Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Public Sphere 235
munity to another. Mule and drovers’ tracks provided the only link
between communities. Many of the most important roads functioned
as processional ways. In Athens, for instance, the principal
paved road was the Panathenaic Way, which began at the Dipylon
Gate on the west side of the city and ended up on the Acropolis.
It served primarily as a processional way. Despite its importance,
however, the surface along most of its length was simply packed
with gravel. More functional was the paved road to Athens from
the marble quarries on Mount Pentelikon. Goods were conveyed to
Athens from the port of Piraeus—a distance of about five miles—
along a cart road that also began on the west side of the city. (During
the Peloponnesian War, when it was no longer safe to travel
outside the city walls, a road running the entire length of the Long
Walls that joined Athens to its port served in its place.) In many
ways, the most impressive road-building project in Greece was the
diolkos, or slipway, built by the Corinthians around 600 b.c.e. The
diolkos enabled ships to be towed across the isthmus of Corinth
rather than having to circumnavigate the Peloponnese. It remained
in use until the ninth century c.e.
Sea Travel
The most common means of long-distance travel was by sea,
though sea travel was hazardous due to weather conditions, piracy,
and poor means of navigation. The sea god Poseidon’s enmity to
Odysseus, which delays the hero’s homecoming and causes him
the loss of all his ships, reflects a genuine paranoia about sea travel,
notwithstanding its importance to Greek culture. Because there
were no passenger ships, those seeking to travel by sea would
have had to present themselves on the waterfront and bargain for a
place on a ship heading toward their destination or at least toward
a stop-off point along the way. They would have had to take their
own bedding with them, along with food and cooking pots.
The busiest commercial port in the Greek world in the Classical
Period was the Piraeus, which functioned not only as a center
for the export of Athenian merchandise and the import of goods
destined for Athens, but also as an entrepôt or place of redistribution
and transshipment for traders who found it more convenient
to use its unrivaled facilities than deal directly with the source of
supply. Given the unpredictability of the Aegean during the winter
months, its commercial port, which was known as the emporion,
must have hummed and buzzed with frenetic activity for half the
year and been practically idle for the rest.