It is remarkable how little we actually know about ancient Greek cities, from texts or archaeology. Less than 10 percent of a recorded 1500 cities are carefully researched in the field, whilst just 50 or so have usable texts concerning aspects of their life (Whitley 2001). Athens, providing almost all the relevant ancient literary sources and archaeological attention, dominates what is written, despite it being highly abnormal as a rare giant agglomeration (Megalopolis), and imperial center.
Nonetheless the creation of the typical city plan, perhaps precociously seen in Archaic Old Smyrna (Figure 9.3), a walled community with densely-packed homes focused on an agora and a ritual complex (often on an acropolis), can be followed as we have already observed along two major trajectories (Snodgrass 1987—1989). A single Geometric-early Archaic settlement can explode into a much larger walled nucleation, or a community comprising several close hamlet-villages can coalesce through infill of the interstices. Athens and Corinth conform to the second model. At Athens (Figure 10.6) the separate burial places tied to discrete hamlets are banished to a new single urban periphery, whose border will later be marked by an early Classical city wall, whilst the associated rapid growth in population is estimated to rise from 10,000 to 20,000 (Morris 2005) across the Archaic centuries. In Corinth by the sixth century an
Figure 10.6 The proto-historic dispersed plan of Athens with the later city wall.
I. Morris, “The early polis as city and state.” In J. Rich and A. Wallace-Hadrill (eds.), City and Country in the Ancient World. London 1991, 25—58, Figure 2. © 1991 Routledge. Reproduced by permission ofTaylor & Francis Books UK.
Extensive city enceinte was built around most of the older hamlets, although infill of this vast space (4 km2) was only gradual. Burial is also displaced, focusing on the extramural North Cemetery.
The rise of larger, more integrated civil communities (poleis) caused the abandonment of previous refuge-like clusters of houses around the residence of chieftains (basileis), such as Emborio on Chios (Figure 8.5), left around 600 BC for a more accessible town site by the coast below.
Two forms are recognizable for Archaic town plans. Older EIA towns grew organically. This tended to create sprawling settlements lacking efficient communication networks, with limited open spaces. The latter were primarily reserved for an acropolis, a public marketplace (agora), suburban sanctuaries, and those important male gathering-places, gymnasia. Classical Athens was described by contemporaries as such a place. In contrast, when a new town was built it might possess a regular plan from the beginning, encouraging a geometric grid for streets and house blocks. We see this in the colonies as early as Late Geometric times, at Megara Hyblaea in Sicily for example. Nonetheless the Archaic period throughout the
Aegean witnessed the materialization of the polis concept in the form of defined and increasingly walled, built-up settlements of the living, formally isolated from the external necropoleis or “cities of the dead.”
Houses remained rather randomly spaced in older-established settlements, and at the start of the Archaic era even city temples were little differentiated from the domestic structures which surrounded them. It was chiefly in the sixth century that we see the creation of small complexes of public buildings around agoras, and communal constructions such as spring-houses, water conduits, and even longer aqueducts. A rising “plantation” of inscriptions marking legal codes and polis decisions of a political, economic, and ritual character would be found at the major state sanctuaries and in the agora. Still, most Greek public events were open-air and the erection of stone buildings in Greek towns for communal affairs of various kinds did not mark the first practice of certain activities (Tomlinson 1995). More relevant is the symbolic statement being made by the polis in paying for costly monumental structures to house affairs of state.
The rights of citizens and their involvement in public affairs are materialized through the building of conspicuous lawcourts (prytaneia) and assembly-halls (bouleuteria), for example at Athens, the focus from the final Archaic period onwards of the most advanced experiments in democracy. However elsewhere a simpler solution was to hold public meetings in the courts of temples (in Crete at Dreros), or in theaters (Argos in the Peloponnese). Athens, with its final Archaic creation of a constituency-based parliamentary system, still seems in another league for democratic institutions, since assemblies were also held in its rural settlements (in the theater ofThorikos, whilst Sounion has several agoras) (Lohmann 1992). Yet these were probably provincial towns in their own right, thus functioning as mini-poleis.
Actually, after temples, the next city-center public building to appear was its most elegant, seen today in the Athenian Agora in the restored Hellenistic Stoa of Attalos. Archaic to Classical stoas were usually singlestory, long, roofed structures with a deep colonnaded facade backed often by a parallel row of small rooms. The portico provided citizens with shelter or shade depending on the weather, but plenty of light and air, whilst the rooms to the rear could be deployed as shops, archives or other storerooms, galleries, or public dining-rooms. Generally stoas were placed along one side of city squares, or other public spaces where religious or secular communal gatherings took place. Eventually city agoras might be enclosed by bordering stoas on several sides. Stoas appear to originate in a sacred context, one of the earliest being the seventh-century example at the sanctuary of Hera on the island of Samos, erected for participants in religious ceremonies. Wood was normal in Archaic times, with stone constructions typical by the Classical era, probably following the earlier “lithicization” (conversion into stone) of temple colonnades (Tomlinson 1995). A less common form of public architecture was required in states with “Dorian” forms of communal male dining, where special buildings were erected in the city-center for these daily “rituals” (Haggis et al. 2007).
Greek stone theaters seem an even more typical urban monument, but surviving examples are generally late transformations of simpler constructions. Theatrical performances evolved from ritual dances and songs, usually originally presented in the agora. By Classical times regular excavated areas in natural hills became common, with wooden seating, and similar structures were in use for the Panhellenic Games. Stone seating and performance spaces become general only in late Classical and Hellenistic times (Tomlinson 1995). Although public celebrations of dance, music, poetry, and drama arose in Archaic times from religious festivals, the development of choruses and actors in the sixth century is associated with the city-state form of government and represented another aspect of civic debate on the nature of society which the polis stimulated (Rhodes 2003).
Over the Archaic period the “city as structure” crystallized into an integrated set of meaningful topographies: the religious, defensive, and secular civic built environment was complementary to that of private life (Holkeskamp 2002, 2004). Monuments at prominent locations reminded the community of its past and present aspirations. The visual world of the “cityscape” acted in a dialectic with its occupants, both reflecting collective values but also educating citizens in those concepts. These concerns are to be associated with the expulsion of burials to extramural areas and the symbolic layout of cemeteries; the formal setting out and bounding of the agora; the construction of permanent highly-visible buildings for political and legal assemblies; the increasingly secluded nature of private homes; and finally the increasingly pretentious erection of major state sanctuary complexes at eyecatching points of the town. Civic religious processions followed meaningful itineraries around this “city as structure” to reinforce awareness of the constituent parts of the polis as a collective life.
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