner’s bed, but the
suggestion that Achilles might have married Briseis if he had taken her
back to Phthia after the war (19. 295–9) seems improbable.35 What is
required, however, to turn her union with Achilles into a marriage is a
feast in the community. She cannot be transformed into a wife in the
Greek camp.
Nothoi
Discussion of the forms of union between men and women leads naturally
into the question of the status of illegitimate children, nothoi and nothai.
Clearly a father, during his lifetime, could make his own decisions about the
treatment of children in his household, and if he was powerful could also
impose these decisions on the community. Menelaos, to whom Helen had
borne only a single daughter, had a nothos son by another woman, a slave,
and did his best to give the boy a good start in life by publicly celebrating
his marriage to a girl from a Spartan family at the same time as his
celebration of the departure of his daughter to wed Neoptolemos (Odyssey
4. 3–14). He evidently intended to make this son, Megapenthes, heir to his
estate, and presumably hoped that the boy would succeed to his position
as leader in Sparta.36 Odysseus, in his fictive persona as self-made Cretan,
son of a bought woman, claims that his father during his lifetime treated
all his sons with equal honour, but that after the father’s death the
legitimate sons cut the nothos off with only a house and a small share of the
estate (14. 199–210). Theano, wife of Antenor, suckled a nothos as if he had
been one of her own children (Iliad 5. 69–71). But there could be friction.
Medon, nothos son of Oileus of Lokris, had to leave home because he had
killed a kinsman of his stepmother.37
In the battle scenes of the Iliad legitimate sons and nothoi fight side by
side, but there is a tendency for the nothos to play a subordinate role.
Teukros, bastard half-brother of Ajax son of Telamon, was reared in his
father’s house; he fights as an archer, relying on the shield of the better-
armed Ajax.38 Two of Priam’s nothoi act as charioteers for their legitimate
brothers, the programmatically or ironically named Isos (‘equal’) for
16
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Indeed, the most prevailing incentive to our labor was to secure
the means of education for some male member of the family. To
make a gentleman of a brother or a son, to give him a college
education, was the dominant thought in the minds of a great many of
these provident mill-girls. I have known more than one to give every
cent of her wages, month after month, to her brother, that he might
get the education necessary to enter some profession. I have known
a mother to work years in this way for her boy. I have known women
to educate by their earnings young men who were not sons or
relatives. There are men now living who were helped to an education
by the wages of the early mill-girls.
In speaking of this subject, Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson
says,—
“I think it was the late President Walker who told me that in his
judgment one-quarter of the men in Harvard College were being
carried through by the special self-denial and sacrifices of women. I
cannot answer for the ratio; but I can testify to having been an
instance of this myself, and to having known a never-ending series
of such cases of self-devotion.”
Lowell, in this respect, was indeed a remarkable town, and it

might be said of it, as of Thrums in “Auld Licht Idyls,” “There are
scores and scores of houses in it that have sent their sons to college
(by what a struggle), some to make their way to the front in their
professions, and others, perhaps, despite their broadcloth, never to
be a patch upon their parents.”
The early mill-girls were religious by nature and by Puritan
inheritance, true daughters of those men and women who, as some
one has said, “were as devoted to education as they were to
religion;” for they planted the church and the schoolhouse side by
side. On entering the mill, each one was obliged to sign a “regulation
paper” which required her to attend regularly some place of public
worship. They were of many denominations. In one boarding-house
that I knew, there were girls belonging to eight different religious
sects.
In 1843, there were in Lowell fourteen regularly organized
religious societies. Ten of these constituted a “Sabbath School
Union,” which consisted of over five thousand scholars and teachers;
three-fourths of the scholars, and a large proportion of the teachers,
were mill-girls. Once a year, every Fourth of July, this “Sabbath
School Union,” each section, or division, under its own sectarian
banner, marched in procession to the grove on Chapel Hill, where a
picnic was held, with lemonade, and long speeches by the ministers
of the different churches,—speeches which the little boys and girls
did not seem to think were made to be listened to.
The mill-girls went regularly to meeting and “Sabbath-school;” and
every Sunday the streets of Lowell were alive with neatly dressed
young women, going or returning therefrom. Their fine appearance
on “the Sabbath” was often spoken of by strangers visiting Lowell.
Dr. Scoresby, in his “American Factories and their Operatives,”
(with selections from The Lowell Offering,) holds up the Lowell mill-
girls to their sister operatives of Bradford, England, as an example of
neatness and good behavior. Indeed, it was a pretty sight to see so
many wide-awake young girls in the bloom of life, clad in their
holiday dresses,—
“Whose delicate feet to the Temple of God,

