At What Age Did Ancient Greek Women Typically Marry?

It is well and widely known that ancient Greek parents typically compelled their daughters to marry at a shockingly young age, one at which they would legally be considered minors in most countries in the twenty-first century. Greek men, by contrast, typically married much older, usually when they were in their late twenties or thirties. As a result, the groom at an ancient Greek wedding was usually at least a decade older than the bride he was marrying—and in many cases much older than that.

Unmarried girls were effectively considered their father’s property. Marriages were usually arranged primarily between a girl’s father and her male suitor. The extent to which a father allowed his daughter to decide which man she would marry probably varied significantly depending on factors such as time period, region, and the specific father in question’s personality and attitudes; in some cases, girls probably had significant say over which man they married, but it is likely that, in other cases, they had little or no say.

Exactly how young did ancient Greek women really marry, though? Popular histories and even many academics routinely assert as fact that Greek parents typically forced their daughters to marry as soon as they began puberty, before they even turned fifteen. In this post, however, I will argue that this is based mainly on one literary passage describing a bride who was probably unusually young and was not typical for most city-states. Instead, a more comprehensive view of the evidence suggests that Greek girls actually most commonly married when they were a bit older, broadly between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. The ages at which girls married also varied significantly across regions; ancient authors record that, in certain parts of the Greek world, girls typically married significantly younger or older than they did in other parts.

At what age did girls in ancient Greece experience menarche?

The first wrinkle in sorting out the approximate age at which ancient Greek girls typically married is determining the age at which girls typically experienced menarche (i.e., their first menstrual bleeding). For most ancient Greeks, although a girl could be betrothed before she experienced her first period, menarche nonetheless would have marked the earliest possible age at which her parents could actually give her away in marriage.

In most western societies in the twenty-first century, menarche typically occurs quite early, at around age eleven or twelve. Ancient medical sources, however, indicate that the age of menarche for girls in ancient Greece and Rome was typically significantly older, at around fourteen years old (Amundsen and Diers, “The Age of Menarche in Classical Greece and Rome,” 125–132).

One ancient source that provides some context on this matter is the History of Animals, a treatise on the biology of reproduction in the Greek language that is traditionally attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE). It may be the authentic work of Aristotle or the work of a slightly later author. If it is by Aristotle, then it may contain substantial sections that have been added by writers of the third century BCE, but it is not likely that any substantial portions of the work date significantly later than that. The work contains the following passage at IX(VII).1.581a–b, which sets the typical age of menarche for girls at around fourteen years:

“φέρειν δὲ σπέρμα πρῶτον ἄρχεται τὸ ἄρρεν ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ ἐν τοῖς ἔτεσι τοῖς δὶς ἑπτὰ τετελεσμένοις· . . . περὶ τὸν αὐτὸν δὲ χρόνον καὶ τοῖς θήλεσιν ἥ τ᾿ ἔπαρσις γίνεται τῶν μαστῶν καὶ τὰ καταμήνια καλούμενα καταρρήγνυται· τοῦτο δ᾿ ἐστὶν αἷμα οἷον νεόσφακτον. . . τὰ δὲ καταμήνια γίνεται ταῖς πλείσταις ἤδη τῶν μαστῶν ἐπὶ δύο δακτύλους ἠρμένων.”

This means, in my own translation:

“And the male begins to bear seed in the majority [of cases] upon having completed twice seven years [i.e., upon reaching the age of fourteen]. . . And, around the same time also, in females the development of the breasts occurs and the so-called menses begin to flow. And this is blood of the same sort as that of a newly-slaughtered animal. . . And the menses occur in most girls after the breasts have been raised to [the height of] two fingers.”

In addition to this passage in the History of Animals, the Koan Prenotions, a Greek medical treatise that has passed down as part of the Hippokratic Corpus and that most likely dates to around the fifth or fourth century BCE, contains a passage (XXX, 502) that obliquely alludes to fourteen as the typical age for the onset of puberty. Both of these passages accord well with later medical writings from the Roman Period, which also consistently place the usual onset of menstruation in girls at around age fourteen.

The reason why menarche occurs so much younger in most girls in western countries in the twenty-first century is because children in western countries today typically have much better nutrition and overall health than children in ancient Greece and Rome. As a result, they physically mature much more rapidly.

