To be of Irish or Italian stock, to piece together a family tree or to list the different branches of a given family: In our everyday vocabulary, origin, filiation and matrimony are often expressed through vegetal metaphors, as if we were unknowingly thinking of family and kinship as organic elements.Footnote ¹ In fact, it is by no means certain that the family is a historical object like any other. Structural anthropology has taught us that the rules that organize exchanges within families can only be understood through structures and codes that are unaffected by historical events, since ‘kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena.’Footnote ² Claiming there had been an epistemological break with the historical discipline, Claude Lévi-Strauss thus assigned a mission to the anthropology of kinship to ‘provide a logical framework for historical developments, which, while perhaps unpredictable, are never arbitrary.’Footnote ³ For their part, it is most often from the angle of studying ‘private life’ that historians have assessed this difficult subject, conceived of as a ‘zone of immunity to which we may fall back or retreat, a place where we may set aside arms and armor needed in the public place, relax, take our ease, and lie about unshielded by the ostentatious carapace worn for protection in the outside world.’Footnote ⁴

Is kinship a ‘logical framework’ indifferent to history? Is the family a ‘zone of immunity’ offered for withdrawal? The idea would have seemed strange to the ancient Greeks. In its very form, the city did not differentiate between ontology and kinship. In their view, the city had not been built in opposition to the family, but within its folds, by working around its tensions and dissonances. The ancient authors constantly meditated on the links that connected family feuds to civil war, as if any conflict in lineage could devastate a given community at any moment. Aristotle even tells the story, in the manner of a founding myth, of a dispute between two brothers from the small town of Histiaia. Initially spreading to close relatives, their dispute over their paternal inheritance eventually affected the whole town, which apparently split into two irreconcilable factions.Footnote ⁵ The way the Athenian tragic authors imagined the destiny of the rival cities of Argos and Thebes is barely any different. In both Oedipus’ and Agamemnon’s families, the same chain of events constantly reproduces itself: An entire family is torn apart and leads the community inevitably to its own end.Footnote ⁶ Athenian tragedies of the fifth century therefore offered a countermodel to the city of equals, which was also a city of brothers.

Family breakdowns reciprocally offer the most striking representation of the tragic consequences to which the stasis can lead. ‘Sons were killed by their fathers, and suppliants dragged from the altar or slain upon it.’Footnote ⁷ It is in these terms that Thucydides describes the civil war that struck Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War. It seems that political conflict even came to corrupt all family bonds, since ‘even kinship became a weaker tie than faction.’Footnote ⁸ Also, to refound the community at the end of a civil war very often implied not only restoring public institutions, but also recreating bonds of fraternity between citizens in the manner of a fictional family. In Nakone in Sicily at the beginning of the third century, the reconciled city thus undertook, under the observant eye of neighboring Segesta, to mix the partisans of its two opposing factions and, to that end, associate each one of its members with a group composed of five ‘elected brothers,’ drawn from each of the city’s two conflicting halves. This civic decision even intended to establish new bonds between citizens at the expense of the traditional structures of kinship, since natural relatives (anchisteis) could no longer live together within the same group.Footnote ⁹ Civic kinship therefore supplanted the bonds that organized real kinship while adopting their essence and vocabulary.

The Domestic Chorus: The Oikos of Ischomachus

Encompassed by the double dimension of union and disunion, the family and the city, far from being opposed, are related. In the literature of the classical period, the choral metaphor is a beneficial resource for assessing the link between these two realities; it is in the shape of a well-ordered chorus that Ischomachus, addressing his wife in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, appraises the community of work and life that is the oikos:

The interior space of the house, in its ideal form, even borrows the form of the cyclical chorus of the dithyramb: ‘For each set looks like a chorus of utensils, and the space between the sets is beautiful to see, when each set is kept clear of it, just as a cyclic chorus about the altar is a beautiful spectacle in itself, and even the free space at the center looks beautiful and pure.’Footnote ¹¹ The chorus therefore constitutes an ideal architectural model for organizing the various components of the oikos.