Seemed to move as if wings had carried them there.”
The morals of these girls were uniformly good. The regulation

paper, before spoken of, required each one to be of good moral
character; and if any one proved to be disreputable, she was very
soon turned out of the mill. Their standard of behavior was high, and
the majority kept aloof from those who were suspected of wrong-
doing. They had, perhaps, less temptation than the working-girls of
to-day, since they were not required to dress beyond their means,
and comfortable homes were provided by their employers, where
they could board cheaply. Their surroundings were pure, and the
whole atmosphere of their boarding-houses was as refined as that of
their own homes. They expected men to treat them with courtesy;
they looked forward to becoming the wives of good men. Their
attitude was that of the German Fräulein, who said, “Treat every
maiden with respect, for you do not know whose wife she will be.”
But there were exceptions to the general rule,—just enough to
prove the doctrine of averages; there were girls who came to the mill
to work whom no one knew anything about, but they did not stay
long, the life there being “too clean for them.”
The health of the girls was good. The regularity and simplicity of
their lives, and the plain and substantial food provided for them, kept
them free from illness. From their Puritan ancestry they had inherited
sound bodies and a fair share of endurance. Fevers and similar
diseases were rare among them; they had no time to pet small
ailments; the boarding-house mother was often both nurse and
doctor, and so the physician’s fee was saved. It may be said that, at
that time, there was but one pathy and no “faith cures” nor any
“science” to be supported by the many diseases “that flesh is heir
to.”
By reading the weekly newspapers the girls became interested in
public events; they knew all about the Mexican war, and the anti-
slavery cause had its adherents among them. Lectures on the
doctrine of Fourier were read, or listened to, but none of them were
“carried away” with the idea of spending their lives in large
“phalansteries,” as they seemed too much like cotton-factories to be
models for their own future housekeeping.
The Brook Farm experiment was familiar to some of them; but the
fault of this scheme was apparent to the practical ones who foresaw
that a few would have to do all the manual labor and that an undue
share would naturally fall to those who had already contracted the
working-habit.
Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, one of the early pioneers of the dress-
reform movement, found followers in Lowell; and parlor meetings
were held at some of the boarding-houses to discuss the feasibility
of this great revolution in the style of woman’s dress. The Lowell
Journal of 1850 states that on the Fourth of July a party of
“Bloomerites” walked in the procession through the public streets,
and The London Punch embellished its pages with a neat cartoon, a
fashion-plate showing the different styles of the Bloomer costume.
This first attempt at a reform in woman’s dress was ridiculed out of
existence by “public opinion;” but from it has been evolved the
modern bicycle costume, now worn by women cyclers.
It seems to have been the fashion of the mill-girls to appear in
procession on all public occasions. Mr. Cowley, in his “History of
Lowell,” speaks of President Jackson’s visit to that city in 1833. He
says: “On the day the President came, all the lady operatives turned
out to meet him. They walked in procession, like troops of liveried
angels clothed in white [with green-fringed parasols], with cannons
booming, drums beating, banners flying, handkerchiefs waving, etc.
The old hero was not more moved by the bullets that whistled round
him in the battle of New Orleans than by the exhilarating spectacle
here presented, and remarked, ‘They are very pretty women, by the
Eternal!’”
CHAPTER V.
CHARACTERISTICS (CONTINUED).
One of the first strikes of cotton-factory operatives that ever took

