GREEK TOWN-PLANNING: FIRST EFFORTS
Greek town-planning began in the great age of Greece, the fifth
century B.C. But that age had scant sympathy for such a movement, and
its beginnings were crude and narrow. Before the middle of the century
the use of the processional highway had established itself in Greece.
Rather later, a real system of town-planning, based on streets that
crossed at right angles, became known and practised. Later still, in
the early fourth century, the growing care for town-life produced town
by-laws and special magistrates to execute them. In some form or
other, town-planning had now taken root in the Greek world.
The two chief cities of Greece failed, indeed, to welcome the new
movement. Both Athens, the city which by itself means Greece to most
of us, and Sparta, the rival of Athens, remained wholly untouched by
it. Alike in the days of Themistocles and Pericles and in all its
later history, Athens was an almost Oriental mixture of splendid
public buildings with mean and ill-grouped houses. An often-quoted
saying of Demosthenes puts the matter in its most favourable light:
'The great men of old built splendid edifices for the use of the
State, and set up noble works of art which later ages can never match.
But in private life they were severe and simple, and the dwelling of
an Aristides or a Miltiades was no more sumptuous than that of any
ordinary Athenian citizen' (Third Olynthiac Oration, 25).
This is that 'desire for beauty and economy' which Pericles (or
Thucydides) praised in the Funeral Oration. It has a less lovely side.
Not a few passages in Greek literature speak, more or less clearly, of
the streets of Athens as narrow and tortuous, unpaved, unlighted, and
more like a chaos of mud and sewage than even the usual Greek road.
Sparta was worse. There neither public nor private buildings were
admirable, and the historian Thucydides turned aside to note the
meanness of the town.
Nevertheless, the art of town-planning in Greece probably began in
Athens. The architect to whom ancient writers ascribe the first step,
Hippodamus of Miletus,--born about or before 480 B.C.,--seems to have
worked in Athens and in connexion with Athenian cities, under the
auspices of Pericles. The exact nature of his theories has not been
recorded by any of the Greek writers who name him. Aristotle, however,
states that he introduced the principle of straight wide streets, and
that he, first of all architects, made provision for the proper
grouping of dwelling-houses and also paid special heed to the
combination of the different parts of a town in a harmonious whole,
centred round the market-place. But there seems to be no evidence for
the statement sometimes made, that he had any particular liking for
either a circular or a semicircular, fan-shaped town-plan.
_Piraeus_ (fig. 2).
Three cities are named as laid out by Hippodamus. Aristotle tells us
that he planned the Piraeus, the port of Athens, with broad straight
streets. He does not add the precise relation of these streets to one
another. If, however, the results of recent German inquiries and
conjectures are correct, and if they show us his work and not--as is
unfortunately very possible--the work of some later man, his design
included streets running parallel or at right angles to one another
and rectangular blocks of houses; the longer and presumably the more
important streets ran parallel to the shore, while shorter streets ran
at right angles to them down to the quays. Here is a rectangular
scheme of streets, though the outline of the whole town is necessarily
not rectangular (fig. 2).
[Illustration: FIG. 2. PLAN OF PIRAEUS]
_Thurii_.
Another town ascribed to Hippodamus is the colony which the Athenians
and others planted in 443 B.C. at Thurii in southern Italy, of which
Herodotus himself is said to have been one of the original colonists.
Its site has never been excavated, and indeed one might doubt whether
excavation would show the street plan of 443 B.C. or that of a later
and possibly even of a Roman age, when the town was recolonized on the
Roman system. But the historian Diodorus, writing in the first century
B.C. and no doubt embodying much older matter, records a pertinent
detail. The town, he says, was divided lengthways by four streets and
crossways by three. Plainly, therefore, it had a definite and
rectangular street-planning, though the brevity of the historian does
not enable us to decide how many house-blocks it had and how far the
lesser streets were symmetrical with these seven principal
thoroughfares. In most of the cases which we shall meet in the
following sections of this treatise, the number of streets
running-straight or at right angles is very much greater than the
number assigned to Thurii. I may refer for example to the plans of
Priene, Miletus, and Timgad.
_Rhodes_.
A third city assigned to Hippodamus is Rhodes. This, according to
Strabo, was laid out by 'the architect of the Piraeus'; according to
others, it was built round its harbour like the seats of an ancient
theatre round the orchestra, that is, fan-fashion like Karlsruhe.
However, this case is doubtful. Rhodes was laid out in 408 B.C.,
thirty-five years after the planting of Thurii and seventy years after
the approximate date of the birth of Hippodamus. It is conceivable but
not altogether probable that Hippodamus was still planning towns in
his extreme old age, nor is it, on political grounds, very likely that
he would be planning in Rhodes. As, however, we do not know the real
date of his birth, and as Strabo does not specifically mention his
name, certainty is unattainable.[18]
[18] On Hippodamus see K.F. Hermann, _de Hippodamo Milesio_
(Marburg, 1841) and Erdmann, _Philologus_ xlii. 193-227, and
_Programm Protestant. Gymnasium zu Strassburg_, 1883. As will be
seen, I do not accept all Erdmann's conclusions. For the Piraeus
see Aristotle, _Politics_, II. 8 = p. 1267 and IV. 11 = p. 1330.