But let us not be mistaken: The choral household that Ischomachus celebrates is far from being an egalitarian community. On the contrary, it consists of two half-choruses, placed under the authority of two chorus-leaders: the virtuous wife, qualified as a ‘Queen Bee,’ and the father of the family, whose respective spheres are clearly delimited.Footnote ¹² Ischomachus’ statement establishes a spatial and functional partition between masculine and feminine, public and privateFootnote ¹³: ‘And since both the indoor and the outdoor tasks demand labor and attention, the divinity from the first adapted the woman’s nature, I think, to the indoor and man’s to the outdoor tasks and cares.’Footnote ¹⁴ If Ischomachus’ wife’s prominent position at home is acknowledged, she remains nevertheless subordinate to her husband, as suggested by the fact that she is never named, making of her a generic representative of the ‘female race’ (genos gunaikon). Above all, any coryphaeus worth his salt must demonstrate the ability to make people respect the internal hierarchies that distinguish stewards, servants and slaves. The model proposed by Ischomachus is therefore indeed a ‘theoretical construction aiming at putting the city in order.’Footnote ¹⁵ The choral paradigm provides a standard of authority as relevant for managing an oikos as for leading a city, which is why the knowledge of the domestic coryphaeus is fully political.

A Disputed Heritage

A speech by Isaeus allows us to observe in detail a family chorus caught up in the turmoil of the Athenian civil war. It is at its heart that the heroine of this chapter, Hegeso, lived for most of her life. But before we can discuss her experiences as a wife and the mother of a citizen, as detailed on a funerary inscription, we need to look at the family dispute that mobilized the Athenian courts in 399.

Its rather confused origins date back to the year 411.Footnote ¹⁶ A rich Athenian by the name of Dicaeogenes died during the Battle of Cnidus. With neither a son nor a brother as heir, he had legally adopted one of his cousins. At first sight, this was very banal: The procedure of adoption, by which an old man made a young adult member of his extended family his successor and his heir – that is, the equivalent in law of a legitimate biological son (gnēsios) – was fairly common in classical Athens. The adopter thus secured the transmission of his assets to his kin and, above all, ensured that the funeral rites in his memory would be regularly performed.Footnote ¹⁷

But let us look more closely at this agreement. Childless, Dicaeogenes (II) had chosen as his successor the biological son of his rich uncle by marriage, Proxenus of Aphidna, who took his name after the adoption (therefore becoming Dicaeogenes III). However, Dicaeogenes (II) had four sisters, meaning that many of his nephews, in the absence of a natural heir, could have claimed a share of his considerable fortune, which totaled almost ten talents.Footnote ¹⁸ According to Isaeus’ speech, the will envisaged that only one third of the inheritance would go to the adopted son, the remainder being shared between the other nephews of Dicaeogenes (II). This agreement seems to have been respected during the first part of the decade 410–400. But in 403, Dicaeogenes (III) reneged on the agreement by taking Dicaeogenes (II)’s entire inheritance for himself, which led to him being sued by one of the nephews of Dicaeogenes (II), Menexenus, in 402. The lawsuit, which consisted of an epidikasia (a motion to contest the inheritance),Footnote ¹⁹ found in favor of Dicaeogenes (III), who was authorized to seize his adoptive father’s house, demolish it and turn it into a garden adjacent to his own residence. Thus, the judgment was a clear victory for the adoptive son, who was also the deceased’s cousin by his mother, to the detriment of the descendants of his sisters. Now, for our litigant, this legal action was intimately linked to the situation of stasis that the city was going through:

‘When the city suffered misfortune and strife arose’: The expression deserves to be more clearly defined. The situation indeed demonstrates that Dicaeogenes (III) took advantage of the restoration of the democracy to appropriate his adoptive father’s estate in its entirety. If the crime had been committed during the civil war, it would be hard to find a reason for the litigant to avoid mentioning the fact that his adversary had rallied to the regime of the Thirty.

But how could a dispute over an obscure matter of inheritance be resolved in the aftermath of the civil war? A man of few words, our litigant contented himself with imputing his adversary’s victory to the false testimonies to which he claimed he resorted, as well as to the intervention of a foreigner:

One cannot, however, take at face value what Isaeus’ client affirms, and bringing up false testimonies under the influence of a foreigner seems to have been no more than a delaying tactic.