place in this country was that in Lowell, in October, 1836. When it
was announced that the wages were to be cut down, great
indignation was felt, and it was decided to strike, en masse. This was
done. The mills were shut down, and the girls went in procession
from their several corporations to the “grove” on Chapel Hill, and
listened to “incendiary” speeches from early labor reformers.
One of the girls stood on a pump, and gave vent to the feelings of
her companions in a neat speech, declaring that it was their duty to
resist all attempts at cutting down the wages. This was the first time
a woman had spoken in public in Lowell, and the event caused
surprise and consternation among her audience.
Cutting down the wages was not their only grievance, nor the only
cause of this strike. Hitherto the corporations had paid twenty-five
cents a week towards the board of each operative, and now it was
their purpose to have the girls pay the sum; and this, in addition to
the cut in the wages, would make a difference of at least one dollar a
week. It was estimated that as many as twelve or fifteen hundred
girls turned out, and walked in procession through the streets. They
had neither flags nor music, but sang songs, a favorite (but rather
inappropriate) one being a parody on “I won’t be a nun.”
“Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I—

Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave,
I will not be a slave,
For I’m so fond of liberty
That I cannot be a slave.”
My own recollection of this first strike (or “turn out” as it was

called) is very vivid. I worked in a lower room, where I had heard the
proposed strike fully, if not vehemently, discussed; I had been an
ardent listener to what was said against this attempt at “oppression”
on the part of the corporation, and naturally I took sides with the
strikers. When the day came on which the girls were to turn out,
those in the upper rooms started first, and so many of them left that
our mill was at once shut down. Then, when the girls in my room
stood irresolute, uncertain what to do, asking each other, “Would
you?” or “Shall we turn out?” and not one of them having the
courage to lead off, I, who began to think they would not go out, after
all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying, with
childish bravado, “I don’t care what you do, I am going to turn out,
whether any one else does or not;” and I marched out, and was
followed by the others.
As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more
proud than I have ever been since at any success I may have
achieved, and more proud than I shall ever be again until my own
beloved State gives to its women citizens the right of suffrage.
The agent of the corporation where I then worked took some
small revenges on the supposed ringleaders; on the principle of
sending the weaker to the wall, my mother was turned away from her
boarding-house, that functionary saying, “Mrs. Hanson, you could
not prevent the older girls from turning out, but your daughter is a
child, and her you could control.”
It is hardly necessary to say that so far as results were concerned
this strike did no good. The dissatisfaction of the operatives
subsided, or burned itself out, and though the authorities did not
accede to their demands, the majority returned to their work, and the
corporation went on cutting down the wages.
And after a time, as the wages became more and more reduced,
the best portion of the girls left and went to their homes, or to the
other employments that were fast opening to women, until there
were very few of the old guard left; and thus the status of the factory
population of New England gradually became what we know it to be
to-day.
Some of us took part in a political campaign, for the first time, in
1840, when William H. Harrison, the first Whig President, was
elected; we went to the political meetings, sat in the gallery, heard
speeches against Van Buren and the Democratic party, and helped
sing the great campaign song beginning:—
“Oh have you heard the news of late?”
the refrain of which was:
“Tippecanoe and Tyler too,

Oh with them we’ll beat little Van, Van,
Van is a used-up man.”
And we named our sunbonnets “log-cabins,” and set our teacups

