WHOLE CLOTH 183
family needs funds in the future. Textiles are not food, and while they cannot
sustain life as wheat, olives, or wine can, when well maintained, clothes and
other woven goods can last a lifetime and more. An abundance of well-crafted
cloth and clothing could serve the family in one generation or even the next,
for example in the case of Demosthenes (27.10), who counted his mother’s
clothing as part of his inheritance. Pomeroy ( 1989 : 33) argues that for a family
to be wealthy, what is produced must be sold. Cloth as product thus translates
to household wealth (Pomeroy 1995 ). It should be noted that women actively
produced that wealth (Pomeroy 1994 : 61–5) and so are engaged in at least the
production of items capable of producing revenue.
What we understand better than we did in the past is that the existence ofancient commercial weaving and sale of cloth and clothes is supported by the
archaeological evidence. Some of that production, judging from the material at
Olynthus, took place in buildings that architecturally and artifactually appear
to be houses, although some of those textiles were, judging from Building Z
in Athens, produced in ergasteria. The literary sources support the idea of com-
mercial production and sale of cloth, clothing, and household furnishings, and
scholars such as Ault, Cahill, and Haagsma, based on the finds at individual
sites, have expressed the opinion that in all likelihood the Greeks did produce
cloth and clothing beyond what was necessary for household needs. These
assertions, however, are not proof.
A question that I have not asked of the material, because that question isunanswerable, is who made the cloth and clothes detailed herein. The imme-
diate answer might be women. The image, and here I mean literally the image
of women spinning thread and weaving cloth is ubiquitous in Greece, and to
praise a woman for textile work, as the Romans inscribed lanam fecit on the
tombstone for a female, was to imply that the woman had kept to her proper
place and attended to housewifely duties (e.g., Hdt. 5.12.3; 4.34.1; 4.162.5).
Some most tantalizing, but admittedly inconclusive evidence that I would
like to present here comes from the papyri in the Zenon’s archive, evidence
of a practice that might possibly be extrapolated back to the Classical period.
Several records note the sale to the estate of a single or a few garments manu-
factured by one woman. Thus Maiandria wove two chlamys in order to pay
off a debt (P. Cair. Zenon II 59263; III 59355). Theodora made a chiton (P.
Cair. Zen. III 59433.7-10) and the wife of Menippus made a chlamys and
two chitons (P. Cair. Zen. II 59146; Loftus 2000 : 178). Their actions paral-
lel that of Andria the metic who made wool to support herself in Classical
Athens. A question to be asked of the sales by women is whether they were,
as was certainly the case with Maiandria, motivated by economic necessity
to produce cloth beyond what her oikos needed, or whether this was regular
practice.