Fig. 7.1 Stemma of the family of Dicaeogenes of Kydathenaion.

In fact, the matter was difficult to settle in legal terms. Although they undoubtedly appeared in the same document, the trial unfolded as if in 411 Dicaeogenes (II) had carried out two distinct legal actions, of which the two family branches, represented by the brothers-in-law of the deceased and Proxenus himself, were witnesses: By means of the first, the adoption, he had instituted a successor, designated as his son, and had entrusted to him the transmission of the rights of his oikos; by means of the second, his testament, he had limited the range of the inheritance by specifying that his adopted son would only inherit one third of his property.Footnote ²² Thus, his successor was not the full heir enjoying absolute rights over the oikos and its possessions. Such a case constituted a major and exceptional restriction with regard to the law of Solon on wills, which made the adopted son the universal heir.Footnote ²³ Dicaeogenes (III) had, moreover, undoubtedly referred to this law in 399 to plead his case, considering that his status as adopted son made him the universal and incontestable heir, even to the detriment of the rightful claimants in the collateral line. It must be admitted that, by finding in favor of Dicaeogenes (III), the Athenian judges had defended a restrictive interpretation of the law of Solon, according to which one could not dissociate the transmission of the property from the recognition of filiation in a testamentary adoption.Footnote ²⁴

A Political Trial?

Such an interpretation has its charms, but it might lend to the Athenian court a legal rigor that it did not possess; furthermore, this alone is not enough to explain Dicaeogenes (III)’s victory. In fact, the denouement of the trial of 402 certainly had a political subtext, present in every aspect of the confrontation affecting the entire family of Dicaeogenes (II), which the litigant preferred not to mention. Several of the main characters were waiting in the wings of our family drama. Dicaeogenes (III)’s biological father was Proxenus of Aphidna. One of the Hellenotamiai in 410/9,Footnote ²⁵ he had held an important position in Athens at the end of the fifth century. More importantly, he was an eminent member of the genos of the Gephyreans and a direct descendant of Harmodius, one of the two famous Tyrannicides who were said to have freed Athens from the yoke of the Peisistratids in 514. Furthermore, the memory of the Tyrannicides had taken on a new flavor in the aftermath of the restoration of democracy: The ritual activities that took place around their two bronze statues are attested for the first time, and a hymn was included in the great festival of the Panathenaia in which the two ‘liberators’ were commemorated and honored ‘on a par with the gods and heroes.’Footnote ²⁶ It is, moreover, possible that these songs simultaneously celebrated the Tyrannicides and the resistance fighters of Phyle led by Thrasybulus.Footnote ²⁷ How could we then imagine that during the trial of 402 the memory of this illustrious family did not play to the advantage of Proxenus’ natural son? A few years later, the natural brother of Dicaeogenes (III), Harmodius, attacked the honorific decree granting a statue to Iphicrates. This was a rare distinction that would have put the victorious general on the same footing as his own ancestors. On this occasion, the accuser outlined the eugeneia of his prestigious lineage and the constancy of his commitment to serve the democracy.Footnote ²⁸ The temptation is great, therefore, to see in the family of Proxenus a hotbed of democrats in a position of power in the city in 402.

Our litigant, Menexenus (II), was the nephew of Cephisophon, the brother-in-law of Dicaeogenes (II), whose sister he had married. A close friend of Rhinon, Cephisophon, as we have seen, was an important political character in the civil war, since he was the ambassador of the oligarchy in Sparta in the summer of 403.Footnote ²⁹ The man was clearly on the side of the Three Thousand, and his position in the city, once democracy was restored, remained fragile and disputed. Above all, he was the son of Polyaratus of Cholargos, who had been secretary to the Council during the decisive year of 405/4 and perhaps played an important role in negotiating the Athenian surrender. Finally, one should perhaps recognize in the litigant’s own brother-in-law a certain Eryximachus, mentioned in a fragmentary speech by Lysias, in which he was accused of having remained in the city during the oligarchy.Footnote ³⁰ Therefore, the trial of 402 seems to lend itself to a political reading, the decision of the judges sanctifying the victory of a man, Dicaeogenes (III), whose biological family had proven their unfailing commitment to the democrats, and the defeat of a family who lined up on the side of the Three Thousand.

