Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 129
where “gold and bronze lay piled up, and clothes in chests, and
an abundance of fragrant olive oil, and jars of aged wine, sweet
to drink.”
More impressive than the remains in Attica are those in Olynthos,
a city in northeast Greece that was laid out in a grid pattern, as
was common in the case of new foundations from the fifth century
b.c.e. onward. Even the remains at Olynthos are, however, meager
by comparison with the remains of Roman houses found in Herculaneum
and Pompeii.
Building materials were extremely crude. Even the more sturdily
constructed houses had lower courses of irregularly shaped stones
simply piled on top of one another. Exterior walls were made of
baked or unbaked mud brick, sometimes coated with lime. For the
most part, walls were so thin and poorly constructed that, instead
of breaking in by the front door, thieves sometimes knocked a hole
through them. The word most commonly used for a burglar means
literally a “wall digger.” As the orator and politician Demosthenes
once remarked, “Are you surprised, men of Athens, that burglary
is so common when thieves are bold and walls are merely made of
mud?”
An Athenian house. Courtesy of the American School of Classical Studies
at Athens.