of life’s necessities, only craft smen had the needed skill and
equipment to forge good weapons and tools, to cast jewelry or
armor, or to paint pottery with scenes of the gods and heroes.
Workshops and forges raised near the agora provided access
to the marketplace and to traders who bought and sold goods
across the seas. Nearby forests and public quarries provided
raw materials for construction, for pottery, and for iron and
bronze forging.
Permanent settlements grew near the agoras and fortifi -
cations. Th e fi rst large Greek towns were built on the island
of Crete and in Ionia (the islands of the eastern Aegean and
the nearby coast of Asia Minor), the most prosperous region
of the early Greek world. Th e Ionian cities, including Mile-
tus and Smyrna, had the essential ingredients for successful
towns: an extensive hinterland that provided food, wine, and
oil as well as a market for craft s such as pottery and tools. Th e
cities of Ionia also lay astride busy trade routes between the
Aegean, the Black Sea, Egypt, and the Levant.
In the early Greek cities regular blocks shared un-
paved streets that led from the town gates to central public
squares. Th e houses had several rooms, with some rising
two stories in a wing set back from the street. Alleys sepa-
rated the blocks and provided drainage for rainwater and
wastewater. In the outer districts and in smaller settle-
ments, haphazard, unpaved lanes meandered among the
private homes and workshops.
From the beginning of the Archaic Period (ca. 600 b.c.e.)
and the earliest Greek writing, many Greek settlements be-
came entirely self-suffi cient, their inhabitants having the
skills or the wealth to live independently off the land. In con-
trast to farming settlements, these towns gave rise to distinct
social divisions. At the top was an urban aristocracy, men
who were responsible for civic aff airs, for lawmaking, for set-
tling disputes, and for leadership in war. Th e members of this
class held full membership and rights in the city. Women,
children, and foreigners did not hold the privileges of the
citizenry; slaves—most gathered by war and piracy—had no
legal rights whatsoever and could be disposed of in any man-
ner their owners saw fi t.
By the process of synoikismos, several villages unifi ed
themselves into a polis, or city-state. Th e most signifi cant such
event in Greek history was the confederation of several villag-
es in Attica, a peninsula of southern Greece, to form the polis
of Athens, an act that by the city’s tradition was carried out
by its founder-king, Th eseus. Other leading city-states were
Th ebes, Sparta, and Corinth; Delos and Rhodes were promi-
nent island-states in the Aegean region. In some places this
unifi cation took place without a physical center, and so the
polis could simply mean a political alliance among extended
families or villages. But in most cases cities had such a cen-
ter, as well as a gymnasium or school, public halls, a theater,
a temple, and water delivered through public fountains. Th e
city reserved to itself the authority to mint coins, to regulate
the calendar, to keep standard weights and measures, and to
set down the proper timing and duration of religious festivals.
Grain inspectors, superintendents of the markets, and port
overseers watched over commerce. A city might depend for
its existence on the export of its marble, silver, wine, timber,
or fl ax; to keep careful control over trade in this item was the
diff erence between success or failure, wealth or starvation.THE INNOVATIONS OF HIPPODAMUS
Th e architect Hippodamus of Miletus is the fi rst-known city
planner in Greek history. According to historical tradition,
Hippodamus created the orthogonal (rectangular) pattern
of streets that came into vogue during the Classical Period
(starting in the fi ft h century b.c.e.). In fact, Hippodamus was
not the fi rst to create a regular street grid, but he did apply his
philosophy of the ideal city to his Ionian hometown, thereby
setting a standard for new Greek towns raised in the centu-
ries to come.
In the ideal city of Hippodamus, the citizens of the po-
lis were divided into artisans, farmers, and soldiers, while
the land consisted of religious, public, and private zones. He
carried this tripartite division to Miletus, which was rebuilt
in 479 b.c.e. aft er its destruction by a Persian army. Hip-
podamus laid out three main sections, divided by the city’s
two harbors. Th e central agora and public buildings were
raised in a low-lying precinct, while the city’s theater was
built into the side of a hill overlooking the main harbor; on
the other side of the harbor was a temple dedicated to the
goddess Athena (at the smaller harbor, known as the Lion
Harbor, stood a temple of Apollo). A highway linking the
city to sacred precincts in the countryside led away from
the wall at the southern edge of the city. Aft er it was rebuilt
by Hippodamus, Miletus grew to a population of 100,000,
one of the largest cities of ancient Greece, and boasted three
large covered markets, one of them made of fi ne marble and
surrounded by galleries two stories tall.
Th e renown of Hippodamus spread to Athens, which
had become the wealthiest city of the Greek world. Athenian
leaders invited Hippodamus to lay out the streets of the new
harbor town of Piraeus, near Athens, as well as the colony of
Th urii in southern Italy. Th e Hippodamian plan was imitat-
ed, or applied by him personally, at Olynthus in Macedonia,
at the city of Rhodes, and at the town of Priene. Th e rect-
angular grid, and the idea of specialized precincts carefully
laid out within that grid, became a convention throughout
the Greek world, even on hilly ground and mountain slopes
where the terrain made surveying and construction on such
a plan diffi cult.PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BUILDINGS
Th e cities of ancient Greece grew by absorbing nearby
settlements and by commerce, which earned money and
attracted foreign traders and fortune seekers. By proving
their merit, these outsiders could win citizenship, granted
by a vote in the public assembly. Wealthy rural landown-
ers also built homes in the city to enjoy its services and
entertainments, to conduct business in the agora, and takecities: Greece 223