The ancient Greek concept of oikos, and how family as a factor influences one's life, both past and present.
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TRANSCRIPTED VERSION
Hi everyone, and welcome to today’s podcast. Have you ever asked yourself how something today, such a social structure or a certain facet of life is the way it is? Or what is its origin? Its history? I will be delving into the ancient Greek concept of oikos and how it helped advance the civilization but also how oikos presents itself in the social structures of the modern age in the western world.
Let’s start off with the basics and define oikos. Oikos is a Greek word roughly translating to mean family. Sarah B Pomeroy gives us a deeper understanding of oikos to be “the center of a person’s existence, and every member was preoccupied with its preservation, economic well-being, and social standing.”[1]
An oikos, or oikoi for plurality, was the family unit of every household. This 3-part concept consisted of the family, the family’s material possessions and any property/housing belonging to the family. In other words, oikos was the beginning of the monetary consolidation that determined a family’s net worth.
So you may ask yourself while listening to this, why can’t a family just be a family? Well, when we think of family today, we don’t think of everything our family owns, nor the house we may live in. We don’t think of our jobs or the opportunities awarded to us and instead defer to the people of who are our parents, our siblings, our children, a spouse or a grandparent. In today’s world, it is almost taboo or a fragile subject to discuss one’s wealth, or lack of, in comparison to the rest of society, but in Ancient Greece, this ‘taboo’ subject was necessary for the civilization to keep advancing.
Let me ask you this, have you ever heard the saying, ‘money makes the world go round’? It’s an undisputed fact that the more money you have, the better the quality of your life and simply put, we as humans, have evolved to point where our source of income is no longer tied to the household. Basically, we no longer depend on agriculture like the farming families of Archaic Greece.
Deriving from the word ‘oikonomia’, roughly translating to ‘economy’, this model of the early Greek family as a lineage formed the backbone of social organization and class division.[2] As the Greek civilization flourished, political life became more and more entangled with domestic life until it was virtually impossible to distinguish the two. But what happened when Greece advances past an agricultural civilization and entered the Classical Period or the Hellenistic periods where craft specialization flourished?
We’ll take a deeper look into craft specialization later but since each polis was autonomous, an oikos in Athens looked very different than one in Sparta or in Gortyn as Virginia Hunter explains in her review of Cynthia Patterson’s “The Greek Family”, but the gist of it remains the same across as Greek city-states: the apparition of a higher net worth meant greater upwards economic mobility for opportunities such as the occasion to increase one’s oikos, the ability to be politically enfranchised, and increase social standing.
It’s not quite different than it is today if we replace the word oikos with the word wealth. It is easy to see that the two are necessary components in daily life respectively. In the Early Iron Age, “the main economic resource for each of the families in a village or town was its ancestral plot,”[3] and as we move on the Classic and Hellenistic periods, though landowners were still the highest class socially and economically, the need for farming decreased allowing craft specialization to really take off. Fathers now started to teach their sons their trade which would ensure some sort of personal financial stability. The apparition of practitioners of the liberal arts and skilled professions, who were neither at the top or bottom of the economic scale[4] presents enough evidence to understand that Greece was undergoing a sort of stratification that would eventually lead to the rise of socioeconomic divisions separating the wealthy elite and a burgeoning common middle class.
It’s easy to see the historical parallels between our society today and the one of Ancient Greece. Just as it is vital one has a job or a source of income, it was important to be part of an oikos because your position determined your financial security.
Pomeroy tells us that “in Athens, married women were part of their husband’s oikos”[5] and “children belonged to the oikos of their father.”[6] Interestingly enough, she also makes note of the fact that “consistent with Solon’s Law and Greek custom, Xenophon mentions [in his work entitled Oeconomicus, a “Treatise on the Skills of Estate Management] that children will be the support and allies of their aged parents,”[7] which is a piece of information significant to today’s podcast. The word “aged” in this last statement leads me to believe that multiple generations resided in the same household.
