Oikos
The household — the fundamental economic and social unit of ancient Greek life, encompassing family, slaves, property, and religious obligations.
The Meaning of Oikos
The oikos was not merely a building but a complete social and economic unit: the family and its dependants (including slaves), the land and movable property, the ancestral graves and household cults, and the ongoing obligation to maintain all of these. The head of household (kyrios) had legal authority over all members and responsibility for the household's ritual obligations — maintaining the hearth fire, honoring household deities (especially Zeus Ktesios, protector of household stores), and performing ancestral rites. The management of the oikos (oikonomia) was a full discipline: Xenophon wrote a treatise on it, the Oikonomikos, covering land management, the training and supervision of slaves, the education of a wife, and the maintenance of household order. The polis was understood as a federation of oikoi: private and public were not opposites but concentric circles of obligation. Drama explored oikos tensions obsessively — the house of Atreus, the house of Oedipus — because the household was the primary social unit and its dysfunction radiated outward into political catastrophe.
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Fun Fact
The word economics — literally oikos-nomos, the law or management of the household — shows that ancient Greek thought of the national economy as fundamentally an expansion of household management principles.
Words We Inherited
English words and phrases that trace back to this myth. See our full guide to English words from Greek mythology.
Explore Further
Genos
💭 conceptsocial structure, mythology
Clan, lineage, or birth-group — the extended kinship unit that organized aristocratic social and religious life in early Greece.
Phratry
💭 conceptkinship, society
A hereditary kinship group forming the basic social unit of Greek civic life, where membership was required for citizenship and participation in religious rites.
Plutocracy
💭 conceptPolitical science and language
A form of government in which the wealthy hold power, derived from Ploutos, the Greek god of wealth, combined with kratos, meaning rule or power
Nomos
💭 conceptlaw, custom, convention
Human-made law and custom, as opposed to the natural order (physis).
Democracy
💭 conceptPolitical science and Athens
A system of government in which power is held by the people, invented in Athens around 508 BCE and derived from the Greek demos (people) and kratos (power or rule)
Aristos
💭 conceptsocial structure, ethics
The best — the superlative of agathos (good), identifying those who excel in virtue, birth, or achievement above all others.
Minoan Culture
💭 conceptHistory
The Bronze Age civilisation of Crete that preceded and profoundly influenced Greek mythology and religion
Koros
💭 conceptethics, mythology
Satiety or excess — the dangerous state of having too much, which leads to hybris and then to ate and destruction in the Greek moral cycle.
Sacred Marriage
💭 conceptReligion
A ritual union between a god and goddess symbolising cosmic fertility and renewal
Autarkeia
💭 conceptIndependence from external goods
The philosophical ideal of needing nothing beyond yourself — the self-sufficiency that makes a person immune to fortune.
Dikē
💭 conceptreligion, ethics, law
Justice, right order, or the way things ought to be — both the divine personification of justice and the principle of cosmic and social rightness.
Aidos
💭 conceptShame, modesty, and reverence
Aidos was the Greek concept of shame, reverence, and the inner sense of propriety that restrained people from acting dishonourably — the opposite of hubris.