A small Greek city laid out on a Hippodamian grid of equal blocks down a steep hillside: the agora ringed by stoas at its centre, the temple of Athena on a terrace above, the theatre cut into the slope, the council house beside the agora, and some two hundred courtyard houses turned to the sun.
Aristotle names Hippodamus of Miletus as the man who first divided cities into regular blocks, and in Book VII of the Politics he tells the founder of a city where things should go: temples and magistrates on a conspicuous site, a “free” agora below them kept clear of trade, a separate market for goods, and walls, for all that regular streets make a city easier for an enemy to take. Priene, refounded above the Maeander plain around 350 BC and built up over the next two centuries, is the city that shows those rules most completely.
Its grid of blocks, 160 by 120 Ionic feet, is laid over a slope so steep that the east–west streets run level along terraces while the north–south streets climb as stairs. Public buildings take whole blocks: the agora with stoas on three sides and the long Sacred Stoa across the main street, as Vitruvius describes the Greek agora; the council house and town hall behind it; the food market apart to the west; Athena’s temple, by Pytheos, raised on its own terrace; the theatre in the hillside at the top; the gymnasia and stadium at the bottom. The walls ignore the grid and climb the crags to the acropolis.
Each block first held eight houses; by the second century BC many had been joined in pairs, as shown here. Every house turns its porch and main room south across its court, as Socrates advises in Xenophon. The number of terraces is simplified and their heights reduced. Click a building for its rule and its source.