The Oxford dictionary defines family as a group or one or more parents and their children living together as a unit. It’s not hard to see that this definition encapsulates not only the main themes of oikos, but it transcends history to the point where we can see this exact model represented today and in Ancient Greece. If we take Xenophon’s account into order, I can only infer that at least 3 generations resided in a household at any given time giving way to the idea of the ‘multigenerational home’. It’s not all that uncommon to find these familial structures in the twenty first century as multigenerational living is rising in popularity due to its extraordinary benefits. These social structures have been a consistent feature of any developed society, which the article The Future of Multigenerational Living in Existing Communities highlights.
Geraldine Gardener and Alexander Nasserjah argue that “there is opportunity to address economic pressures while leveraging the social benefits of shared living.”[8] The two authors concisely illuminate the main reasons why multigenerational households have gained traction in both the past and present, giving credit “to cultural norms among certain ethnic and minority populations, economic reasons due to rising housing costs, and social supports to aid with childcare or eldercare.”[9] Though the ancient Greeks lived together mainly as social supports, multiple generations in one home today is often at the hands of the former - economic reasons.
Jason Houle, author of “Disparities in Debt” explains to readers the importance of Socioeconomic Position (SES) saying that, “higher income parents are able to contribute more money toward their children’s education, are more likely to have saved money for their children’s education, and can transfer money to their children in other domains such as rent and leisure.”[10] Houle’s statement proves that more wealth eased any financial burdens or worries but it can also create huge economic disparities and gaps between socioeconomic classes which first was visible in ancient Greek society when landowners emerged as the wealthy elite while artisans and tradesman, the majority of the population, made up the middle class. Houle’s statements apply to both modernity and history, further reinforcing the concept of a modern day oikos by demonstrating that even in today’s world, a large percentage of young individuals have to rely on the financial support of their family in order to ensure their own economic well-being.
Kind of striking to see the similarities between today’s definition and the one Pomeroy provides us with earlier in the show. Before I sign off today, I just want to reiterate that oikos was a large umbrella term encapsulating the family but as this became the structure upon which the civilization advanced, oikos throughout the years has taken on a more economical definition as we can see through the utilisation of multigenerational households. I hope you’ve all enjoyed this facet of history and the transcription will be below as well as an appendix of resources.
Thank you.
Bibliography
Sources Cited
Gardner, Geraldine, and Alexander Nasserjah. "The Future of Multigenerational Housing in Existing Communities: Insights for Transatlantic Cities." Cityscape 22, no. 1 (2020): 249-72. Accessed November 25, 2020. doi:10.2307/26915496.
Golden, Mark. "The Greek Family." The Classical Review, New Series, 49, no. 1 (1999): 157-59. Accessed November 22, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/713933.
Houle, Jason N. "Disparities in Debt: Parents' Socioeconomic Resources and Young Adult Student Loan Debt." Sociology of Education 87, no. 1 (2014): 53-69. Accessed November 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43186798.
Hunter, Virginia. Phoenix 52, no. 3/4 (1998): 395-98. Accessed November 22, 2020. doi:10.2307/1088687.
Pomeroy, Sarah B. et al. 2019. A Brief History of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society and Culture. (4th edition, Oxford University Press).
Pomeroy, Sarah B. "Some Greek Families: Production and Reproduction." In The Jewish Family in Antiquity, edited by Cohen Shaye J.D., 155-64. Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2020. Accessed October 22, 2020. doi:10.2307/j.ctvzgb9cp.11.
Sources Referenced and Consulted
Samama, Evelyne. Revue Des Études Grecques 117, no. 2 (2004): 783-85. Accessed November 22, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44261901.
[1] Pomeroy et al, “A Brief History of Ancient Greece”, 54 [2] Virginia Hunter, “The Greek Family”, 396 [3] Pomeroy et al, “A Brief History”, 54 [4] Pomeroy, “Some Greek Families”, 156 [5] Ibid, 156 [6] Ibid 160 [7] Ibid 156 [8] Geraldine Gardner and Alexander Nasserjah, “The Future of Multigenerational Housing”, 252 [9] Ibid, 256 [10] Jason Houle “Disparities in Debt”, 87