Manners & Customs

Women And Property In Ancient Athens

Athenian law would not allow a woman to participate in a business transaction involving anything whose value exceeded a sum of money roughly equivalent to that needed to feed a family for five or six days. She could buy groceries at the local market but needed the approval of a male guardian to do anything more....

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Ancient Greek Medicine

Medicine was very important to the Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek Culture was such that a high priority was placed upon healthy lifestyles, this despite Ancient Greece being much different to the Greece of the modern World....

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Women In Sparta

By 600 BCE Sparta had conquered her neighbors in the southern half of the Peloponnese. The vanquished people, called Helots, were required to do all of the agricultural work on land owned by the victors, making Sparta self-sufficient in food and ruler of a slave population seven or eight times as large. Not needing to import anything allowed Sparta...

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Greek Medicine and Disease

Disease was a very serious problem for the Greeks, as for all other people in the ancient and medieval worlds. One out of three babies died before they were a year old. Half of all children died before they were ten. And even most people who grew up died in their forties and fifties....

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Greek Approach To Women's Illness, Pregnancy And Childbirth

It is tempting to credit the medicine we are taking when an illness is cleared up, forgetting that the condition might have gone away by itself regardless of what we did. This is undoubtedly the key to the popularity even today of so many "folk medicines" that researchers insist do nothing at all except make money for the manufacturers, and there w...

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Architecture and Women in Ancient Greece

Architecture relates to the design and construction of buildings, temples, houses and other structures used for human habitation. In Ancient Greece public buildings were made of marble. They used post and lintel construction so the roof was supported on tall columns. This was the same method of construction that was used in ancient Egypt. Walls wer...

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The Women of Athens

Compared to the women of Sparta, the status of an Athenian woman in Greek society was minimal. By comparison to present day standards, Athenian women were only a small step above slaves by the 5th century BC. From birth a girl was not expected to learn how to read or write, nor was she expected to earn an education. On reading and writing, Menander...

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Lifestyle of the Ordinary Ancient Greek

by Christopher Xenopoulos Janus. The daily Lifestyle of the anient Greek - just the ordinary people men and women, children and the elderly, slaves and foreigners, rich and poor - has always been of special interest to me. Not more so, of course, than the philosophers, artists and dramatists who have contributed so enormously to our culture and way...

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Burial Rituals and the Afterlife of Ancient Greece

As seen in the literature of ancient Greece, tombs and rituals of the wealthy were extravagant. Gold and jewels were essential grave offerings of respectable and honored tombs, perhaps used as a way to display wealth and status. It seems the wealthier you were the more elaborate your final resting place. The ancient Greeks had distinct methods of b...

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Everyday Life in Ancient Greece

Centered within a loose collection of city-states (often at war with one another), ancient Greek culture reached its pinnacle during the fourth century BC - an era described as its "Golden Age." Art, theater, music, poetry, philosophy, and political experiments such as democracy flourished. Greek influence stretched along the northern rim of the Me...

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