WHOLE CLOTH 171
horrific odor produced when it was heated to extract the dye-secreting gland.
Other plant and earth-derived dyes, cheaper and more easily obtained, might
have been employed in domestic textile production such as that referred to in
Aristophanes (Eccl. 216).
Given the processes I have detailed for the stages of making and ornament-ing woven goods, the impression is that making clothes and fabric furnishings
for the home was extremely time-consuming. Barber ( 1992 : 110) and others
have speculated that the average Greek woman spent a very significant per-
centage of her waking hours making textiles, whether she was involved in
one, several, or all the stages of production. Carr ( 2000 : 165) estimates that
for a family with three free adults, a child and two slaves, textile production
would take thirty-eight to forty-seven hours of work per week for three of
the adults. Although Barber ( 1994 : 30) believed that women could spin while
rearing children, Nixon ( 1999 ) has used ethnographic parallels and testimo-
nies from contemporary weavers to argue that weaving and childcare were
mutually incompatible. Nixon believes that children serve as too great a dis-
traction to the weaver and too much a danger to the quality of the work
produced and so would be excluded from the workroom. With the other nec-
essary duties of daily domestic life – such as the preparation and serving of
food; the bearing, nursing, and rearing of children, to name just a few – it is
worth asking how much time members of the oikos had to produce surplus
thread, cloth, or garments for sale outside of the home. It is even reasonable to
ask whether the household had the time to produce enough textiles to supply
the home without resorting to purchase. The answer must lie in that known
but great unknown, domestic slaves, who are visible in the literary and epi-
graphic record but, according to Morris ( 1998 ), are ‘invisible’ in the material
record of the household. The more slaves and free women resident in a home,
the more cloth could be produced, and there is evidence, albeit disputed, that
the numbers of wool-working slaves was rather large. Gomme ( 1933 : 42, foot-
note 9) and others (e.g., Meyer 2010 : 15, 70) who have studied the Athenian
phialai-inscriptions have noted that females outnumbered males in the occu-
pation of manufacture and that forty-four of forty-eight women mentioned
were wool workers (talasiourgoi). Still a matter of some debate is whether these
latter were metics, manumitted domestic slaves, or those employed in a com-
mercial enterprise.^7
In order to ‘excavate’ this question further, I present a survey of loom weightsand spindle whorls and their find spots in domestic and other private settings.
The presentation begins in Archaic Athens and includes material from numer-
ous Classical poleis as well as from Hellenistic sites; the latter will serve as both
parallels and contrasts with Classical Greek practice. In the interests of space,
and because the practice differs considerably, this survey does not include the
evidence for Roman commercial textile manufacture (see, e.g., Vicari 2001 ).