Marriage & Coming of Age
Growing Up Female in the Ancient World
The experience of growing up as a girl in ancient Greece depended enormously on where you lived. Athens and Sparta were both Greek city-states, but they held strikingly different views about what a young woman should become and how she should be prepared for that role. In Athens, a girl was trained for marriage and domesticity. In Sparta, she was trained for physical fitness and the production of strong children for the state. Comparing these two systems is one of the core analytical skills this topic demands.
Growing Up in Athens
Athenian girls did not attend school. Their education took place within the home, overseen by their mother, female relatives and domestic slaves. They learned the skills they would need as wives: weaving, spinning, managing a household and, in wealthier families, basic literacy. The goal was to make them a good wife — obedient, domestic and chaste.
Athenian girls were married young, typically between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, to men who were considerably older, often in their late twenties or thirties. The marriage was arranged not between the couple themselves but between families. The key figure was the kyrios — the woman’s male guardian, usually her father, and after marriage her husband. The kyrios had legal authority over the woman and conducted all negotiations on her behalf, since women in Athens had no legal standing of their own.
In Athens, girls were typically married at fourteen to eighteen to men significantly older than themselves. The marriage was arranged by the girl’s kyrios (male guardian). The girl had no legal voice in the arrangement.
The Athenian Wedding
An Athenian wedding was a structured ritual spread over several days. Before the ceremony, the bride dedicated her childhood toys and often a lock of her hair to the goddess Artemis, marking the end of girlhood. She wore a kalyptra (bridal veil) during the wedding. The ceremonial lifting of the veil by the groom was called the anakalypteria. On the evening of the wedding, the bride bathed in sacred water brought from the spring Enneakrounos; she was dressed and adorned; and a procession (the nuptial torch-lit procession) carried her by cart or on foot from her father’s house to her new husband’s home. Friends and relatives accompanied the couple, singing hymns. The transfer of the bride from one household to another was the central act: the woman was passing from the authority of her father to the authority of her husband.
A central part of the marriage arrangement was the dowry. The bride’s father paid a sum of money or property to the groom. In law this remained the wife’s property, but in practice the husband controlled it. If the marriage ended in divorce, the dowry had to be returned. This financial arrangement meant that daughters were a significant economic commitment for their fathers, and poorer families sometimes had difficulty securing marriages for their daughters. The pyxis — a small, lidded box used for cosmetics and trinkets — was a common wedding gift in Athens, and several fine examples survive. One notable example, the Gold pyxis from Shaft Grave V at Mycenae (now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens), shows how far back the idea of decorative personal containers for women extends.
Beyond the financial dowry, a woman brought her domestic skills, her reputation for modesty and her capacity to produce legitimate heirs. Athenian citizenship law (under Pericles, 451 BC) required that both parents be Athenian citizens for a child to inherit full citizen rights. This gave every Athenian man a strong interest in his wife’s fidelity, since only a legitimate, citizen-born wife could produce citizen sons. The seclusion of women within the home (the gynaikon) was partly a response to this legal requirement: it was a way of policing female sexuality and guaranteeing the legitimacy of children.
Growing Up in Sparta
Sparta’s approach to raising girls was radically different. In Sparta, girls participated in public physical education alongside boys. They ran, wrestled, threw the discus and javelin, and competed in athletic festivals. This was deeply shocking to other Greeks. The Athenian writer Plutarch, in his life of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus (not a prescribed source, but useful context), remarked that this regime made Spartan women more physically robust and better prepared for childbirth.
The purpose of this education was not to make Spartan women independent; it was to make them produce healthy, strong sons for the Spartan army. Sparta’s entire social system was organised around the production of warriors. Girls who were physically fit were expected to survive childbirth more easily and to carry children well. Spartan women also married later than Athenian women, typically in their late teens or early twenties, to men of similar age — the theory was that both partners should be mature and at physical peak for breeding. This produced a very different dynamic from the typical Athenian age gap.
Spartan girls received public physical training — running, wrestling, athletics — to produce healthy children for the state. They married later (late teens to early twenties) than Athenian girls (fourteen to eighteen). Spartan women had wider property rights and greater public visibility than Athenian women.
The Spartan Marriage Ceremony
The Spartan wedding ceremony was itself unusual. Ancient sources describe a ritual in which the bride’s hair was cut short and she was dressed in men’s clothing and sandals, then left alone in a darkened room for her husband to find. This cross-dressing element puzzled later writers and has been interpreted in various ways — possibly as a transition ritual, marking the passage from one state to another, or as a way of easing the young man’s anxiety about women. Either way, it was strikingly different from the elaborate torch-lit procession of an Athenian wedding. The couple did not live together immediately; the husband continued to sleep in communal quarters and visited his wife in secret for some time after the wedding.
Both Athens and Sparta used marriage to serve the needs of the state rather than the wishes of the couple. In Athens, this meant producing legitimate citizen heirs and maintaining household stability. In Sparta, it meant producing strong soldiers. The key analytical point is that in both societies marriage was fundamentally about male political and military concerns; the women’s own desires were largely irrelevant. However, Spartan women gained considerably more freedom and respect as a result of their role — they could own property, speak in public and move around the city. Athenian women were expected to be invisible outside the home.