|
|
As the twilight deepens outside, Phanagora lights the first in a row of little oil lamps at the back of the tavern. She’s starting a new amphora of wine and wants to make sure that the sediment in the urn has properly settled. Yesterday, a patron had pointedly asked for his wine to be poured into the Spartan campaign cup that he had brought along for the purpose. These cups have a series of concentric rings indented into the inside. This is all the better to trap debris if the cup is dipped into a muddy stream, or alternatively to catch the lees from a poorly filtered amphora of wine. Phanagora prides herself on the quality of the fare she serves, so the implied insult had stung. Now she carefully checks the product, even though this particular amphora is ‘black wine’ from Chios and almost opaque.17
The early evening crowd are rolling in – workmen dusty from their labours, shopkeepers from the Agora, and artisans from the many small manufactories scattered around the Piraeus. Some are slaves, some are metics and some are native Athenians. Phanagora does not really care so long as their coin is good. There’s also a smattering of travellers from the docks. Many like to stop here for a quick bout of refreshment before taking the long stroll between the Long Walls up to Athens proper.
One such traveller seems to be the long-haired foreigner sitting in the corner, twirling an oiled lock of grey hair around his forefinger as he gazes disapprovingly down the street. His tunic is cheap lambswool, albeit warm and comfortable, yet the rings on his fingers are Italian-worked gold. Phanagora is a bit uneasy about that. Most of her patrons are a good crowd, but there’s always the odd bad apple who might be tempted into a bit of street thievery if the victim is evidently a foreigner.
‘Those stalls, down there – who permits them?’ he demands of Phanagora when she comes to top up his wine. ‘They are permanent structures and should be removed. The whole point of that street is that it should carry away water in a heavy rain.’
A TERRACOTTA OIL LAMP. ONES FROM PRIVATE HOUSES WERE OFTEN MUCH MORE ELABORATE
‘It’s not really a problem,’ remarks Pentarkes, who has come downstairs to help his mother-in-law with the evening shift. ‘The street is on an incline, and the rainwater just washes around them.’
‘Not the point,’ insists the stranger loudly. ‘We’re next to Munchyia here, and under that hill everything is so hollowed out and undermined – partly by humans, partly by nature – that you can fit whole houses into some of those tunnels. If the street is not properly drained here, then the water back flows to the Munchyia and causes problems there.’ He jabs a finger at the offending stalls. ‘Those things should not be there.’
‘You seem to know a lot about local geography for a foreigner,’ remarks one of the tavern regulars.
‘Of course I do,’ says the stranger. ‘Munchyia – hill and harbour, that way. Main road to Akte and the grain warehouses, two blocks that way. Quickest way to the main harbour, three blocks that way, turn right. And when you get there, tell the authorities that the piping from the fountain at the intersection could use some repair. Can’t the collective Athenian intellect get its head around the concept of urban maintenance?’
The workmen look a bit defensive. As far as they are concerned the Piraeus works fine. It has straight streets, arranged so that the wind blows the stink and smoke away. Also, the streets are nicely angled so that the houses catch the sun. For twisty old streets, decrepit houses and a water supply so old no one knows where the pipes are, one has to go to the asty (the city of Athens proper). The people of the Piraeus like it where they are.
A workman looks at the stranger suspiciously. ‘Who are you, anyway?’
‘I am Hippodamus!’ The stranger spreads his arms wide, and performs a sort of sitting bow, like an actor receiving applause in the theatre. The revelation is greeted with thoughtful silence.
Hippodamus. The name is certainly familiar. The local agora south of the new theatre is the Hippodamean Agora. The name also pops up on a few other local structures and an intersection near the harbour. This is because Hippodamus was responsible for the design of the whole Piraeus.
After a long pause a voice from the back says, ‘That Hippodamus. I thought you were dead. Ages ago.’
‘Not dead,’ retorts the city planner. ‘Living in Thurium in Italy. Though now you mention it, that’s almost the same thing.’
Phanagora, meanwhile, is staring through the tavern windows, down the darkening street. When she was a girl, that view was just rubble and goat tracks. She recalls that Pericles himself hired Hippodamus to make a proper port town of it all.
