Households, Families, and Women

In the Classical period, an 'oikos', the family unit, including its members, slaves, and property, came together in a very real sense when its own immediate concerns took it outside the home to sanctuaries of the gods. Iconography in the fourth century BCE captures the Athenian family at worship, before not just one god but several: Asklepios, Artemis, and Athena. In the Archaeological Museum at Athens there is a large collection of marble votive reliefs, each of which portrays a scene of an individual family worshipping before Asklepios and his daughter Hygeia. Along the length of any one of these reliefs there straggles a line of figures, Asklepios, Hygeia, and a family: an adult couple (presumably man and wife), followed by children. 1here is also a maid slave at the end of the line with a basket balanced on her head, which basket carries the implements for a sacrifice about to be performed. Most of the reliefs show a small slave male figure standing immediately before a small altar with an animal: the sacrificial victim, in whose meat the whole family and the slaves will share. Sickness and the desire for health would have led the Athenian family to either the Asklepieion at the foot of the acropolis or the one at the Piraeus. To commemorate the visit and remind the god of the family's piety, the head of the household commissioned a relief immortalizing the event (see Athens National Archaeological Museum 1333; LIMC s.v. Asclepius no. 66; Hausmann 1948: 177, fig. 6; see also LIMC s.v. Asclepius nos 63-70, 248).