(we drank from saucers then) in little glass tea-plates, with log-
cabins impressed on the bottom. The part the Lowell mill-girls took in
these and similar events serves to show how wide-awake and up to
date many of these middle-century working-women were.
Among the fads of those days may be mentioned those of the
“water-cure” and the “Grahamite.” The former was a theory of
doctoring by means of cold water, used as packs, daily baths, and
immoderate drinks. Quite a number of us adopted this practice, and
one at least has not even yet wholly abandoned it.
Several members of my mother’s family adopted “Professor”
Graham’s regimen, and for a few months we ate no meat, nor, as he
said, “anything that had life in it.” It was claimed that this would
regenerate the race; that by following a certain line of diet, a person
would live longer, do better work, and be able to endure any
hardship, in fact, that not what we were, but what we ate, would be
the making of us. Two young men, whom I knew, made their boasts
that they had “walked from Boston to Lowell on an apple.”
We ate fruit, vegetables, and unleavened or whole-wheat bread,
baked in little round pats (“bullets,” my mother called them), and
without butter; there were no relishes. I soon got tired of the feeling
of “goneness” this diet gave me; I found that although I might eat a
pint of mashed potato, and the same quantity of squash, it was as if I
had not dined, and I gave up the experiment. But my elder brother,
who had carried to the extremest extreme this “potato gospel,” as
Carlyle called it, induced my mother to make his Thanksgiving
squash-pie after a receipt of his own. The crust was made of Indian
meal and water, and the filling was of squash, water, and sugar! And
he ate it, and called it good. But I thought then, and still think, that his
enjoyment of the eating was in the principle rather than in the pie.
A few of the girls were interested in phrenology; and we had our
heads examined by Professor Fowler, who, if not the first, was the
chief exponent of this theory in Lowell. He went about into all the
schools, examining children’s heads. Mine, he said, “lacked
veneration;” and this I supposed was an awful thing, because my
teacher looked so reproachfully at me when the professor said it.
A few were interested in Mesmerism; and those of us who had
the power to make ourselves en rapport with others tried
experiments on “subjects,” and sometimes held meetings in the
evening for that purpose.
The life in the boarding-houses was very agreeable. These
houses belonged to the corporation, and were usually kept by
widows (mothers of mill-girls), who were often the friends and
advisers of their boarders.
Among these may be mentioned the mothers of Lucy Larcom; the
Hon. Gustavus Vasa Fox, once Assistant Secretary of the Navy;
John W. Hanson, D.D.; the Rev. W. H. Cudworth; Major General B.
F. Butler; and several others.
Each house was a village or community of itself. There fifty or
sixty young women from different parts of New England met and
lived together. When not at their work, by natural selection they sat in
groups in their chambers, or in a corner of the large dining-room,
busy at some agreeable employment; or they wrote letters, read,
studied, or sewed, for, as a rule, they were their own seamstresses
and dressmakers.
It is refreshing to remember their simplicity of dress; they wore no
ruffles and very few ornaments. It is true that some of them had gold
watches and gold pencils, but they were worn only on grand
occasions; as a rule, the early mill-girls were not of that class that is
said to be “always suffering for a breast-pin.” Though their dress was
so simple and so plain, yet it was so tasteful that they were often
accused of looking like ladies; the complaint was sometimes made
that no one could tell the difference in church between the factory-
girls and the daughters of some of the first families in the city.
Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, in The Lady’s Book, in 1842, speaking of the
impossibility of considering dress a mark of distinction, says: “Many
of the factory-girls wear gold watches and an imitation at least of all
the ornaments which grace the daughters of our most opulent
citizens.”
The boarding-houses were considered so attractive that
strangers, by invitation, often came to look in upon them, and see for
themselves how the mill-girls lived. Dickens, in his “American Notes,”
speaks with surprise of their home life. He says, “There is a piano in
a great many of the boarding-houses, and nearly all the young ladies
subscribe to circulating libraries.” There was a feeling of esprit de
corps among these households; any advantage secured to one of
the number was usually shared by others belonging to her set or
group. Books were exchanged, letters from home were read, and
“pieces,” intended for the Improvement Circle, were presented for
friendly criticism.
There was always a best room in the boarding-house, to entertain
callers in; but if any of the girls had a regular gentleman caller, a
special evening was set apart each week to receive him. This room
was furnished with a carpet, sometimes with a piano, as Dickens
says, and with the best furniture, including oftentimes the relics of
household treasures left of the old-time gentility of the house-mother.
This mutual acquaintanceship was of great advantage. They
discussed the books they read, debated religious and social
questions, compared their thoughts and experiences, and advised
and helped one another. And so their mental growth went on, and
they soon became educated far beyond what their mothers or their
grandmothers could have been. The girls also stood by one another
in the mills; when one wanted to be absent half a day, two or three
others would tend an extra loom or frame apiece, so that the absent
one might not lose her pay. At this time the mule and spinning-jenny
had not been introduced; two or three looms, or spinning-frames,
were as much as one girl was required to tend, more than that being
considered “double work.”
The inmates of what may be called these literary households
were omniverous readers of books, and were also subscribers to the
few magazines and literary newspapers; and it was their habit, after
reading their copies, to send them by mail or stage-coach to their
widely scattered homes, where they were read all over a village or a
neighborhood; and thus was current literature introduced into by and
lonely places.
From an article in The Lowell Offering, (“Our Household,” signed
H. T.,) I am able to quote a sketch of one factory boarding-house
interior. The author said, “In our house there are eleven boarders,
and in all thirteen members of the family. I will class them according
to their religious tenets as follows: Calvinist Baptist, Unitarian,
Congregational, Catholic, Episcopalian, and Mormonite, one each;
Universalist and Methodist, two each; Christian Baptist, three. Their
reading is from the following sources: They receive regularly fifteen
newspapers and periodicals; these are, the Boston Daily Times, the
Herald of Freedom, the Signs of the Times, and the Christian Herald,
two copies each; the Christian Register, Vox Populi, Literary
Souvenir, Boston Pilot, Young Catholic’s Friend, Star of Bethlehem,
and The Lowell Offering, three copies each. A magazine, one copy.
We also borrow regularly the Non-Resistant, the Liberator, the
Lady’s Book, the Ladies’ Pearl, and the Ladies’ Companion. We
have also in the house what perhaps cannot be found anywhere else
in the city of Lowell,—a Mormon Bible.”
The “magazine” mentioned may have been The Dial, that
exponent of New England Transcendentalism, of which The Offering
was the humble contemporary. The writer adds to her article:
“Nothwithstanding the divers faiths embraced among us, we live in
