This dissertation traces the idea of the home and family (oikos) through several speeches from the corpus of the Attic orators. Many of the speeches are concerned with family matters, from issues of inheritance or guardianship to adultery and murder. Scholars studying the ancient Greek family often use these speeches as evidence for social practices; my dissertation differs from these approaches in that it centers around the evidence not for real life but for the ideologies that shaped the habits and opinions of the ancient Athenians. I demonstrate that the orators drew on the ideology of the oikos, a set of social expectations that the house should be well-organized and family members perfectly loyal and affectionate to one another, in order to persuade the jury to vote in their favor.

The oikos was a particularly powerful symbol in the Athenian imaginary: every member of the jury and Assembly, before whom the speeches I focus on were delivered, belonged to an oikos. The orators used references to the house and family as a way of appealing to the shared experience of belonging to an oikos. In this way, they evoked what I call the home feeling, a communal, family feeling which could be used to persuade, to characterize, or to provide evidence. My first three chapters deal with forensic rhetoric, showing how speeches by Antiphon, Isocrates, Lysias, Isaeus, and Demosthenes engage with social expectations about behavior between family members and anxieties about dangers both inside and outside the house. In my fourth chapter, I argue that Demosthenes’ political speeches invoke the home feeling at the level of the polis in order to persuade the people of Athens to join together against dangers at home—laziness and complacency among the citizenry—and the increasing threat of Philip of Macedon. By focusing on the home feeling and the prevalence of the rhetoric of the oikos in the Attic orators, my dissertation casts new light on the importance of the house and household in Athenian public discourse.