ABSTRACT
Of all themes on pottery, that of domestic work is most often invoked as evidence of everyday life in classical Greece. It is a familiar topic in discussions of women’s life: authors duly present a series of images illustrating different household tasks, and the illustrations are taken to be photographic reproductions of Athenian housewives at typical daily jobs. As is often the case with iconography, a deceptively small number of pots are frequently reproduced to illustrate women’s tasks within the household. But domestic work, like every other iconographic theme, has its own conventions of representation, is subject to change over time, and is unevenly patterned over the Greek world. This chapter will illustrate and comment on women’s tasks, as shown on pottery, but with an appreciation of the fragmentary and partial nature of the evidence. It will also focus on the relative frequency of scenes, since simply illustrating each task which is depicted can conceal significant variations in the actual numbers of pots representing individual themes. For example, the process of carding wool before it is spun is always included in a list of female occupations known from scenes on pots, yet very few examples of the theme are found in comparison to spinning with the distaff.1
