§ 5. Early Evidence continued: The Κλῆρος And The Maintenance Of The οἶκος.
The κλῆρος was the holding of the head of an οἶκος.
There are signs in Homer of the existence, already insisted upon for later times, of the connection of the ownership of property with the headship of a household. It follows that if the head of a [pg 109] family was the only owner of land, the desire of establishing a family and thereby preserving at the same time the acquired property and the name of the possessor, made the acquisition of a wife a real necessity for the owner of land.
Eumaios, the swineherd, says that Odysseus would have given him a property (κτῆσις), both an οἶκος and a κλῆρος and a shapely wife.[279] And Odysseus in one of his many autobiographies speaks of taking a wife as if it were the necessary sequel to coming into his inheritance.[280]
Even Hesiod, the son of a poor settler, without much property to keep together, if we can take Aristotle's reading of the line, gives the necessary outfit for a peasant farmer in occupation of a small κλῆρος, as a house, a wife, and a plough-ox.[281]
Aristotle quotes this line of Hesiod, in his argument that the οἶκος was the association formed to supply the wants of each day,[282] its members being called by Charondas, he says, ὁμοσίπυοι (sharers in the mealbin), and by Epimenides the Cretan ὁμόκαποι (sharers of the same plot of ground).[283] And he might have added that Pindar uses the word ὁμόκλαροι to mean “twins.”[284]
and supplied the maintenance the house.
A household, according to Aristotle, consisted thus partly of human beings, partly of property.[285]
So closely is the idea of livelihood bound up that of the house or οἶκος, that Telemachos can say without incongruity that his house is being eaten by the wooers:—