Alike in the days of Themistocles and Pericles and in all its later history, Athens was an almost Oriental mixture of splendid public buildings with mean and ill-grouped houses.

An often-quoted saying of Demosthenes puts the matter in its most favourable light: 'The great men of old built splendid edifices for the use of the State, and set up noble works of art which later ages can never match.
But in private life they were severe and simple, and the dwelling of an Aristides or a Miltiades was no more sumptuous than that of any ordinary Athenian citizen' (Third Olynthiac Oration, 25).
This is that 'desire for beauty and economy' which Pericles (or Thucydides) praised in the Funeral Oration.

It has a less lovely side.
Not a few passages in Greek literature speak, more or less clearly, of the streets of Athens as narrow and tortuous, unpaved, unlighted, and more like a chaos of mud and sewage than even the usual Greek road.
Sparta was worse.

There neither public nor private buildings were admirable, and the historian Thucydides turned aside to note the meanness of the town.
Nevertheless, the art of town-planning in Greece probably began in Athens.

The architect to whom ancient writers ascribe the first step, Hippodamus of Miletus,--born about or before 480 B.C.,--seems to have worked in Athens and in connexion with Athenian cities, under the auspices of Pericles.