the attic stelai - The American School of Classical Studies at Athens

234 W. KENDRICK PRITCHETT
estate,'53 and that in a Tenian inscription of approximately the same date the doors
were clearly not a part of the house.154 In addition, Kent cites Greek leases of today,
according to which the lessees furnish their own doors. Finley,'55 however, would
argue that while doors might occasionally be movable, the general practice was to
consider them as a fixed part of the building, since doors and roofs were usually not
mentioned in mortgage inscriptions. Yet it is dangerous to draw conclusions e silentio,
particularly in inscriptions; moreover, we cannot ignore the high cost of wood suitable
for doors. The Attic Stelai add another example to those cited by Kent of a house
which is specified as 'with a door' (IV, 20).
The fact that doors were auctioned separately shows that they were in effect
items of movable property; it is also clear that the houses from which they came could
be rented or sold doorless, and that there was an active market for doors which were
not new. We may conclude from the evidence of Kent and Finley that in the case
of rented houses custom varied; clearly many tenants were expected to bring their
own doors with them when they moved into a house. Thus Thucydides (II, 14, 1)
relates that the inhabitants of Attica brought the very woodwork from their houses
into the city with them in 431 B.C.; this does not of course necessarily mean that what
they salvaged was their own, but it does mean that they thought they would have a
use for individual doors. There is a passage in Lysias, XIX, The Property of Aristophanes,
31, which describes the precautions taken to make sure that the doors of a
house were not stolen, and Robinson and Graham 156 note that the scarcity of door
hardware to be found at Olynthos is probably due to the " wholesale removal of the
doors after the destruction of the city."
The following terms for doors are used in our inscription: Gtpa, Ov'pa o-airpa, Ovpa
&6arpto-roa, Ovpa crvvApoa'8q, KXLt-taL8E, KXw-ta'8E 0-alTpat, Kipraca. On the derivation
of the word thyra see Buck, Dictionary, p. 465, and for a general list of Greek terms
for doors, Pollux, I, 76. H. Klenk has written a Giessen dissertation, Die antike Tiir
(1924), which is based on literary and inscriptional evidence and refers to examples
in ancient art. This work suffers from its lack of illustrations or diagrams, and from
its failure to take advantage of archaeological findings. The use of inscriptions is
unmethodical and incomplete; all the detailed evidence as to construction and cost
which the building records can offer has been ignored. In H. Diels' Parmenides there
is an Appendix, " Ueber altgriechische Thiiren und Schl6sser ; 157 this is an extended
commentary on the Proemion, 11, 11-15, but its emphasis is almost entirely upon
techniques of barring and locking doors, and not on the doors themselves. There is a
153
I.G., II2, 2499, lines 11-14 and 30-37.
154 I.G., XII, 5, 872, line 44.
155 Land and Credit, pp. 72 and 261, note 120.
156 Olynthus, VIII, p. 257.
157
Berlin, 1897, pp. 117-151; also published in his Antike Technik.