Hippodamus once claimed that this was because Pericles had been deeply impressed by his work in the rebuilding of Miletus after the Persians had destroyed it in the Ionian Wars. Pericles liked the idea of streets laid out on a grid plan, and he asked Hippodamus if it was possible for the same thing to be done with the Piraeus. It was Hippodamus’ fond claim that until he did it first, no one had ever thought of making straight streets that cross the others at right angles.
Yet, despite this boast, Anatolia was packed with cities with a grid layout, and those streets had been there for over a thousand years. Even Miletus, according to those with long memories, had been put back together into very much the same shape as it had been before the Persians took it apart – grid pattern and all.
‘Anyway, rebuilding Miletus was a long time ago. You couldn’t have been more than a teenager when the rebuilding started,’ Phanagora says.
‘I’m older than I look,’ retorts Hippodamus. ‘There’s not much alternative to clean living in Thurium. If I didn’t do my grid in Miletus, why else would Pericles have hired me?’
From a seat near the wine casks, a full-bearded man with long wavy hair raises his hand like a schoolchild. Dropping easily into the role of teacher, Phanagora points an authoritative finger. ‘Antisthenes, pupil of Socrates. Stand and answer.’
‘Because you wrote Elements of City Planning. Pericles was really impressed with it. And your idea of dividing city land into public, private and sacred, and then conceiving of a city as a single mechanism with integrated parts – Socrates says it’s revolutionary.’
Antisthenes knows the topic well. Socrates has rather a lot to say about Hippodamus, and Antisthenes has tactfully chosen the more polite bit. Socrates also thinks that Hippodamus’ theories on social engineering are, in his words, ‘the kind of deranged fantasy you get from a know-it-all who tries to talk about politics when he has no practical experience.’ That critique was specifically about Hippodamus’ proposed division of the city’s people into three classes – artisans, farmers and soldiers. ‘What’s to stop the soldiers simply taking over the state?’ Socrates had demanded. Antisthenes is about to put this point to Hippodamus when Phanagora forestalls him.
‘Thank you, Antisthenes. You may sit down,’ she says. Now she turns to face Hippodamus. ‘Our Socrates has offered you a compliment, albeit at second hand. How do you respond?’18
‘By demanding more wine,’ says Hippodamus. ‘If I’m to go on about urban design for the entertainment of the gentlemen here, I deserve to drink at your expense. It’s only fair.’
Hippodamus was the son of Euryphon, a Milesian. It was he who cut up Piraeus with his invention of cities divided into blocks. He developed a somewhat eccentric lifestyle. Some people thought him a dandy, because he liked to stand out with his expensive jewellery and flowing locks of hair. Yet he wore cheap but warm clothes whatever the season. He wanted to be thought to be a man of wide learning in the sciences and was the first man who attempted to speak on the subject of the best form of constitution without having any practical knowledge of the subject.
ARISTOTLE POLITICS 2.1267B18
His drink refreshed, Hippodamus launches into an exposition he has evidently recited dozens of times before. ‘First thing, don’t assume your city is complete. It’s a living entity, like a tree. It’s going to grow and change. You have to allow for that. So when you plan, be flexible. The basic unit for building a house is the brick. The basic unit for building a city is the city block, created by roads running north to south and east to west.
‘Now, you aim to have your important structures in the middle, spaced apart to avoid traffic congestion, and with the main roads running alongside them, not through. Compare the mess that is the Agora in Athens with my creation, the Hippodamean Agora. Instead of having not one but two thoroughfares running right through it, my Agora has the road running alongside it, straight to the temple of Artemis. And that road is sixty cubits wide to accommodate festival crowds, processions or whatever else you want to stage there.’19
Hippodamus refrains from mentioning that Pericles didn’t completely trust the unruly populace down at the port, packed as it is with metics, traders and foreign influences. So, he had Hippodamus make the main road broad, straight and clear. This is wonderful for traffic, but the real reason for the wide street is that its very breadth makes it harder for rioters or rebels to build a decent barricade across it. In fact, the street is wide enough to allow a unit of hoplites to proceed in good formation right down to the harbour.
This last bit of information would undoubtedly upset the unruly elements, foreigners and metics who make up Hippodamus’ audience. Aware that some cynical individual might make the same point at any moment, Hippodamus hurries on to explain the logic behind favouring straight streets.