For Thurii see Diodorus XII. 10. For Rhodes see Strabo 654 = XIV.
ii. 9: E. Meyer, _Gesch. des Alt._ iv. pp. 60, 199 rejects the
tale. For plans of the Piraeus see Wachsmuth, _Stadt Athen im
Alterthum_, ii. 134, and Curtius and Kaupert, _Karten von Attika_
(1881), plan II_a_ by Milchhöfer. Foucart has adduced epigraphic
reasons for dating the work of Hippodamus here to 480-470 B.C.
(_Journal des Savants_, 1907, pp. 178-82); they are not
conclusive, but, if he be right, the difficulty of assigning the
Piraeus and Rhodes to the same architect becomes even greater.
The town-plan of Piraeus given by Gustav Hirschfeld (_Berichte
der sãchs. Ges. der Wissenschaften_, 1878, xxx. I) is not
convincing, nor do I feel very sure even about Milchhöfer's
results.
If we cannot tell exactly how Hippodamus planned cities or exactly
which he planned, still less do we know how far town-planning on his
or on any theory came into general use in his lifetime or indeed
before the middle of the fourth century. Few Greek cities have been
systematically uncovered, even in part. Fewer still have revealed
street-planning which can be dated previous to that time. It does not
follow, when we find streets in the ruins of an ancient city, that
they must belong to its earliest period. That is not true of towns in
any age, modern or mediaeval, Roman or Greek. Some Greek cities were
founded in early times, were rebuilt in the Macedonian period, and
again rebuilt in the Roman period. Without minute excavation it may be
impossible to assign the town-plan of such a place to its proper place
among these three periods.
We have, however, at Selinus in Sicily and Cyrene on the north coast
of Africa, two cases which may belong to the age of Hippodamus. They
are worth describing, since they illustrate both the difficulty of
reaching quite certain conclusions and also the system which probably
did obtain in the later fifth and the early fourth century.
_Selinus_ (fig. 3).
At Selinus the Italian archaeologists discovered some years ago, in
the so-called Acropolis, a town of irregular, rudely pear-shaped
outline with a distinct though not yet fully excavated town-plan. Two
main thoroughfares ran straight from end to end and crossed at right
angles (fig. 3), the longer of these thoroughfares being just a
quarter of a mile long and 30 ft. wide. From these two main streets
other narrower streets (12-18 ft. wide) ran off at right angles; the
result, though not chess-board pattern, is a rectangular town-plan.
Unfortunately, it cannot be dated. Selinus was founded in 648 B.C.,
was destroyed in 409, then reoccupied and rebuilt, and finally
destroyed for ever in 249. Its town-planning, therefore, might be as
early as the seventh century B.C. Or (and this is the most probable
conclusion) it may date from the days of Selinuntine prosperity just
before 409, when the city was growing and the great Temple of Zeus or
Apollo was rising on its eastern hill. Or again, though less probably,
it may have been introduced after 400. We may conclude that we have
here a clear case of town-planning and we may best refer it to the
later part of the fifth century.[19]
[Illustration: FIG. 3. PLAN OF SELINUS]
[19] Koldewey and Puchstein, _Die griech. Tempel in Unteritalien
und Sicilien_, p. 90, plan 29, from Cavallari; Hulot and
Fougères, _Sélinonte_, Paris, 1910, pp. 121, 168, 196. The latter
writers assign the rebuilding to Hermocrates, 408-407 B.C. But
our accounts of Hermocrates do not suggest that he rebuilt
anything at Selinus of any sort, except defences.
_Cyrene_ (fig. 4).
[Illustration: FIG. 4. PLAN OF CYRENE]
At Cyrene the researches of two English archaeologists about 1860
disclosed a town-plan based, like that of Selinus, on two main streets
which crossed at right angles (fig. 4). Here, however, the other
streets do not seem to have been planned uniformly at right angles to
the two main thoroughfares, and the rectangular scheme is therefore
less complete and definite than at Selinus. Cyrene, unfortunately,
resembles Selinus in another respect, that we have no proper knowledge
of the date when its main streets were laid out. It was founded
somewhere in the seventh century B.C. and Pindar, in an ode written
about 466 B.C., mentions a great processional highway there. Whether
this was one of the two roads above mentioned is not clear. But it is
not probable, since Pindar's road seems hardly to have been inside the
city at all.[20]
[20] Smith and Porcher, _Discoveries at Cyrene_ (1864), plate 40;
hence Studnickza, _Kyrene_ (1890, p. 167, fig. 35), and Malten,
_Kyrene_ (Berlin, 1911). For Pindar's reference see Pyth. v. 90
and p. 16 above.
