Houses of Classical Athens

Bibliographic Data

ID3939311
AuthorsJ Walter Graham (corresponding author)
Year1974
Volume28
Issue1
Pages45
Publication date1974-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhoenix (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8299 • E-ISSN: 1929-4883
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1087230
OpenAlexW2313298468
LanguageEN
Citations received22

A N ANCIENT TRAVELLER who visited Athens in the early third century B.C. was plainly recording his own impressions when he wrote that anyone approaching Athens for the first time would find it almost incredible that a city so poorly laid out, badly supplied with water, and crowded with mean little houses could really be that famous Athens of which he had heard so much-until he saw its wonderful public buildings (FHG 2.254). And on several occasions the fourth-century orator, Demosthenes (3.26, 13.29, 23.207), rhetorically called attention to the undistinguished simplicity of the homes of the great leaders of early fifth-century Athens, the men who had saved Greece from Persian tyranny. Remarks such as these, too hastily and uncritically accepted, have furnished generations of compilers of books on Greek Life with a splendid opportunity to laud the Athenians for practising such noble self-restraint in their private lives, satisfied themselves to live in plain little mud-brick huts on crowded, narrow alleys so long as they might with marble Parthenons glorify their city and their gods. This impression that living-conditions, not only in Athens but in Classical Greece in general, were about on a par with our modern big-city slums, has not yet disappeared' in spite of the discovery nearly half a century ago of large and commodious houses at the site of the small north-Greek town of Olynthus, houses that can be dated to the threequarters of a century between the synoikismos of the city about 432 B.c. and its destruction by Philip of Macedon in 348 B.C. Most of the hundred houses excavated at Olynthus in four campaigns between 1928 and 1938 by expeditions from the Johns Hopkins University-the author participated in the campaigns of 1931 and 1934-measured nearly sixty feet square and were trimly arranged in rectangular blocks three hundred feet long by one hundred and twenty feet wide intersected by streets seventeen, or in one case twenty-four, feet broad. Each block of ten houses was constructed as a single unit with common walls between the individual houses which adhered to a general pattern evidently laid down by the supervising architect or architects (Fig. 1). Yet the prospective resident was evidently permitted to modify the details of the plan to suit his own taste and requirements, for no two houses have exactly the same arrangement of rooms.2

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