The street-door of a Grecian house, usually, when single, opened outwards, but when there were folding doors they opened inwards as with us.[[356]] In the former case it was customary when any one happened to be going forth, to knock, or call, or ring a bell, in order to warn passengers to make way.[[357]] These doors were constructed of various materials,[[358]] according to the taste and circumstances of the owner, sometimes of oak, or fir, or maple, or elm; and afterwards as luxury advanced they were made of cedar, cyprus, or even of citron wood, inlaid as in the East, with plates of brass or gold.[[359]] Mention is likewise made of doors entirely composed of the precious metals; of iron also, and bronze and ivory.

The jambs were generally of wood;[[360]] but likewise sometimes of brass or marble. The doors were fastened at first by long bars passing into the wall on both sides;[[361]] and by degrees smaller bolts, hasps, latches, and locks and keys succeeded. For example the outer door of the Thalamos in Homer was secured by a silver hasp, and a leathern thong passed round the handle and tied, perhaps, in a curious knot.[[362]] Doors were not usually suspended on hinges, but turned, as they still do in the East, upon pivots inserted above into the lintel and below into the threshhold.[[363]] In many houses there were in addition small half-doors of open wood-work,[[364]] which alone were commonly closed by day, in order to keep the children from running out, or dogs or pigs from entering. The doors usually consisted of a frame-work, with four or six sunken panels, as with us; but at Sparta, so long as the laws of Lycurgus prevailed, they were made of simple planks fashioned with the hatchet.[[365]] In the great Dorian capital the custom was for persons desirous of entering a house to shout aloud at the door,[[366]] which, at Athens,[[367]] was always furnished with an elegant knocker.[[368]] Door-handles, too, of costly materials and curious workmanship,[[369]] bespoke even in that trifling matter the taste of the Greeks.

The materials commonly used in the erection of a house were stones and bricks. In the manufacture of the latter[[370]] the ancients exhibited more skill and care than we; they had bricks of a very large size, and half bricks for filling up spaces, which prevented the necessity of shortening them with the trowel. Of these some were simply dried in the sun, used chiefly in building the dwellings of the poor.[[371]] At Utica in Africa there were public inspectors of brick-kilns,[[372]] to prevent any from being used which had not been made five years. In several cities on the Mediterranean bricks were manufactured of a porous earth, which when baked and painted, as it may be conjectured, on the outside, were so light that they would swim in water.[[373]] To diminish the weight of bricks, straw was introduced into them in Syria and Egypt, which was altogether consumed in the baking. In roofing such of their houses as were not terraced they employed slates, tiles, and reed-thatch.[[374]] Possibly, also, the wealthy may have tiled their houses with those elegant thin flakes of marble, with which the roofs of temples were occasionally covered.

[261]. But even from a fragment of Bacchylides we may infer the magnificence of Grecian houses; for the poor man who drinks wine, he says, sees his house blazing with gold and ivory:

χρυσῷ δ᾽ ἐλεφαντί τε

μαρμαίρουσιν οἶκοι.

Athen. ii. 10.

Men had by this time advanced considerably from the state in which they are supposed to have built their huts in imitation of the swallow’s nest. Vitruv. ii. 1.

[262]. Plat. Repub. iv. t. vi. p. 165. Dion Chrysost. i. 262. ii. 459. Dem. cont. Mid. § 44.—Lucian. Amor. § 34.