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