In these two cases and in one or two others which might be noted from
the same or later times, the town-scheme includes rectangular elements
without any strict resemblance to the chess-board pattern. The
dominant feature is the long straight street, of great width and
splendour, which served less as the main artery of a town than as a
frontage for great buildings and a route for solemn processions. Here,
almost as in Babylon, we have the spectacular element which architects
love, but which is, in itself, insufficient for the proper disposition
of a town. Long and ample streets, such as those in question, might
easily be combined, as indeed they are combined in some modern towns
of southern Europe and Asia, with squalid and ill-grouped
dwelling-houses. Hippodamus himself aimed at something much better, as
Aristotle tells us. But it was not till after 350 B.C. or some
approximate date, that dwelling-houses were actually arranged and
grouped on a definite system.[21]
[21] Soluntum, near Palermo, on the north coast of Sicily, was
found by Cavallari in 1875 to exhibit a rectangular street-plan;
one main street ran north and south along level ground and
several lesser streets lay at right angles to it mounting a
hillside by means of steps (as at Priene, p. 42). See the
_Bullettino delta Commissione di Antichità e Belle Arti in
Sicilia_, viii. Palermo, August 1875. Cavallari himself assigned
this plan to the date when Soluntum was founded--which is
unfortunately uncertain--but only on the general ground that 'in
una città, una volta tracciate le strade e disposte le arterie
dicommunicazione, non è facile cambiarne la disposizione
generale'. I attach less weight than he does to this reason.
Soluntum was in the main and by origin a Phoenician town, with a
Greek colouring; in 307 B.C. it was refounded for the discharged
soldiers of Agathocles; later still, in Roman times, it had the
rank of 'municipium'; most of its ruins are generally considered
to be of Roman date and small objects found in it are also mostly
Roman, and its street-plan may also be Roman. As the 'Bullettino'
is somewhat rare, I add a reduced plan (fig. 5).
[Illustration: FIG. 5. SOLUNTUM]
It was probably, however, in the first half of the fourth century that
the Greek cities began to pass by-laws relating to the police, the
scavenging and the general public order of their markets and streets,
and to establish Agoranomi to control the markets and Astynomi to
control the streets. These officials first appear in inscriptions
after 350, but are mentioned in literature somewhat earlier. An
account of the Athenian constitution, ascribed formerly to Xenophon
and written (as is now generally agreed) about 430-424 B.C., mentions
briefly the prosecution of those who built on to the public land, that
is (apparently), who encroached upon the streets. But it is silent as
to specific officers, Astynomi or other. Plato, however, in his
'Laws', which must date a little earlier than his death in 347,
alludes on several occasions to such officers. They were to look after
the private houses 'in order that they may all be built according to
laws', and to police and clean the roads and water-channels, both
inside and outside of the city. A prohibition of balconies leaning
over the public streets, and of verandas projecting into them, is also
mentioned in two or three writers of the fourth century and is said to
go back to a much earlier date, though its antiquity was probably
exaggerated.[22]
[22] Plato, _Laws_ 763 c, 779 c, &c.; Aristotle, _Ath. Pol._ 50;
Arist., _Oec._ ii. 5, p. 134; Xenophon, _Ath. Pol._ iii. 4;
Schol. to Aeschines, iii. 24. The fact that the word 'Astynomos'
occurs in Aeschylus does not justify the writer of an article in
Pauly-Wissowa (_Real-Encycl._ ii. 1870) in stating that
magistrates of this title were already at work in the earlier
part of the fifth century; the poet uses the noun in a general
sense from which it was afterwards specialized. Some of the
regulations recur at Rome (p. 137).
The municipal by-laws which these passages suggest clearly came into
use before, though perhaps not long before, the middle of the fourth
century. They do not directly concern town-planning; they involve
building regulations only as one among many subjects, and those
regulations are such as might be, and in many cases have been, adopted
where town-planning was unknown. But they are natural forerunners of
an interest in town-planning. As in modern England, so in
fourth-century Greece, their appearance suggests the growth of a care
for well-ordered town life and for municipal well-being which leads
directly to a more elaborate and methodical oversight of the town as
an organized combination of houses and groups of houses.
As we part from this early Greek town-planning, we must admit that
altogether we know little of it. There was such a thing: among its
main features was a care for stately avenues: its chief architect was
Hippodamus. Thus much is clear. But save in so far as Milchhöfer's
plans reproduce the Piraeus of B.C. 450 or 400, we cannot discern
either the shape or the size of the house-blocks, or the grouping
adopted for any of the ordinary buildings, or the scheme of the
ordinary roads. We may even wonder whether such things were of much
account in the town-planning of that period.