The concept of the single-entrance, courtyard house offers a means of exploring the relationship between cultural expectations about domestic life, and the physical form taken by the house itself. It re-focuses attention away from superficial aspects of the appearance of the buildings themselves and instead places the emphasis on how the spaces they created may have worked as lived environments. At the same time it also provides a frame for thinking beyond the space of the prosperous Classical urban-dweller, to encompass the houses – and the experiences – of other social groups and the residents of culturally Greek communities in other times and places. Broadening the perspective in this way while at the same time distinguishing between these different groups of evidence deomnstrates that although the Classical model is striking for its widespread use and for the variety of architectural forms through which it was materialised, it was actually a relatively socially-restricted and short-lived phenomenon.

Chapter 4 considers to what extent housing on the rest of the Greek mainland was organised in a similar way to that in Athens and Attica, during the fifth and earlier fourth centuries BCE. The discussion includes evaluation of excavated houses in northeastern Greece (Olynthos, Thasos, Torone), northwestern Greece (Ammotopos, Kassope, Leukas), and central and southern Greece (Halieis, Dystos, Ano Siphai, Elean Pylos). By exploring the spatial extent of the single-entrance courtyard house, and addressing the potential underlying social significance of some of the continuities or variations in form and organisation, the Chapter addresses how representative this house-form, with its associated social norms, may have been, of Greece more widely. It is argued that the single-entrance, courtyard house is most characteristic of larger households in larger, urban settlements, and that co-existing alongside it were smaller houses which were most characteristic of smaller settlements but were sometimes also found in urban locations. The relative proportions of the different types cannot be estimated due to the fact that the archaeological data are unlikely to provide a representative sample.