ABOVE: Detail of an Attic red-figure vase painting dating to the fifth century BCE depicting a woman preparing a young bride (who is labeled with her name Thalea) for her wedding

Hesiodos’s advice on marriage

Having established that menarche for Greek girls typically occurred at around age fourteen, let us examine the sources for when girls typically married. Possibly the earliest surviving source is the Works and Days, a didactic poem composed in dactylic hexameter that was most likely originally performed orally and most likely became fixed in something resembling the form in which we know it today sometime in the first half of the seventh century BCE.

The speaker of the poem is Hesiodos, who describes himself as a farmer from the small town of Askre in the region of Boiotia in central mainland Greece. The poem is nominally addressed to Hesiodos’s supposed brother Perses, whom he characterizes as a good-for-nothing scoundrel. Most scholars agree that Hesiodos is probably more of a poetic persona than a real, historic individual and that Perses is a fictional character meant to serve as his literary foil. In any case, the advice that Hesiodos gives in the poem is self-consciously generic and applicable to all Greek men.

In the Works and Days lines 695–699, Hesiodos recommends that a man should ideally marry when he is around thirty years of age and that he should marry a girl who is in her fifth year past menarche at the time of the wedding. He says, in Greek:

“ὡραῖος δὲ γυναῖκα τεὸν ποτὶ οἶκον ἄγεσθαι,
μήτε τριηκόντων ἐτέων μάλα πόλλ᾽ ἀπολείπων
μήτ᾽ ἐπιθεὶς μάλα πολλά: γάμος δέ τοι ὥριος οὗτος:
ἡ δὲ γυνὴ τέτορ᾽ ἡβώοι, πέμπτῳ δὲ γαμοῖτο.”

This means, in my own translation:

“And be at the right time of life to lead a wife into your home,
when you are neither very much behind thirty years,
nor very much past; and this is the right season for your wedding.
But a woman should mature for four years past puberty, and, in the fifth, she should be married.”

Since girls in ancient Greece most commonly experienced menarche when they were around fourteen years old, in saying that a man should ideally marry a girl when she is in her fifth year past menarche, Hesiodos is recommending that he should marry her when she is around eighteen or nineteen years old.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bronze portrait head discovered in the Villa of the Papyri in Pompeii, believed to be a fictional representation of the poet Hesiodos

Solon’s agreement with Hesiodos

Although the Works and Days is the only Greek literary source from the Archaic Period that expressly comments on the appropriate age for a girl to marry, other sources indicate that the advice Hesiodos gives in the poem about the appropriate ages of marriage was fairly common wisdom.

The Athenian lawgiver and poet Solon (lived c. 630 – c. 560 BCE), in a well-known poetic fragment (fr. 27 Gerber), divides an ideal man’s life into ten stages, each lasting seven years, and recommends that a man should ideally marry in the fifth stage of his life, which lasts from when he is twenty-seven to thirty-four years of age. He declares, in fr. 27.9–10:

“πέμπτῃ δ᾿ ὥριον ἄνδρα γάμου μεμνημένον εἶναι
καὶ παίδων ζητεῖν εἰσοπίσω γενεήν.”

This means, in my own translation:

“And, in the fifth, it is time for a man to be thinking about marriage
and seek for a lineage of children to follow him.”

Although Solon does not say what age a girl should be at the time of her wedding, the fact that he is in such close agreement with Hesiodos about the age at which a man should marry suggests that he would most likely agree with him about the age at which a girl should marry as well.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait bust of the Athenian lawgiver Solon, based on a Greek original dating to around the late second century BCE, currently held in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples

The Gortyn law code

Possibly the next earliest explicit evidence after Hesiodos for the age at which Greek girls married comes from Gortyn, a Greek city-state located on the southern end of Krete, the southernmost of all the Greek islands. There, the surviving wall of a round public building that was most likely the bouleuterion (i.e., the building where the boulē, or council of the city-state, met) bears a long, almost totally complete inscription in Doric Greek dating to the first half of the fifth century BCE.

This inscription spans twelve whole columns of text and is the second-longest surviving inscription in the Greek language from all of classical antiquity. It bears the text of the city’s law code from that era, which is known today as the “Great Law Code of Gortyn.” This law code is possibly the most important surviving source of information about the legal systems of Greek city-states in the Classical Period (lasted c. 490 – c. 323 BCE) and certainly the most important source on the subject from this period from outside of Athens.

The Gortyn law code mandates that a patroiokos (i.e., a woman or girl from an aristocratic family who has no living father or brothers by her father and who is the legal heir to her father’s estate) should marry when she is no younger than twelve years of age.

