Athens in the fifth century BC was the largest of the Greek city-states, with a population estimated at 150,000—200,000 people. Even though the Persian destruction offered Athenians an occasion for change, long-established traditions of urban organization held firm: the layout of streets continued to be haphazard, with narrow, twisting streets of hard earth and gravel. This contrasts with the tidy orthogonal grid plans favored for newly founded towns including, close by, the Peiraeus, the port of Athens, laid out by Hippodamus of Miletus, the pioneer city planner in the mid-fifth century BC, at the urging of Themistokles and his successors.
We can imagine that much of the space inside the walls of Athens was given over to houses. The typical city house, as attested especially by excavated examples nestled in the hills to the west of the Acropolis and to the south of the Agora, was modest: irregular in outline and simple in plan, small rooms without distinctive character arranged around a central court (Figure 16.12). Lighting was poor: windows did not exist, so light entered via the doorways from the court, or was provided by oil lamps, small terracotta holders for olive oil and a wick. Doorways were blocked by curtains, not door flaps. Some houses had an upper story. Country houses could be larger and, freed from the constraints of cramped city building sites, regular in contour.
Building materials were far more modest than those used for temples. Walls consisted of mud bricks on stone foundations, the whole protected with a coating of stucco and a roofing of clay tiles on a timber framework. Flooring was normally of beaten earth and clay, or, exceptionally, of pebble designs laid in cement. Furniture was simple, shifted from room to room as needed, including portable braziers that provided heating. For interior wall decoration a simple applica-
Figure 16.12 Houses (reconstructed), fifth century BC Athens
Tion of color would typically suffice. Water was not piped to private homes. Instead, people relied on wells, sometimes supplemented with cisterns for the collection of rainwater. For sanitation, people made do with stone-lined pits serving as cesspools; in many towns waste was simply tossed into the street.
The main hydraulic engineering project of Classical Athens was the Great Drain, established in the early fifth century BC, which still runs north-south along the west side of the Agora, collecting run-off in its stone-lined channel and carrying it northwards to the Eridanos River. In addition, water was piped in from outlying springs to a scattering of public fountains, such as in the Agora as we have seen, but in general aqueducts were rare before the Romans.
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