Therefore, new oikoi were formed every generation and would continue to be perpetuated through marriage and childbirth. When a son was given his portion of the inheritance, either before or after his father had died, he was said to have formed a new oikos. However, when any legitimate sons reached adulthood the role of kyrios could, in many instances, be transferred from the father to the next male generation. Initially the kyrios of an oikos would have been the husband and father of offspring. The kyrios was responsible for representing the interests of his oikos to the wider polis and providing legal protection to the women and minors with whom he shared his household. Family Men Ī man was the head ( kyrios, κύριος) of the household.
Lisa Nevett points out that houses frequently had a "complex pattern of spatial usage", with rooms being used for multiple purposes. For example, a house in Attica known as the Vari House had multiple possible places which may have been used for cooking, but no fixed fireplace, and no one place was used for the entire lifetime of the house. However, Lin Foxhall has argued that Greek houses often had no permanent kitchens. Historians have identified a "hearth-room" in ancient Greek houses as a centre of female activity. Entranceways at Olynthos were designed for privacy, preventing passers-by from seeing inside the house. On the Murder of Eratosthenes demonstrates that at least some Athenian houses also had an upper storey. Only a minority of the houses had evidence of staircases survive, demonstrating that they definitely had upper storeys, while for the remainder of Olynthian houses the evidence is inconclusive. Likewise, of the houses excavated at Halieis in the Argolid, most of the houses seem to have had a single entrance which gave access to a court, and Nevett also cites three buildings excavated on Thasos as being similarly arranged around a courtyard. In the classical period, houses excavated from Olynthos were "invariably" organised around a colonnaded courtyard. By contrast, in Athens houses appear to have varied much more in size and shape. In Olynthos and Halieis, street plans in the classical city were rectilinear, and thus houses were of regular shapes and sizes. The grid layout, with regularly sized rectangular houses, can be seen. In this model, access to the private areas were restricted to the family, while public areas accommodated visitors. It has been argued that instead of dividing the household space into "male" and "female" areas, it is more accurate to look at areas as being private or public.
More recent scholarship from historians such as Lisa Nevett and Lin Foxhall has argued for a more flexible approach to household space, with rooms not simply having a single fixed function, and gendering of space not being as simple as some rooms being for men and others for women. In Lysias' speech On the Murder of Eratosthenes, the women's rooms were said to be situated above the men's quarters, while in Xenophon the women's and men's quarters are next to one another. Traditional interpretations of the layout of the oikos in Classical Athens have divided into men's and women's spaces, with an area known as the gynaikon or gynaikonitis associated with women's activities such as cooking and textiles work, and an area restricted to men called the andron.
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