Nonetheless, here we must be careful. Although the code indicates that, at least in Gortyn in the early fifth century BCE, some girls from aristocratic families could marry as young as twelve, it does not necessarily indicate that it was common for girls to marry that young. Indeed, the code provides no information about the age at which it was typical for girls in Gortyn during this period to marry.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the inscription of the Great Law Code of Gortyn, dating to the first half of the fifth century BCE

The age of Ischomachos’s wife when he married her in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos

So far, most of the sources we have examined have come from outside of Athens. For most of the fifth century BCE, however, Athens was the most populous, most politically influential, and most economically prosperous city-state in mainland Greece. Throughout the entire Classical Period, Athens was also the most important center of literary and cultural output in the entire Greek world. It therefore produced a quantity of literature that was disproportionately massive even considering its large population relative to other city-states.

Moreover, as I discuss in this post I wrote back in January 2020, the vast majority of the ancient Greek literary texts that have survived to the present day have survived because they were copied for Greek-reading audiences in the medieval Roman (or “Byzantine”) Empire, who idolized the literature of the Classical Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and were more likely to copy texts by Athenian authors than by non-Athenians. As a result of the combination of all these factors, the extant sources for Greek history in this period tend to be extremely Athens-centric.

One very important source of information about marriage and the lives of aristocratic Athenian women in the Classical Period is Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE), an Athenian aristocrat, writer, historian, and student of the famous philosopher Socrates who wrote a large number of surviving dialogues, histories, and essays over the course of the first half of the fourth century BCE, including a dialogue titled Oikonomikos or The Estate-Manager.

In this dialogue, Xenophon portrays his teacher Socrates as describing in great detail a conversation that he allegedly had with Ischomachos, a wealthy Athenian aristocrat who has a reputation for being managing his own household well and being a general expert on the subject of household management. The conversation is an invaluable source of information about how Xenophon at least thought that an ideal aristocratic Athenian household should operate.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Antiquities Museum website showing a Roman marble portrait bust dating to around 120 CE, based on an earlier Greek original, depicting the Athenian writer Xenophon

In the course of this conversation, Xenophon portrays Socrates and Ischomachos as discussing the question of how aristocratic men ought to “train” their wives to fulfill their proper role in the household. He portrays Ischomachos as emphasizing to Socrates that his own wife was extremely young and inexperienced in the area of household management when he married her by telling him that she was “not yet fifteen years old” at the time. This exchange, which occurs in the Oikonomikos 7.4–5, reads as follows, as translated by E. C. Marchant with my own adaptations:

Socrates: “Ah, Ischomachos,” said I, “that is just what I want to hear from you. Did you yourself train your wife to be of the right sort, or did she know her household duties when you received her from her parents?”

Ischomachos: “Why, what knowledge could she have had, Socrates, when I took her for my wife? She was not yet fifteen years old when she came to me, and up to that time she had lived in leading-strings, seeing, hearing and saying as little as possible. If when she came she knew no more than how, when given wool, to turn out a cloak, and had seen only how the spinning is given out to the maids, is not that as much as could be expected? For in control of her appetite, Socrates, she had been excellently trained; and this sort of training is, in my opinion, the most important to man and woman alike.”

Many modern scholars have uncritically interpreted this passage as evidence that the normal age for Athenian aristocratic girls to marry was before they turned fifteen. For instance, the highly eminent scholar Sarah B. Pomperoy, who is recognized as the founder of the modern study of ancient women’s history, gives the following rather dystopian description of a typical Athenian marriage in her 2002 book Spartan Women, on page 44:

“The Athenian [bride] was not quite fifteen: she married a stranger nearly twice her age, moved to a new house, and rarely saw her friends and relatives again.”

To support this claim, Pomperoy cites Xenophon’s Oikonomikos as her only source, saying that it describes “the Athenian marriage at best.”

I am convinced that this interpretation is incorrect because it rests on the incorrect assumption that Ischomachos’s marriage represents a typical ancient Athenian marriage and that Athenian girls typically married at the same age that his wife happened to marry. In contrast to Pomperoy and many others, I think that the specific rhetorical context and purpose of Ischomachos’s statement about his wife’s age suggest that she is, in fact, rather young for an Athenian aristocratic bride.