much harmony, and seldom is difference of opinion the cause of
dissensions among us.”
Novels were not very popular with us, as we inclined more to
historical writings and to poetry. But such books as “Charlotte
Temple,” “Eliza Wharton,” “Maria Monk,” “The Arabian Nights,” “The
Mysteries of Udolpho,” “Abellino, the Bravo of Venice,” or “The
Castle of Otranto,” were sometimes taken from the circulating library,
read with delight, and secretly lent from one young girl to another.
Our religious reading was confined to the Bible, Baxter’s “Saints’
Rest,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “The Religious Courtship,” “The
Widow Directed,” and Sunday-school books.
It was fortunate for us that we were obliged to read good books,
such as histories, the English classics, and the very few American
novels that were then in existence. Cheap editions of Scott were but
just publishing; “Pickwick,” in serial numbers, soon followed;
Frederika Bremer was hardly translated; Lydia Maria Child was
beginning to write; Harriet Beecher Stowe was busy in her nursery,
and the great American novel was not written,—nor yet the small
one, which was indeed a blessing!
There were many representative women among us who did not
voice their thoughts in writing, and whose names are not on the list
of the contributers to The Offering. This was but one phase of their
development, as many of them have exerted a widespread influence
in other directions. They graduated from the cotton-factory, carrying
with them the results of their manual training; and they have done
their little part towards performing the useful labor of life. Into
whatever vocation they entered they made practical use of the habits
of industry and perseverance learned during those early years, and
they have exemplified them in their stirring and fruitful lives.
In order to show how far the influence of individual effort may
extend, it will be well to mention the after-fate of some of them. One
became an artist of note, another a poet of more than local fame, a
third an inventor, and several were among the pioneers in Florida, in
Kansas, and in other Western States. A limited number married
those who were afterwards doctors of divinity, major-generals, and
members of Congress; and these, in more than one instance, had
been their work-mates in the factory.
And in later years, when, through the death of the bread-winner,
the pecuniary support of those dependent on him fell to their lot,
some of these factory-girls carried on business, entered the trades,
or went to college and thereby were enabled to practise in some of
the professions. They thus resumed their old-time habit of supporting
the helpless ones, and educating the children of the family.
These women were all self-made in the truest sense; and it is well
to mention their success in life, that others, who now earn their living
at what is called “ungenteel” employments, may see that what one
does is not of so much importance as what one is. I do not know why
it should not be just as commendable for a woman who has risen to
have been once a factory-girl, as it is for an ex-governor or a major-
general to have been a “bobbin-boy.” A woman ought to be as proud
of being self-made as a man; not proud in a boasting way, but proud
enough to assert the fact in her life and in her works.
All these of whom I speak are widely scattered. I hear of them in
the far West, in the South, and in foreign countries, even so far away
as the Himalaya Mountains. But wherever they may be, I know that
they will join with me in saying that the discipline of their youth
helped to make them what they are; and that the cotton-factory was
to them the means of education, their preparatory school, in which
they learned the alphabet of their life-work.
Such is the brief story of the life of every-day working-girls; such
as it was then, so it might be to-day. Undoubtedly there might have
been another side to this picture, but I give the side I knew best,—
the bright side!
CHAPTER VI.
THE LOWELL OFFERING AND ITS WRITERS.
One of the most curious phases in the life of New England, and
one that must always puzzle the historian of its literature, is its
sudden intellectual blossoming half a century ago.
Emerson says, “The children of New England between 1820 and
1840 were born with knives in their brains;” and this would seem to
be true, since during or very near that time, were born the majority of
those writers and thinkers whose lives have been so recently and so
nobly rounded out,—Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier,
John Pierpont,—they whose influence cannot be overestimated in
bringing an ideal element into our hitherto prosaic New England life.
The seeds of this intellectual growth came suddenly, as if blown
from some far-off cultured land, and were sown broadcast. Some
found a resting-place in this little corner of New England, where were
gathered together these daughters of Puritan ancestors, and they,
too, feeling the intellectual impetus, were impelled to put in writing
their own crude thoughts. Their desire for self-improvement had
been to some extent gratified, and they now began to feel the benefit
of the educational advantages which had been opened to them. As
in “Mary Barton,” they “threw the shuttle with increasing sound,
although Newton’s ‘Principia’ lay open before them, to be snatched
at in work-hours, but revelled over at meal-time or at night.”
And the “literary” girls among us would often be seen writing on
scraps of paper which we hid “between whiles” in the waste-boxes
upon which we sat while waiting for the looms or frames to need
attention. Some of these studious ones kept note-books, with
abstracts of their reading and studies, or jotted down what they were
pleased to call their “thoughts.” It was natural that such a thoughtful
life should bear fruit, and this leads me to speak of The Lowell
Offering, a publication which was the natural outgrowth of the mental
habit of the early mill-girls, for many of the pieces that were printed
there were thought out amid the hum of the wheels, while the skilful
fingers and well-trained eyes of the writers tended the loom or the
frame.
The idea of organization for literary and educational purposes
was first proposed in 1837 by Miss Harriot F. Curtis, perhaps the
most progressive of all the mill-girls. She with her immediate
associates conceived the idea of forming a little society for mental
improvement. In The Lowell Offering of January, 1845, is the
following account of its formation written by Miss Maria Currier.
“IMPROVEMENT CIRCLE.
“In one of the corporations [the Lawrence] of this city, about eight
years ago, might have been seen, on a summer evening, a company
of four or five young females, who through the day had labored at
their several employments in some one of the factories connected
with the corporation. Perhaps they were not ambitious above others
of their sex.... But wishing to improve the talents which God had
given them, they proposed the formation of a society for mutual
improvement. An evening was appointed for the proposed purpose;
and having invited a few others to join them, they met at the time
appointed.... A president, vice-president, and secretary were chosen;
a constitution was drafted, and by-laws formed, to which each of the
members affixed her name.... At length a circle on a more extensive
scale was formed by a gentleman of this city, and a plan conceived
of bringing before the world the productions of inexperienced
females; of showing that intellect and intelligence might be found
even among factory operatives. It was then that The Offering was
published; and many of those who were present at the first meeting
of our Improvement Circle were contributors to its pages.”
At the first meeting, Miss Curtis delivered a stirring address, in

