The Family. In contrast to more well-documented periods of world history, sources for the family and social trends in ancient Greece are exiguous. Most of the evidence comes from literary texts, and of those, the richest material is the poetry of Homer, composed in the Archaic Period, around 750 B.C.E., and Athenian tragedy, performed between 480 and 404 B.C.E., at the beginning of the Classical era. Literary texts, like modern cinema and novels, may provide insight into some of the underlying ideas the ancient Greeks had about family life and social roles, but they do not always reflect the lives of everyday people. Often they focus on a bygone era filled with kings and queens, aristocrats and warriors, a world in which slaves, children, and commoners figure little. Instead, they tell us more about how the ancient Greeks imagined things should be, rather than how they really...