The City of the Dead: The Blended Family

As attractive as it may be, such a reading is also fragile. Considering Athenian political life as a confrontation between lineages with clearly defined positions tends to identify family solidarities and ideological positions too hastily. There is much to be gained from examining the Dicaeogenes affair in a different light. It should be noted that the result of the lawsuit recognized the defeat of the collateral kin of the deceased in favor of his direct, adopted descendant. The legal relationship of rights and duties, the anchisteia, codified according to the right of succession, acknowledged the primacy of the adopted son over all the collateral relatives. Taken from this point of view, the Athenian judges’ decision can be seen in light of the shifts that characterize Athenian civic discourse at the turn of the fifth and the fourth centuries. Termed by some a ‘politics of the oikos’ promoted by the city, the oikos provided an ideological pattern for thinking about the ideal form of the community and, by extension, about the city itself.Footnote ³¹

In 403 the restoration of democracy was accompanied by the reactivation of the law of Pericles, enacted for the first time in 451, but whose application had been suspended de facto during the years of war.Footnote ³² By establishing that only the children of citizen fathers and mothers would be citizens, the law granted an unprecedented place to the Athenian wife in the transmission of status. Uterine siblings, and, more broadly, what we would call the nuclear family, took on a new importance, to the detriment of the looser forms of solidarity based on membership of a shared male lineage.

The evolution of funerary practices is undoubtedly the best vantage point for viewing the new symbolic role given to the oikos, which now became the locus for familial belonging. It was indeed at the end of the fifth century that the use of the family peribolos (funerary enclosure), which first appeared in Attica in the 430s, became widespread.Footnote ³³ Beyond their morphological diversity, hundreds of stelai erected along the main streets of the Kerameikos Cemetery came to portray an idealized representation of the oikos through the use of a limited repertoire of gestures and postures. By celebrating the memory of one or several individuals of the same lineage, these decorative reliefs exalted an ideal vision of harmony and concord as well as the filiation that allowed a single family chorus to unite several generations of the living and the dead. As Geneviève Hoffmann writes, ‘to compensate for the sorrow of death, the funerary monument expresses a hope: that the inter-generational solidarity in time is reinforced by an alliance expressed in a precise place and eternalized in stone.’Footnote ³⁴ What was new at the end of the fifth century was the ‘publicization’ of the oikos, now displaying itself in the public space, trying to draw the attention of passersby.Footnote ³⁵ An idealized version of the family was projected and offered itself up to the public eye in the form of a funerary oikos within which all its members live together beyond death. Moreover, Daniela Marchiandi has shown that the arrangement of funerary markers within a family enclosure very often reproduced the internal hierarchies of the family structure, with the founding couple in the middle and the couples formed by their sons arranged around them.Footnote ³⁶ Immediate family is presented as a harmonious, almost immutable rampart against the outside world and its divisions. Might we go so far as to assert that the development of this type of funerary art was also intended to offer a response to the conflicts of the city at the end of the fifth century?

Hegeso, the Seated Woman

Let us get a closer look at the city of the dead by taking one of the streets that led from the Sacred Gate across the Kerameikos Cemetery. By chance, the modern traveler can easily see an impressive funerary enclosure, arranged on a terrace like a small sanctuary.Footnote ³⁷

