Man, argues Aristotle in Book VIII, Chapter 12 of his Nicomachean Ethics, “is naturally inclined to form couples—even more than to form cities, inasmuch as the household is earlier and more necessary than the city, and reproduction is more common to man with the animals. With the other animals the union extends only to this point, but human beings live together not only for the sake of reproduction but also for the various purposes of life; for from the start the functions are divided, and those of man and woman are different; so they help each other by throwing their peculiar gifts into the common stock.”
In Book I, Chapter 2 of Politics, Aristotle offers a social genesis narrative that begins with the individual household, proceeds to a village formed out of a group of such households, and culminates with a city (or city-state; polis in Greek) composed of several such villages bonded together.
The Greek word that Aristotle uses for household is oikos, which represents both the linguistic root of and the historical foundation for economics. Unlike our current nuclear family, the oikos was a complex, self-sufficient economic unit made up, in its fullest incarnation, of parents and children, grandparents and cousins, servants and slaves, lands and livestock, weavers and artisans.
Everyone from the master to the servant, the farmhand to the milkmaid, the potter to the blacksmith had a function within the oikos. Within the family itself, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters had distinct and separate roles, but