which she stated the object and scope of the organization, and the
urgent need that existed for all working-women to make an effort to
improve their minds.
The club met fortnightly, and each member contributed articles in
prose and verse, which were read at the meetings, and subjected to
the criticism of those present.
In answer to a letter of enquiry, Miss Curtis writes: “I do not
remember who composed the first circle, not even the names of the
officers; but I think Emmeline Larcom was secretary. Farther than
that I can only say, I was not anything. I never would hold any office,
—office brings trammels. I believe I wrote and read the address of
which Maria speaks. Louisa and Maria Currier, Emmeline Larcom,
Harriet Lees, and possibly Ann Carter were there.... If you want to
know whose brain conceived the idea, I suspect it was I. I was
always daring; the other five were modest and retiring.” And thus
was formed the first woman’s literary club in this country,—a remote
first cause of the hundreds which now make up the General
Federation of Women’s Clubs, since it bears the same relation to
that flourishing institution as the native crab does to the grafted tree.
Some of these early club, or improvement circle women either are,
or have been, members of similar organizations in the localities in
which they live, and have done their best to incorporate into the
constitution of the modern woman’s club the idea of “improving the
talents God has given them.” And if they have continued to live up to
this doctrine, no doubt they have attained, if not to all they may have
desired, at least to all they were capable of achieving, according to
their limitations.
It may be well to mention here that Improvement Circles
continued to be formed, and that in 1843 there were at least five in
different parts of the city. I attended one in 1845, connected with The
Lowell Offering. It met in the publication office, on Central Street, and
was well filled with factory operatives, some of whom had brought
their contributions, and waited to hear them read, with quaking
hearts and conscious faces. Harriet Farley presided, and from a pile
of manuscript on the table before her selected such contributions as
she thought the most worthy of a public reading. Among these, as I
remember, were the chapters of a novel by Miss Curtis, one of Lucy
Larcom’s prose poems, and some “pieces of poetry.” Included in
these pieces were some verses in which the wind was described as
playing havoc with nature to such an extent that—
“It took the tall trees by the hair,

