We know a great deal about the ancient Greeks. We know what they ate, how they worshipped and how they fought. We know the types of houses they lived in and what they were furnished with. We know their politics, their philosophies and their arts. Despite all of this, our understanding of ancient Greek culture remains incomplete. With few exceptions, our knowledge is shaped by the narratives of the extraordinary members of society – men of high status, privilege and power. From the works of Herodotus, an aristocrat from Halicarnassus, to Xenophon, the Athenian son of a wealthy equestrian family, our libraries are filled with the writings of the elite. These men, though accomplished in their own right, experienced life in a markedly different way from the multitudes of ordinary people with whom they shared a society and a culture.

Likewise, the material culture of the people located at the centre of society – those whose histories have defined sociocultural normality – tends to be studied more often than that of others. Partially this is an issue of preservation; for example, grand houses of stone survive better in the archaeological record than modest dwellings of wattle and daub. Nevertheless, the resulting effect is that those who exist outside of societal norms, who occupy the periphery rather than the centre, become marginal in both a social and a material sense (Turner and Young 2007: 298).

When applied to individuals and groups, ‘marginality’ or ‘social marginalisation’ references the social, economic, political and legal spheres where people who are disadvantaged struggle to gain access to resources, which leads them to be ignored, excluded or neglected (Gurung and Kollmair 2005: 10). Greek literary sources, for instance, suggest that marginalised individuals experienced social exclusion (Herodotus 7.231–2; Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 22; Plutarch, Aristeides 73–4 on ostracism; Bremmer 1983 on scapegoat rituals), legal discrimination (Demosthenes 57.3), criminalisation (Demosthenes 24.123; Forsdyke 2008), poverty (Lysias 24) and often premature death (Xenophon, Hellenica 1.7.35).