In the dialogue, Ischomachos tells Socrates exactly how old his wife was when he first married her specifically in order to emphasize just how young she was at the time and how little she knew about managing a household. If it were really the norm for Athenian girls to marry when they were only fourteen, then Ischomachos would have no reason to tell Socrates that his wife was so young when he married her, because Socrates would be able to assume that she was that young on his own. The fact that Ischomachos feels the need to explicitly tell him her exact age when they married indicates that this age is not completely normal and predictable.

We also need to consider how the age of Ischomachos’s wife fits into Xenophon’s broader literary and rhetorical purpose. The Oikonomikos is a dialogue about household management and Xenophon portrays Ischomachos as a recognized expert on this topic. As a character, he therefore (according to what I think is the most plausible interpretation) represents an example of how Xenophon thinks a Greek aristocratic man should manage his household under ideal conditions.

By portraying Ischomachos’s wife as having been extremely young and totally inexperienced in how to manage a household when he married her, Xenophon is able to use Ischomachos’s experience to illustrate how an aristocratic man should “train” his wife into an ideal partner and household administrator in an ideal situation in which she is a blank slate with basically no prior knowledge or experience. Making her so young and inexperienced also allows Xenophon to illustrate Ischomachos’s expertise in household management by emphasizing that she, as an ideal wife, is solely and entirely the product of his training.

Xenophon clearly did not expect his original audience of upper-class Athenian men in the early fourth century BCE to regard almost fifteen years old as an abnormal or shocking age for an Athenian aristocratic bride. If he had expected such a thing, then we would expect him to portray Ischomachos as more defensive about his decision to marry his wife when she was so young. Nonetheless, the specific rhetorical context and purpose of Ischomachos’s statement suggest that Xenophon expected his audience to see almost fifteen as being on the younger end of the normal age range in which an aristocratic girl would be likely to marry.

Aristotle on the appropriate ages for men and women to marry in his Politics 7.1335a

Thankfully, Xenophon is not the only source of information about when it was normal for Athenian aristocratic girls to marry. Aristotle, who lived for much of his life in Athens, also discusses the subject in his Politics 7.1335a. In this passage, he defines the ideal age for girls to marry as eighteen and the ideal age for men to marry as thirty-seven.

Both of these ages are clearly on the more mature end of what the Greeks in the fourth century BCE seem to have considered the normal range, since Aristotle feels the need to argue at length against people (especially girls) marrying younger. He also mentions that it was the norm for girls in the city-state of Troizen, which was located in the Argolis in the northeastern Peloponnesos, across the Saronic Gulf from Athens, to marry extremely young, by which he probably means when they were thirteen or fourteen.

Aristotle writes, as translated by H. Rackham with my own minor edits to modernize the language and make it closer to the Greek:

“But the mating of the young is bad for child-bearing; for in all animal species the offspring of the young are more imperfect and likely to produce female children, and small in figure, so that the same thing must necessarily occur in the human race also. And a proof of this is that in all the states where it is the local custom to mate young men and young women, the people are deformed and small of body.”

“And again young women labor more, and more of them die in childbirth; indeed according to some accounts such was the reason why the oracle was given to the people of Troizen, because many were dying owing to its being their custom for the women to marry young, and it did not refer to the harvest.”

“And again it also contributes to chastity for the bestowal of women in marriage to be made when they are older, for it is thought that they are more licentious when they have had intercourse in youth. Also the males are thought to be arrested in bodily growth if they have intercourse while the seed is still growing, for this also has a fixed period after passing which it is no longer plentiful.”

“Therefore it is fitting for the women to be married at about the age of eighteen and the men at thirty-seven or a little before—for that will give long enough for the union to take place with their bodily vigor at its prime, and for it to arrive with a convenient coincidence of dates at the time when procreation ceases. Moreover the succession of the children to the estates, if their birth duly occurs soon after the parents marry, will take place when they are beginning their prime, and when the parents’ period of vigor has now come to a close, towards the age of seventy.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head based on an earlier Greek original depicting the Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira

At what age was it normal for Athenian aristocratic parents to force their daughters to marry?

If I am correct in interpreting Xenophon’s age for Ischomachos’s wife when she married at almost fifteen as unusually young and Aristotle’s ideal age for a woman to marry at eighteen as unusually mature, this suggests that the most common age for an Athenian citizen girl from an aristocratic family to marry was when she was somewhere in the range of fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen.

