A day in the life of an Archaic Greek woman, c. 770 BC

(This is an old introductory scene from a Tides of History episode - Season 5, Episode 13, “The Roots of Archaic Greece.” These scenes are fun as a kind of sociological storytelling, an attempt to humanize a major trend or summarize a moment from a human perspective. In this case, it’s the massive demographic growth in 8th-century BC Greece, the beginning of the Archaic period. Hope you all like it.)

(Terracotta statuette of a woman, eastern Greek, 6th century BC, via the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Her breath came in gasps as she made her way up the path that wound its way up the hillside. She paused, took a swig of water from her skin, and put her hand on an outcropping of gray-white limestone. It was still cool, not yet warmed by the sun rising over the hills to the east. Before moving on, she reached down into the leather bag she carried slung over her shoulder. Her hand closed around the clay figurines, just to be sure they were still there. The other went, reflexively, to her swollen abdomen, and on cue, she felt the baby kick.

Slowly, her breath coming back, the woman continued her climb. Not much further now to the top, she thought, her hand still resting on her stomach. The baby kicked again. Not much further till that, either, she thought, and she should know. This was her sixth pregnancy, and each time, she had delivered a healthy, living child without complications.

That made her a rarity, and she knew precisely how lucky she was. Too many of the girls she’d known in her childhood, and women she’d known down in the cluster of villages, hadn’t survived. She had seen it herself: the pain, the blood, the fevers afterward, a gauntlet of trials and risks that had claimed so many lives. There was a tree on this hilltop that her mother had told her was sacred to the goddess Artemis, and before each birth, the woman had trekked upward to make her offering. It had worked thus far, just as it had worked for her mother, who waited down in their home with her children.

There was the tree, a tall cypress, and a flat stone underneath it, covered with offerings. She took the clay figurines, one of Artemis and the other of Zeus and Hera’s daughter Eileithyia, who watched over women in childbirth, out of her leather bag. Placing them carefully on the stone, she whispered her request: to keep her and her baby safe during childbirth, and if it wasn’t too much to ask, to see them safely through the months and years afterward as well.

The task done, she turned and walked back down the hill, pausing every once in a while to catch her breath and sip from the waterskin. The sounds and smells of the villages, growing closer to one another every year, wafted up toward her: fragrant smoke from the kilns, the tinkling of shattered pottery, mooing and baaing from the animals, laughter and shouts from the villagers. She should tell her eldest daughter, herself only a few years from marriage and childbirth, about the tree - just in case she didn’t make it through this time.