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