Gene Wolfe's 1987 book Soldier of the Mist is a work of fiction set in Greece in 479 BC following a character called Latro. The book begins with a foreword that, while written in character, includes the following description of Greece at that time:
A few words about the culture in which Latro found himself soon after he began to write may be in order. The people no more called themselves Greeks than do the people of the nation we call Greece today. By our standards they were casual about clothes, though in most cities it was considered improper for a woman to appear in public completely naked, as men often did. Breakfast was not eaten; unless he had been drinking the night before, the average Greek rose at dawn and ate his first meal at noon; a second meal was eaten in the evening. In peacetime even children drank diluted wine; in wartime soldiers complained bitterly because they had only water, and often fell ill.
Athens (“Thought”) was more crime-ridden than New York. Its law against women’s leaving their homes alone was meant to prevent attacks on them. (Another woman or even a child was a satisfactory escort.) First-floor rooms were windowless, and burglars were called “wallbreakers.” Despite the modern myth, exclusive homosexuality was rare and generally condemned, although bisexuality was common and accepted. The Athenian police were barbarian mercenaries, employed because they were more difficult to corrupt than Greeks. Their skill with the bow was often valuable in apprehending suspects.
Although the Greek city-states were more diverse in law and custom than most scholars are willing to admit, a brisk trade in goods had effected some standardization in money and units of measure. An obol, vulgarly called a spit, bought a light meal. The oarsmen on warships were paid two or three obols a day, but of course they were fed from their ship’s stores. Six obols made a drachma (a handful), and a drachma bought a day’s service from a skilled mercenary (who supplied his own equipment) or a night’s service from one of Kalleos’s women. A gold stator was worth two silver drachmas. The most widely circulated ten-drachma coin was called an owl, from the image on its reverse. A hundred drachmas made a mina; sixty minas a talent— about fifty-seven pounds of gold or eight hundred pounds of silver.
The talent was also a unit of weight: about fifty-seven pounds. The most commonly used measure of distance was the stade, from which comes our stadium. A stade was about two hundred yards, or a little over one-tenth of a mile.
Humanitarians accepted the institution of slavery, realizing that the alternative was massacre; we who have seen the holocaust of the European Jews should be sparing in our reproaches. Prisoners of war were a principal source of supply. A really first-class slave might cost as much as ten minas, the equivalent of thirty-six thousand dollars. Most were much more reasonable.
If the average well-read American were asked to name five famous Greeks, he would probably answer, “Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Pericles.” Critics of Latro’s account would do well to recall that Homer had been dead for four hundred years at the time Latro wrote, and that no one had heard of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or Pericles. The word philosopher was not yet in use.
In ancient Greece, skeptics were those who thought, not those who scoffed. Modern skeptics should note that Latro reports Greece as it was reported by the Greeks themselves. The runner sent from Athens to ask Spartan help before the battle of Marathon met the god Pan on the road and conscientiously recounted their conversation to the Athenian Assembly when he returned. (The Spartans, who well knew who ruled their land, refused to march before the full of the moon.)
I'm aware that that's a lot of text and a lot of information, so I apologize if this is a bit too broad. I'm wondering how accurate Wolfe's description is. Does this really reflect what Greece would have been like in 479 BC? Does it reflect what people thought in the 1980s when the book was written? Or is it simply made up by Gene Wolfe for the sake of the story?
This is a pretty adequate rundown of some aspects of early Classical Greek society. There are some things I would object to, but the guy gets points for effort, especially if this was written in the 1980s.
Casual about clothes: this is certainly wrong. It was expected that leisure-class women in particular would not go into the street unless they were completely clothed and veiled. Since clothing was a primary marker of social status, people got more conscientious about clothing the richer they were, and their clothing and accessories would also get deliberately impractical, to show off the fact that they did not need to work. Only slaves and working poor might prefer to go around in clothing that wouldn't interfere with their tasks.
As far as I know, there was no law at Athens that prevented women from leaving the house. This would have been impossible to enforce, especially among the general population. It was merely a social ideal that women were neither seen nor heard. This was not to prevent attacks on them, but to control their lives; in the extremely patriarchical world of Classical Greece, upper-class wives were seen almost exclusively as political assets and baby factories, which required complete control of (sexual) access to them from birth to death.
While the Athenian police force was called "the archers", I don't know of any evidence that they used their bows in carrying out their (limited) duties. They were not a police like the modern police; they mainly kept order at political assemblies.
Homosexuality, bisexuality: these are misnomers. Such words or concepts did not exist at the time. Physical relationships between men (especially among the elite) were common and accepted, although there were some ideas as to what sort of behaviour was appropriate for men of particular ages or statuses.
The parallel drawn here between the massacre of prisoners and the Holocaust is distasteful, but the author also seems to assume that "humanitarians" only accepted slavery as an alternative to massacre, which isn't true. There is no evidence of any Greek questioning any aspect of the institution of slavery. They did not accept it merely as the lesser of two evils; they took it completely for granted.
Whether or not Homer actually ever existed, most Greeks in 479 BC would have known his name.