That being said, there was almost certainly significant variation in when Athenian aristocratic parents married their daughters off, depending on the family’s specific socioeconomic circumstances and needs and the father’s particular beliefs and attitudes about when was the appropriate age for a girl to marry. Some Athenian aristocratic parents probably married their daughters off as young as thirteen or fourteen, while others probably waited until their daughters were eighteen or even nineteen.

It is also important to specify that the age range I have described here only applies to Athenian girls from aristocratic families. It is, unfortunately, much more difficult for us to know when it was normal for Athenian girls from families of lower status to marry, since nearly all the surviving written and material evidence from ancient Greece comes from the well-to-do.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure pyxis attributed to the Marlay Painter dating to between c. 440 and c. 430 BCE, depicting a wedding procession

Ploutarchos of Chaironeia on the marriage of young Spartan women

While girls in some city-states, like Troizen according to Aristotle, typically married extremely young, in other city-states, girls appear to have typically married at significantly more mature ages than was common elsewhere in the Greek world. In particular, in the city-state of Sparta, this seems to have been the case for girls who belonged to the Spartiate class (i.e., the class of full Spartan citizens, who represented only a tiny, highly privileged fraction of the total population of Sparta as a whole).

The Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) wrote a work titled Life of Lykourgos, in which he discusses a wide range of aspects of Spartan society as it existed during the Classical Period.

Although Ploutarchos was writing many centuries after the time period he describes, he had access to many written sources from the time that have not survived to the present day. He isn’t always reliable and he has an unfortunate tendency to portray Spartan society according to his own conceptions of what an ideal society should look like. Nonetheless, his work remains one of the most important ancient sources that we have on the subject.

In his Life of Lykourgos 15.3–4, Ploutarchos records that marriages among Spartan citizens during the Classical Period took the form of a ritual in which the groom would abduct the bride, a bridesmaid would shave her hair and dress her in men’s clothing, and then the groom would come in and have sex with her in the dark. In the course of describing this practice, he mentions that Spartiate girls were typically married off “not when they were slight or immature, but when they were in their prime and ripe for it.” Here is his full description, as translated by Richard J. A. Talbert:

“The custom was to capture women for marriage—not when they were slight or immature, but when they were in their prime and ripe for it. The so-called ‘bridesmaid’ took charge of the captured girl. She first shaved her head to the scalp, then dressed her in a man’s cloak and sandals, and laid her down along on a mattress in the dark. The bridegroom—who was not drunk and thus not impotent, but was sober as always—first had dinner in the messes, then would slip in, undo her belt, lift her and carry her to the bed.”

“After spending only a short time with her, he would depart discreetly so as to sleep wherever he usually did along with the other young men. And this continued to be his practice thereafter: while spending the days with his contemporaries, and going to sleep with them, he would warily visit his bride in secret, ashamed and apprehensive in case someone in the house might notice him.”

Most scholars interpret this to mean that Spartiate girls typically married at a significantly more mature age than citizen girls in most other Greek city-states. Ploutarchos does not specify exactly when they typically married, but the eminent scholar of ancient Spartan society Paul Cartledge argues convincingly that they most likely did so between the ages of eighteen and twenty (“Spartan Wives,” 94–95).

In Cartledge’s assessment, eighteen is the most likely age at which Spartiate girls were considered to reach marriageable maturity, since this was the age at which Spartiate boys completed the agōgḗ (i.e., the rigorous state education program that all Spartiate boys were required to complete). Some scholars have hypothesized that Spartiate girls may have been required to complete a parallel education program to the agōgḗ, in which case they would have completed it at eighteen as well.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Greek bronze statuette of a girl wearing a Spartan-style dress running, perhaps in a footrace, dating to between c. 520 and c. 500 BCE, originally found in Prizren, currently held in the British Museum in London

Conclusion

No matter how anyone looks at it, in most city-states, ancient Greek girls (or at least those from aristocratic families) married disturbingly young—in many cases younger than eighteen, which is the legal age of adulthood in most countries in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, I don’t think they typically married quite as young as many scholars believe. Although they may have been close, the Greeks weren’t quite operating on a rule of “old enough to bleed, old enough to breed” (as some have rather coarsely characterized it).

Works cited

• Amundsen, Darrel W., and Carol Jean Diers. “The Age of Menarche in Classical Greece and Rome.” Human Biology 41, no. 1 (1969): 125–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41448952.
• Cartledge, Paul. “Spartan Wives: Liberation or Licence?” The Classical Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1981): 84–105. http://www.jstor.org/stable/638462.
• Pomeroy, Sarah B. Spartan Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.