Daily Life & Death

Education was state-sponsored in ancient Sparta, at least for the sons of the Spartan elite. Considered a very rigorous education, children learned to sing and dance, played ball and ate at the home of their 20-year old teacher. Learn more about this ancient education system that was considered so good that Xenophon sent his own sons to be...

Resources for children and adults on many aspects of what life and death was life in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.

Joan Breton Connelly's Portrait of a Priestess challenges common assumptions about the role and importance of women in public life in ancient Greece.

The text of the University of Minnesota's William Stearns Davis' 1910 look at daily life in Ancient Athens in the fourth century B.C.

Basically, the Greek agora, like the forum that served similar purposes in Rome, was an outdoor market and meeting place.

The Formation of ancient Greek personal names.

Review of James S. Jeffers' Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era.

The names and times of day of the ancient Greek meals.

The Roman and Greek names for the equivalent gods and goddesses. Chart includes some of the minor deities, as well as the Olympians.

The end of a gladiator fight often meant death. Sometimes the emperor or editor gave the order to slay the losing gladiator.

E.R. Dodds' distinction between shame and guilt culture has been used to distinguish the collectivist shame-based Greek society from modern individualist guilt-based society.

Cecrops was an early Greek king who civilized the people of what became Athens.

Learn about the Greek acratisma.

The word deipnon is found in the word deipnosophists where it refers to a banquet. Learn more about this Greek word.

Horses and Mules. Comparison of the value of horses and mules for tasks in daily life in the ancient Mediterranean. Also Ancient / Classical History Forum notes on breeding horses and mules.

Thargelia was an ancient Athenian festival with scapegoats.

Oxyrhynchus papyri are documents mostly from the Roman and early Christian era of ancient Egypt that were found by Oxford classicists in rubbish heaps of the formerly important Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus.

Oxyrhynchus is also known as waste paper city. Read the basics on Oxyrhynchus.

Alphabetized lists of attested ancient Greek male, female, and ambiguous names.

By Thomas Martin, on the Athenian diet. Bread was purchased or baked at home, but meat was a feast day luxury.

Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome features words related to agriculture, architecture,daily life, engineering, implements, law, political life, religion, transportation, and warfare.

An ever-evolving series of "tours" of Greek archaeological points of interest developed from the travels of Professor Janice Siegel. Click on the location to take a photo tour complete with descriptions of the photographs.

On slavery: "The output of the mines apparently never regained its previous heights, but it is not clear whether this decline in production of silver was the result of an enduring shortage of slaves to work in the mines or a petering out of the veins of precious metal, or perhaps a combination of these factors."