Several funerary monuments are still visible. To the right stands a large aedicula surmounted by a sculpted block (1.49 m high, 0.92 m wide) on which one can still make out slight traces of paint.Footnote ³⁸ Framed by two columns, supporting a pediment, according to the canonical model of the naiskos, a domestic scene is represented. Seated on a comfortable armchair, a woman in a long, neatly draped chiton is shown; her left foot, wearing a beautiful sandal, rests on a small stool. A veil is slipping down her shoulder and there are jewels adorning her hair. Less formally dressed, but also wearing a long chiton, the young maid facing her is handing her a jewel box (pyxis), from which she has just removed a necklace that she is holding in her right hand.Footnote ³⁹ The beauty of the stele has impressed archaeologists and historians so much that some recognize in it the style of the great sculptor Callimachus, to whom are attributed the sculptures in the frieze of the Athena Nike temple. The cost of the stele and the luxury of the goods represented (the chair and the jewels) testify to the fact that the deceased belonged to the Athenian elite: This is the enclosure of a powerful Athenian family. In the same way, there is no doubt that this woman was a wife, since she is represented in a stereotyped form corresponding to her role in the world of the living. Her seated position unambiguously indicates her status as a married woman according to the iconographic convention used for both mortals and immortals.Footnote ⁴⁰

On the pediment of the naiskos, one can easily read a name:

This woman is not unknown to us: The daughter of Proxenus of Aphidna, she is none other than the biological sister of Dicaeogenes (III). A woman alone, whose portrait is on display in a public space, without any male presence: It’s a rare enough occurrence that we may be tempted to think this stele is an exceptional document testifying to a particular form of recognition not of womankind, but of an individualized woman. However, this would be wrong. For the very name of Hegeso can only be established through interaction with the other funerary monuments nearby, and this tends to erase the singularity of her presence by confining her to the role of the model wife.

The family peribolos can be read as an orchestra, in the center of which a chorus-leader speaks, offering the true meaning to the memorial of Hegeso. In the same funerary enclosure stood two other stelai. On the first one, 3 m high and crowned by a beautiful palmette, five names are engraved, in the following order:

Fig. 7.2 The stele of Hegeso. National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

Fig. 7.3 The enclosure of Coroibos of Melite (Kerameikos, Athens).

On the second one, which had the shape of a loutrophoros vase, was engraved the following epigram:

This epigram celebrates the memory of an Athenian who died at war. If it recalls the hoplite values that the deceased showed in combat (his sophrosunē and aretē), it does not, however, say a word about the battle during which he died. We will never know where and when Kleidemos gave the shining proof of his courage. The celebration of his glorious death in combat and the exaltation of his excellence as a warrior make it possible to silence the memory of the civil war.

Fig. 7.4 Funerary stele of Coroibos of Melite (Kerameikos, Athens) (= IG II² 6008).

One name is particularly striking in this long engraved list: that of Coroibos of Melite. Perhaps we should recognize here the famous architect of Pericles, designer of the Telesterion in the Eleusinian sanctuary, who died at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ⁴³ It is, however, very difficult to establish the links that unite all of these men. According to the custom that the same names are repeated every two generations within the same family, one can guess that the first stele was engraved with names belonging to two distinct male lines: on the one hand, that of Coroibos of the deme of Melite, which included at least his son Cleidemides and his grandson Coroibos (to which it is necessary to add Cleidemos, son of Cleidemides, celebrated on the adjacent monument)Footnote ⁴⁴; and on the other hand, that of Sosicles of the deme of Eitea, whose son, Euthydemos, was honored in the same enclosure.Footnote ⁴⁵ The link between these two male lines, whose history is rooted in two different demes of Attica, is impossible to establish. It seems difficult to imagine that, like a cuckoo that has come to roost in the nest of another bird, members of the family of Eitea wished to list their deceased with the men of Melite if they had no family ties. Family alliances can be guessed at in the background but do not mention those who mainly brought them about: the mothers and wives. Just as it celebrates the union of two oikoi, this monument makes no mention of the women who made it possible.

