Preface
“
πόλις ἐν σκοπέλῳ κατὰ κόσμον
οἰκεῦσα σμικρὴ κρέσσων Νίνου ἀφραινούσης
”“
A polis on a barren rock, small, but settled in an orderly fashion,
is greater than senseless Nineveh.
”
Phokylides of Miletus, 6th c. B.C., fr. 4, tr. authorThe concept of order was central to the creation of a Greek city. A well-ordered state would endure; a poorly ordered one would fall into stasis and disintegrate. This order encompassed both the social organization of the state—its laws, government, tribal structure and other aspects—and its physical structure; and its physical organization was closely linked to its social order. Planning a city, then, was not simply a matter of finding a suitable site, laying out blocks, establishing the trace of the city walls, deciding on the sites of the agora, the temples, and the other public buildings. It was the manifestation of an ideal, a model of the community and of the world translated into physical form. It was the realization of an abstract view of civic space.
To
Aristotle, as to any Greek, “every polis is composed of oikoi”.
0.1 The oikos, both in its social meaning as “household” and its physical manifestation as “house,” was the basic building block of the polis, in both its social meaning as “community” and its physical meaning as “city” (or “city-state”). The study of the Greek city begins, therefore, with the study of the Greek house.
This book considers some of the relationships between house and city, between household and community, as they were worked out in practice at Olynthus in northern Greece (fig. 1).
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| Fig. 1. Map of Greece |
This polis was occupied for a short period of time, for eighty-four years at the most. It was then violently destroyed, leaving tens of thousands of artifacts on the final floors of its houses, and for the most part never reoccupied. A large part of the city was excavated by David M. Robinson between 1928 and 1938, and published in fourteen massive volumes.
0.2 Its unique history, extensive excavation,which uncovered more than a hundred houses, and full publication makes Olynthus the best-documented site for the study of household and urban organization in Classical Greece. Only at Olynthus can we study the remains of a planned city occupied for less than three generations, and so relatively unmodified by later rebuilding, and consider not only the architecture of houses but their contents as well, with well-preserved assemblages on the final destruction floors. We can investigate not only how the houses and city were planned and built, but how space was actually used; we can reconstruct the intended organization of civic and domestic space, and how that organization was realized in practice. We have unique evidence for the layout and use of domestic space; for the occupations and aspirations of the households; for the domestic and urban economies and how they articulate with one another. We can consider not only the typical house, but the range of variation among contemporary houses and their contents: variation which is related to differences in origin, status, family ties, occupation, economic strategies, and the like. We can analyze neighborhood and regional planning in the city, consider its house blocks as not only physical units of civic organization, but social units as well, and evaluate larger regional patterns in the city. We can compare the ideologies of Greek household organization with how houses were actually constructed, examining what sorts of spaces were built and how they were intended to be used; and then how those spaces were actually used. In short, the archaeology of Olynthus offers a fuller and richer picture of Greek domestic and civic life than almost any other Greek site.
