ABSTRACT
In Aristotle's Politics the distinction between oikia and oikos breaks down altogether, and he uses both words indiscriminately in his account of the nuclear family. In legal contexts it is more usual for oikia to mean 'house' and for oikos to mean either 'property' or 'family'. When oikos means 'property', it means the sum total of goods belonging to an individual man, including land, buildings, crops, animals, slaves, furniture, clothes, money, credits owed to him by debtors, and anything else. Legal disputes about an oikos are disputes about the ownership of this totality, not about some particular item. Normally the term oikos, when it refers to persons, refers to the line of descent from father to son through successive generations, as in this account of the ancestry of Makartatos. The Athenian law of inheritance is quite well known, because it is the subject of a fairly large number of extant speeches, especially those of Isaios.
