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