How then can we interpret this face-to-face encounter between a woman, designated by her name and patronymic alone, and the whole of the male lineage extending over five generations? First, let us observe that Hegeso was not buried with her father, since the tomb of Proxenus of Aphidna was far from the Kerameikos Cemetery.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is therefore in her husband’s family peribolos that she found her final resting place. To determine the name of her husband and guardian (kurios) among those engraved on the stele is, however, difficult; no conclusions can be drawn, although the son of the great architect, Cleidemides, seems the best candidate.Footnote ⁴⁷

But the absence of any explicit link between Hegeso and her kurios is in itself significant. It is as if it was less important to recall the memory of them as a couple than to celebrate the alliance that had been concluded between the two oikoi of Proxenus and Koroibos and sealed by the transfer of Hegeso from one house to the other. We should bear in mind that marriage in classical Athens took place in two acts: the engguē and the ekdosis. Whereas the ekdosis consisted in the transfer of the authority of the bride’s father to her future husband, most often in the presence of the other family members, the engguē, which was an essential preliminary, took the form of an oral agreement by which the father and the future husband agreed on the amount of the dowry. The prominence given to the jewels on the stele should be understood in this sense; their presence indirectly recalled the dowry of Hegeso, on which the two parties had agreed and whose transfer sealed the alliance.Footnote ⁴⁸

The scenic arrangement also celebrated, according to well-known iconographic stereotypes, the functional partition between male and female within the oikos. It is at first sight a representation of the two half-choruses – male and female – that constitute the oikos according to the ideological construction formulated by Ischomachus. The symmetry was, however, far from perfect: While all of the men are mentioned by their name, Hegeso, placed by their side, seems to occupy a different position. Certainly, her memory is individualized, but she is not commemorated as a member of any community of women within the oikos. The reason is simple: The very figure of Hegeso assures a metonymic function.Footnote ⁴⁹ Just as the nameless woman of Ischomachus in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus serves as the archetypal model wife, Hegeso plays the role of representative – or coryphaeus – of several generations of wives of the oikos, whose memory was presumably also honored in the enclosure; she is, in this sense, an impersonal figure embodying the feminine protagonist indispensable to the reproduction of the oikos from generation to generation.Footnote ⁵⁰

This partition also makes it possible to symbolically oppose interiority and immutability to exteriority and movement. The deceased wife is represented in a domestic scene; the long-backed chair on which she is sitting is an interior item, and the jewels symbolize better than anything else the kosmos proper to the female world. Ordering the space around her, Hegeso is enthroned here in the manner of Hestia, the divinity of the hearth and a pledge to fixity, immutability, permanence,Footnote ⁵¹ to whom Zeus, in return for staying unmarried, offered a central place in the oikos.Footnote ⁵²

* * *

The family chorality celebrated by Ischomachus leads us, then, to two children of one of the most illustrious families of fifth-century Athens: that of Proxenus of Aphidna. Hegeso and Dicaeogenes (III) were in their way caught in symmetrical forms of logic, which led them both to leave the paternal oikos: Whereas Dicaeogenes (III) inherited his cousin’s oikos, whose name he took following his adoption, his biological sister left the paternal oikos to join that of her husband in Melite. The paths they took are good examples of the games of alliance and the circulation of wealth organized through adoption and marriage within the Athenian social elite.

The destiny of the two children of Proxenus of Aphidna reveals two contradictory faces of the same family group caught up in the events of 403. Union and disunion: The two opposing factions must be considered together. Far from constituting a zone of withdrawal and intimacy, families were rife with political conflicts. The memorial of Hegeso nevertheless exhibits the harmony of the family sphere in the form of two half-choruses singing in tune: the regulated game of exchanges from which marriage proceeds, as well as the regulated gender divisions within it. Celebrating the fixity and the permanence of family lineage, this portrayal masks, or staves off, political turbulence by presenting the oikos as existing in an unchanging temporal space: that of its cyclic reproduction from one generation to the next.

Finally, the history of the family reveals the impact of war on the life of Athenian families from the fifth century. It was during the Battle of Cnidus in 411 that Dicaeogenes (II) died, shortly after having adopted the biological son of Proxenus of Aphidna, just as Cleidemos, the son of Cleidemides, then a young man, fell in a foreign war during the early decades of the fourth century. The epigram engraved in his honor is remarkably discreet about the nature of the battles in which he perished: We will never know the date or the place where Cleidemos made his ultimate sacrifice. The exaltation of his glorious death on the battlefield makes it possible to hush up the memory of the civil war.