| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Cheryl Anne Cox. Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1998. Pp. xx, 253. $45.00.

The Athenian household in classical Greece extended beyond the nuclear family and its property (including domiciles, urban workshops, farmhouses, slaves, other livestock, olive trees and grapevines, and farmland transferable apart from plants on it). The elite, source of most surviving evidence, had a bifurcated strategy. They usually kept wealth within their patrilineal kin-groups, but they also cultivated matrilines, friends, and neighbors (local endogamy). Cheryl Anne Cox's virtue is to stress tendencies of division in this system of partible inheritance. The Athenian problem of "overparceling" the smallish Attic farms (a territory smaller than Rhode Island) in a society with a high death rate found various solutions, including small dowries and the epiclerate. This peculiar institution transmitted the estate of a man without sons through his unmarried daughter by her marriage to his closest male kinsman from a shared male ancestor. 1

Athenian society and law exhibit primitive and sophisticated features often without analogue or influence on other ancient and subsequent legal systems. Stephen Todd, in The Shape of Athenian Law (1993), contrasts this non-legacy to the vast influence of Roman law. Cox, whose bibliography generally stops after 1991, ignores Todd's excellent survey of the forest to examine some tall trees. Todd's useful glossary for readers not versed in Attic legal procedures has no counterpart here, a disappointment that constricts the audience for a topic in family and women's history. . . .

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