Pericles wanted the Piraeus as a model city. When water travels along a gutter on a street with too many twists and turns it overflows, and dirty run-off water interferes with the delivery of clean water to the houses. Hippodamus argues that if the blasted authorities would maintain the pipes properly, the water supply in the Piraeus is vastly superior to that in the asty. That’s because the streets run in straight lines, so you can lay pipes right down them.
Phanagora nods in silent agreement. She lives in a Hippodamean house. When her family moved in, the Athenians were building ten houses a week in the Piraeus – sometimes twenty. All have the same plan: two storeys, a small garden and a kitchen at the back. Because everyone knows where the bedrooms and entrances are, it’s easier to fight fires and deliver water right to her door. She has to admit it – the Piraeus works as a place to live. Whatever Hippodamus’ defects as a person, as a city designer he certainly knows his craft.
‘So what tempted you away from Thurium?’ asks one of the audience, diplomatically topping up Hippodamus’ wine cup by pouring out his own. ‘Was it a desire to return to Athens and critique your own work?’
‘Rhodes,’ replies the city planner. ‘I’m on my way to Rhodes. It’s going to be a great city one day, mark my words.’
This gets Hippodamus some puzzled looks. The more well-travelled members of the audience know that Rhodes is not a city at all. It’s an island with a collection of villages sprawling higgledy-piggledy all over the hillsides.
‘I’ve been commissioned to survey the island and pick out a site for a city,’ Hippodamus continues smugly. ‘Just as the ancient Athenian king, Theseus, united the demes of Attica and made Athens the capital, the villages of Rhodes are amalgamating into one city. And I’m going to design it for them. Despite all my imitators, the people of Rhodes still want the original and best.’
‘Imitators?’ asks Phanagora incautiously. The response is vehement.
‘Yes! Imitators. I call them thieves. It’s a better name for them. You steal the purse from a man’s belt, and you are justly punished as a thief. Yet they steal the ideas from a man’s head – ideas that are far more valuable – and they are lauded and rewarded for the theft. If there were any justice in this world, every time someone laid out a grid plan for a township a payment would be due to me, Hippodamus, who thought of it first.’ He pauses, recalling the critics’ mention of the ancient grid plans in Asia Minor.
‘Apart from barbarians. What they thought of doesn’t matter. We don’t owe them anything. But the state should reward those who come up with ideas that are of benefit to the city, just as they reward the sculptors and painters who beautify it and the soldiers who defend it. Yet not only are my ideas given for free, thereafter they are stolen by others.’
Antisthenes piles in yet again. ‘Yet when your purse is taken by another, you have no purse. When your ideas are taken by another, do you not still have those ideas also? It’s as when I light my household fire from your hearth. I take the flame, but you have it yet.’
‘I can see why you are a student of Socrates,’ snarls Hippodamus.
‘Also, the danger of rewarding the man who comes up with bright ideas is that we create a market for ideas. This is Athens. We’ve all the bright ideas we can handle. Yet what if a man decided he could do better by keeping silent and then selling his ideas to Thebes, or Corinth?’
Rewarding anyone who discovers something useful to the state is an idea which sounds good, but it would make dangerous law. It would encourage informers, and perhaps even lead to political disturbances.
ARISTOTLE POLITICS 2.1268
There is a mutter of agreement from those present. Some are turning back to their drinks, others ordering supper from Pentarkes. Private conversations are starting up around the room. Hippodamus has clearly lost his audience. The city planner gets to his feet with exaggerated dignity.
‘I see I am wasting my time here. There are places in the city where I will be welcome and appreciated. I have tarried here too long. Terrible wine, by the way.’ Hippodamus throws a few obols on to the table in front of Phanagora, and stalks out into the gathering twilight.
Assessments of Antisthenes
(later a prominent philosopher of the Cynic school)
He lived in the Piraeus, and every day would march five miles to Athens in order to hear Socrates.
...
Being a metic, he despised the Athenians for their airs, saying, ‘So what if they are sprung from their native soil? So are snails and wingless locusts.’
DIOGENES LAËRTIUS BOOK 6 PASSIM
More intelligent than educated.
CICERO (TO ATTICUS 12.36)
An absolute dog.
PLATO (FROM DIOGENES LAËRTIUS 6.2)