And as with besoms swept the air.”
This tremendous breeze, or simile, caused a good deal of mirth

among the younger contributors, who had never heard of “The
World-Soul,” nor read Emerson’s line—
“To the green-haired forest free,”
nor Longfellow’s “The Building of the Ship,” where he speaks of the

pine-trees as—
“Shorn of their streaming hair.”
Nor yet Wordsworth’s sonnet:—
“While trees, dim seen, in frenzied numbers tear

The lingering remnant of their yellow hair.”
This was my only appearance at the Circle, as I had hitherto been

deterred from going by the knowledge that those who went were
expected to bring a written contribution to be read there. Shortly after
this, Miss Farley (one of the editors) invited me to send something to
the magazine, and I complied; but I was not an early or a constant
contributor.
In 1839, the Rev. Abel C. Thomas and the Rev. Thomas B.
Thayer, pastors of the First and Second Universalist Churches in
Lowell, established improvement circles composed of the young
people belonging to their respective parishes. These meetings were
largely made up of young men and women who worked in the mill.
They were often asked to speak; but as they persistently declined,
they were invited to write what they desired to say, and send it, to be
read anonymously at the next meeting. Many of the young women
complied with this request, and these written communications were
so numerous that they very soon became the sole entertainment of
what Mr. Thomas called “these intellectual banquets.”
A selection from the articles read at these meetings was
published by Mr. Thomas in pamphlet form, under the title, “The
Lowell Offering, a Repository of Original Articles written by Females
employed in the Mills.” Mr. Thomas’s own account of his part in
establishing the magazine will be found in chapter seven. The first
series, of four numbers, was issued from October, 1840, to March,
1841; and there was such a demand for copies, that a new series
began, The Lowell Offering proper, a monthly magazine of thirty-two
pages, which was issued regularly by its projector from that time until
October, 1842, when it passed into the hands of Miss Harriot F.
Curtis and Miss Harriet Farley, both operatives in the Lowell mills.
Under their joint editorship it was published, the first year by
William Schouler, but after that by these ladies themselves, who
were editors, publishers, and proprietors, until December, 1845,
when, with the end of Volume V. Miss Curtis retired from the
magazine, and The Lowell Offering ceased to exist.
But in September, 1847, Miss Farley resumed the publication of
the magazine and issued one copy under the title The New England
Offering; and all those who were or had been factory operatives
were invited to contribute to its pages.
This magazine was re-issued in 1848, from April to December,
continued through 1849, and until March, 1850, when it was
discontinued for want of means, and perhaps new contributors. Miss
Farley was the editor, publisher, and proprietor of The New England
Offering.
There are about seven volumes of the magazines in all,—five of
The Lowell Offering, and two of The New England Offering, including
the first four numbers in 1840, and the odd numbers of 1847 and
1850.
The prospectus of The Lowell Offering, as issued by its women-
editors in 1845, is as follows:—
THE
LOWELL OFFERING,
WRITTEN, EDITED, AND PUBLISHED
BY FEMALE OPERATIVES.
Our magazine is the only one which America has produced, of
which no other country has produced the like. The Offering is prima
facie evidence, not only of the American “factory-girls,” but of the
intelligence of the mass of our country. And it is in the intelligence of
the mass that the permanency of our republican institutions
depends.
And our last appeal is to those who should support us, if for no
other reason but their interest in “the cultivation of humanity,” and the
maintenance of true democracy. There is little but this of which we,
as a people, can be proud. Other nations can look upon the relics of
a glory come and gone—upon their magnificent ruins—upon worn-
out institutions, not only tolerated, but hallowed because they are old
—upon the splendors of costly pageant—upon the tokens of a
wealth, which has increased for ages—but we can take pride in
these. We have other and better things. Let us look upon our “free
suffrage,” our Lyceums, our Common Schools, our Mechanics’
Literary Associations, the Periodical of our Laboring Females; upon
all that is indigenous to our Republic, and say, with the spirit of the
Roman Cornelia, These, these are our jewels.
Terms: One dollar per year in advance. Postage: 100 miles and
under, 1½ cents. Over 100, 2½ cents.
Published at Lowell, Mass., monthly, by
MISSES CURTIS & FARLEY.
In order to combat the prejudice which then existed against

