They are only fifteen feet wide or even less,--intolerable alleys
a later age would call them,--and dirty to boot. Sometimes they
are muddy, more often extremely dusty. Worse still, they are
contaminated by great accumulations of filth; for the city is without
an efficient sewer system or regular scavengers. Even as the crowd
elbows along, a house door will frequently open, an ill-favored
slave boy show his head, and with the yell, "Out of the way!" slap
a bucket of dirty water into the street. There are many things to
offend the nose as well as the eyes of men of a later race. It is
fortunate indeed that the Athenians are otherwise a healthy folk,
or they would seem liable to perpetual pestilence; even so, great
plagues have in past years harried the city[*].

[*]The most fearful thereof was the great plague of 430 B.C. (during
the Peloponnesian War), which nearly ruined Athens.

The first entrance to Athens will thus bring to a stranger, full of
the city's fame and expectant of meeting objects of beauty at every
turn, almost instant disappointment. The narrow, dirty, ill-paved
streets are also very crooked. One can readily be lost in a
labyrinth of filthy little lanes the moment one quits the few main
thoroughfares. High over head, to be sure, the red crags of the
Acropolis may be towering, crowned with the red, gold, and white
tinted marble of the temples, but all around seems only monotonous
squalor. The houses seem one continuous series of blank walls;
mostly of one, occasionally of two stories, and with flat roofs.
These walls are usually spread over with some dirty gray or perhaps
yellow stucco. For most houses, the only break in the street walls
are the simple doors, all jealously barred and admitting no glance
within. There are usually no street windows, if the house is only