[*] The most fearful thereof was the great plague of 430 B.C. (during the Peloponnesian War), which nearly ruined Athens.
The first entrance to Athens will thus bring to a stranger, full of the city’s fame and expectant of meeting objects of beauty at every turn, almost instant disappointment. The narrow, dirty, ill-paved streets are also very crooked. One can readily be lost in a labyrinth of filthy little lanes the moment one quits the few main thoroughfares. High over head, to be sure, the red crags of the Acropolis may be towering, crowned with the red, gold, and white tinted marble of the temples, but all around seems only monotonous squalor. The houses seem one continuous series of blank walls; mostly of one, occasionally of two stories, and with flat roofs. These walls are usually spread over with some dirty gray or perhaps yellow stucco. For most houses, the only break in the street walls are the simple doors, all jealously barred and admitting no glance within. There are usually no street windows, if the house is only one story high. If it has two stories, a few narrow slits above the way may hint that here are the apartments for the slaves or women. There are no street numbers. There are often no street names. “So-and-so lives in such-and-such a quarter, near the Temple of Heracles;” that will enable you to find a householder, after a few tactful questions from the neighbors; and after all, Athens is a relatively small city[*] (as great cities are reckoned), very closely built, and her regular denizens do not feel the need of a directory.
[* ]Every guess at the population of Athens rests on mere conjecture; yet, using the scanty data which we possess, it seems possible that the population of all Attica at the height of its prosperity was about 200,000 free persons (including the metics—resident foreigners without citizenship); and a rather smaller number of slaves—say 150,000 or less. Of this total of some 350,000, probably something under one half resided in the city of Athens during times of peace, the rest in the outlying farms and villages. Athens may be imagined as a city of about 150,000—possibly a trifle more. During serious wars there would be of course a general removal into the city.
So the crowd elbows its way onward: now thinning, now gaining, but the main stream always working towards the Market Place.
12. The Simplicity of Athenian Life.—It is clear we are entering a city where nine tenths of what the twentieth century will consider the “essential conveniences” of life are entirely lacking; where men are trying to be civilized—or, as the Greeks would say, to lay hold upon “the true, the beautiful, and the good,” without even the absolute minimum of those things which people of a later age will believe separate a “civilized man” from a “barbarian.” The gulf between old Athens and, for instance, new Chicago is greater than is readily supposed[*]. It is easy enough to say that the Athenians lacked such things as railways, telephones, gas, grapefruit, and cocktails. All such matters we realize were not known by our fathers and grandfathers, and we are not yet so removed from them that we cannot transport ourselves in imagination back to the world of say 1820 A.D.; but the Athenians are far behind even our grandfathers. When we investigate, we will find conditions like these—houses absolutely without plumbing, beds without sheets, rooms as hot or as cold as the outer air, only far more drafty. We must cross rivers without bridges; we must fasten our clothes (or rather our “two pieces of cloth”) with two pins instead of with a row of buttons; we must wear sandals without stockings (or go barefoot); must warm ourselves over a pot of ashes; judge plays or lawsuits on a cold winter morning sitting in the open air; we must study poetry with very little aid from books, geography without real maps, and politics without newspapers; and lastly, “we must learn how to be civilized without being comfortable!”[+]
[*] See the very significant comment on the physical limitations of the old Athenian life in Zimmern’s “The Greek Commonwealth,” p. 209.
[+] Zimmern, ibid.
Or, to reverse the case: we must understand that an Athenian would have pronounced our boasted “civilization” hopelessly artificial, and our life so dependent on outward material props and factors as to be scarcely worth the living. He would declare himself well able to live happily under conditions where the average American or Englishman would be cold, semi-starved, and miserable. He would declare that his woe or happiness was retained far more under his own control than we retain ours, and that we are worthy of contemptuous pity rather than of admiration, because we have refined our civilization to such a point that the least accident, e.g. the suspension of rail traffic for a few days, can reduce a modern city to acute wretchedness.
Probably neither the twentieth century in its pride, nor the fourth century B.C. in its contempt, would have all the truth upon its side.[*] The difference in viewpoint, however, must still stand. Preëminently Athens may be called the “City of the Simple Life.” Bearing this fact in mind, we may follow the multitude and enter the Marketplace; or, to use the name that stamps it as a peculiarly Greek institution,—the Agora.
[*] The mere matter of climate would of course have to come in as a serious factor. The Athenian would have found his life becoming infinitely more complex along the material side when he tried to live like a “kalos-k’agathos”—i.e. a “noble and good man,” or a “gentleman,”—in a land where the thermometer might sink to 15° below zero Fahrenheit (or even lower) from time to time during the winter.