WHOLE CLOTH 185
located largely outside the home, suggest that advances in textile technol-
ogy saw the industrialization of textile dyeing as separate from the domestic
environment.
As many scholars of pottery have argued, pots are not people, and I wouldadd that by extension loom weights are not people. Pottery, loom weights,
and cloth are created by human action and used in further human activ-
ity, but from them we cannot determine how many people or even who
carded, spun, and wove in a Greek house. Those households with the larg-
est numbers of free Athenians like the overcrowded home of Aristarchus
in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (2.7.2), could well produce cloth and cloth-
ing much beyond their immediate needs. So, too, could homes with many
slaves, the residents deemed ‘invisible’ in the material record (Morris 1998 ).
Men could spin and weave as well as women could, as Thompson ( 1982 )
has argued, and because women did not engage in large-scale commerce
(Saller 2007: 94), men were probably at least the public face of even the few
Classical commercial weaving establishments. The conclusion to be drawn
is that any discussion of textile work and sale in Classical and Hellenistic
Greece needs to be better informed by feminist theory, better supported
by material as well as literary evidence, and freed from the assumption that
only women spun and wove.
NOTES
1 Koropi: Beckwith 1954 ; Miller 1997 : 80–1. Eleusis: Mylonas 1953. Kerameikos: Hundt
1969 : 65–71. Kalyvia: Moulherat and Spantidaki 2007. Pherae: Adrymi-Sismani 1983.
Kerch: Stephani 1878 –9; Gerziger 1975 ; Barber 1991 : 206–9.
2 The hand-held loom, resembling a lyre in its shape, was used for the sprang technique, a
method of hand-weaving threads in order to create a net-like fabric. The results were akin
to modern crochet.
3 E.g., a red-figure skyphos from Chiusi depicting Penelope at her loom (Chiusi 1831;
Furtwangler and Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei pl. 142), a black-figure Kabeiric
vase with a comic version of the same subject (Oxford, Ashmolean G 249 [V262]), and
shards of a black-figure plaque from the Athenian Akropolis). Graef and Langlotz 1925: pl.
104.2531 A-C.
4 E.g., at Olynthus. Robinson 1941 : 472–4.
5 E.g., W 50, an unpublished wooden spindle whorl found in a well (Deposit K 1:2) to the
north of the Athenian Agora.
6 Painted depictions of figured cloth include the gowns of several goddesses, especially Hebe,
on the dinos by Sophilos in the British Museum (BM GR 1971.11-1.1). The peplos of
Phrasikleia is ornamented with incised and painted designs including rosettes. Barber 1992
favors seeing both of these designs as woven into rather than embroidered on the cloth. The
Gigantomachy on Athena’s peplos was woven in, probably much as Arachne wove repre-
sentations of the misdeeds of the gods into the cloth she created in her contest with Athena
( O v. Met. 4.103–28).
7 Wrenhaven 2009 speculates that the talasiourgoi mentioned in the dedications were
prostitutes.