Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Space and Time 39
along the west coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey); the islands of
the Aegean, of which there are more than two thousand in all; the
islands off the west coast of Greece; the cities along the east coast of
Sicily; and coastal cities in southern Italy, Libya, and Egypt, as well
as a handful in Spain and France. In the Hellenistic Period, the limits
of the Greek world become almost impossible to define, because
Alexander the Great established Greek colonies in a predominantly
non-Greek world that stretched as far east as the Hindu Kush.
THE CITY OF ATHENS
Like any other Greek polis, the Athenian state was a combination
of urban center, or asty, and countryside, or chôra. Ancient Athens
is today best known for the magnificent buildings erected on the
Acropolis. This is a small, artificially leveled hilltop no more than
300 meters long by 200 meters broad that was the home of Athens’s
patron goddess Athene and other major state gods. Here stands
the monumental gateway known as the Propylaia, the Parthenon
or temple of Athene Parthenos, and the Erechtheion or temple of
Poseidon-Erechtheus, all justly renowned as the crowning achievements
of Classical architecture. These monuments should not, however,
so overwhelm us that we lose sight of the image of Athens as
a city—a city, moreover, that possessed many of the same problems
as any urban development in any period, as well as others that were
peculiar to the ancient world.
Civic Amenities
Despite the grandeur of its civic buildings, in many respects, Athens
resembled a country town rather than a city. Most of the amenities
that we take for granted today were virtually nonexistent. There
was no street lighting, which meant that, after nightfall, pedestrians
had to provide their own source, most commonly no doubt in the
form of a lantern-bearing slave. There was no fire brigade. There
were no hospitals. The police force, such as it was, consisted of publicly
owned slaves, whose job primarily was to keep the peace, not
to detect or prevent or investigate crime. Water was brought to the
city from distant springs by means of terra-cotta pipelines that fed
public fountains. With one or two notable exceptions, the majority
of fountain houses were simple reservoirs cut into the living
rock. Only a few major roads were paved. There were no public
toilets. There was only a very rudimentary and highly inefficient