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1 - Kinship ‘In the Halls’

Poetry and the Archaeology of Early Greek Housing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2022

By
Emily Varto
Edited by
J. A. Baird  and
April Pudsey
J. A. Baird
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
April Pudsey
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

Scholarship on Early Greek housing has moved from creating fictional reconstructions based on Homeric poetry, through typological sorting of archaeological houses by shape and rooms, to analysing access patterns and functionalization. These more recent approaches have largely estranged epic poetry from archaeology. However, since they seek to understand domestic structures as experienced by living people, there is a way to build poetry back in by using it to explore the ways their inhabitants thought about domestic spaces. The phrase ‘in the halls’ is used abundantly in the Homeric and Hesiodic corpus as a metonymy for familial life and prosperity. The phrase should be read not as a reality to be sought in the archaeological record but abstractly as an indicator of the importance of physical space in a household’s formation and success. The link between prosperity, family and house can also be seen in the renovations and increasing complexities in some early Greek domestic architecture. Success and wealth modify and are expressed in the house. ‘In the halls’ thus refers to an important cultural idea, also seen in archaeology, linking house, home and family with prosperity.

Keywords

HomerHesiodearly Iron Age housingHomeric societymegaron
Type
Chapter
Information
Housing in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Material and Textual Approaches
 , pp. 27 - 67
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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