“female” editors and publishers, it was thought best (as Mr. Thomas
had advised) that the enterprise should be indorsed by some of the
leading men of the city; and in the original document, now before
me, these gentlemen said:—
“We wish herewith to express most cheerfully our confidence in

their talents and moral worth, and our cordial approbation of the
worthy enterprise in which they are engaged.... We wish only to
witness to all to whom this may come, that Miss Harriet Farley and
Miss Harriot Curtis are worthy of entire confidence, and are

The Power of Individual and Community in Ancient Athens and Beyond: Essays in Honour of John K. Davies Jan Haywood (Editor)

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The Power of Individual and Community

in Ancient Athens and Beyond: Essays

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The Pursuit of a Brave New World in International Law :

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THE POWER OF INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY

First published in 2019 by

Distributor in North America

2 ‘Charis, sweetest of gods’: wealth and reciprocity in

3 Herodotus and the social contexts of memory in Ancient

4 From Croesus to Pausanias: tragic individuals in early

5 Euergetism and the public economy of Classical Athens:

6 The priesthoods of the Eteoboutadai 163

8 At the roots of a revolution. Land ownership, citizenship

9 A twenty-first century Philippic 241

10 Apollo, the tutelary god of the Seleucids, and Demodamas

11 From Xerxes to Mithridates: kings, coins and economic life

12 John Davies, Greek historian 311

Index of sources 325

General Index 331

1.1. Resource movement in a modified version of ‘household autarky’

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

John Kenyon Davies is a phenomenon as an ancient historian. Like many

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

could yield real insights about societies as inter-related entities. The

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

students of Classical antiquity to appreciate the differences between

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

individuals, capable of offering sums of money, or other material resources,

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

As the discussion above has highlighted, another of John’s long-standing

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

Exchanges with ‘Market’-defined Private or

Zosia Archibald and Jan Haywood

Exchanges with ‘Market’-defined Private or Gifts from

Exchanges with ‘Market’-defined Private or Gifts from

IMAGINARY PROPERTIED FAMILIES:

Imaginary propertied families: kinship in epic poetry

Imaginary propertied families: kinship in epic poetry

Imaginary propertied families: kinship in epic poetry

Allies and affines

Imaginary propertied families: kinship in epic poetry

Imaginary propertied families: kinship in epic poetry

Imaginary propertied families: kinship in epic poetry

that bridewealth would be required in this endogamous marriage.32 Finally,

Imaginary propertied families: kinship in epic poetry

celebrated by feasting and a ceremonial passage of the bride to her new

Lowell, in this respect, was indeed a remarkable town, and it

“Whose delicate feet to the Temple of God,

The morals of these girls were uniformly good. The regulation

One of the first strikes of cotton-factory operatives that ever took

“Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I—

My own recollection of this first strike (or “turn out” as it was

“Oh have you heard the news of late?”

the refrain of which was:

Nor yet Wordsworth’s sonnet:—