Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens (review)

The focus of Cox’s book is the relationship between law and practice; more specifically, she addresses the problem of analyzing the tangle of affective, legal, and economic relationships clustered under Greek and crosscultural conceptions of the household and its reproduction. This is an important issue for comparative research, and Cox makes a number of valid (if not particularly new) general points: that Athenian households might include, in addition to a nuclear family and its slaves, additional kin, transient visitors, or nonmarital sexual partners; that household heads were often absent on campaigns or on other journeys; that landholdings were scattered, and wealth of other kinds not uncommon; that forensic speeches provide evidence of attempts by members of the elite to circumvent the law.

Unfortunately, at the more detailed level, both the methodology and the presentation of the argument are disappointing. It is not entirely clear what readership the author and publisher envisaged for the book. One of its stronger points is the use of comparative material from other societies, but the nonspecialist interdisciplinary reader will find the text hard going (so will students). Too often Cox plunges directly into prosopographical detail without providing basic background information about the Athenian economy (for example, about the differences between the fifth century Athenian empire and the situation in the fourth century, in relation to ownership of property outside Attica, levels of military activity and of funding for it, etc.; or about the difference between leasing silver-mine concessions from the state and owning land in the mining district, facilities on which could be leased to other concessionaries). It is symptomatic of this lack of a general framework that Cox fails to provide a systematic discussion of two topics directly relevant to her problematics—the role of freedmen in the economic activities of their ex-owners, and the movements of cleruchs, citizens who had been given land in Athenian settlements overseas, between Attica and other areas of the Aegean.

Cox relies mainly on evidence from the Attic orators, that is, on forensic speeches that give only one side of the cases for which they were written (the outcomes of which, in the great majority of cases, remain unknown). Moreover, her interpretations of the cases are often questionable, and not always consistent. For example, sometimes she identifies the counter-claimants in the Isaeus 6 case as the sons of d.c., Euctemon, by a second marriage, but at other times, as the sons of his freedwoman. Forensic speeches do not provide a solid basis for generalizations about practice, because marginal practices were more likely to lead to dispute and litigation.

There are also problems with terminology. The relationship between a mother’s brother and his sister’s son is characterized as “agnatic,” and the term “neighbor” is used to cover a wide range of categories, from next-door residence and landowning to residence in the same village and even membership in the same locally defined tribal subsection (trittys—for example, members of the demes Potamos and Phrearrhioi may be “neighbors”). Finally, the book would be easier to use if it had a map of Attica, more and better-designed genealogical tables, and indexes for the inscriptions and text passages discussed.