R. E. Wycherley

Aristophanes, Birds , 995–1009

A mongst the people who pester Peisthetaerus (or Peithetaerus or whatever his name is) with unwanted help and advice in the latter part of the Birds is Meton, famous astronomer and mathematician, who produces and demonstrates with instruments a method of laying out the plan of the new town. Peisthetaerus makes no attempt to follow him and quickly bundles him out again without much ceremony. Commentators and readers with few exceptions treat him in a similar way. ʹEπίτηδeς ⋯δɩανόητα, δɩόλου ⋯νοηταίνeɩ, παίζeɩ—such are the comments of the scholiast, and editors are mostly content with that. Van Leeuwen (on 1002–1005) says, ‘Metonis haec verba intellegere velle, id est operam dare ut suo ioco frustretur cbtnicus.’ The passage is of course highly comical; to make it didactic and attribute to Aristophanes a serious excursion into geometry and town-planning would be perverse and pedantic; but in Aristophanes more than in most comic writers there is commonly a grain or two of truth among the chaff. These grains, though of little or no importance for the appreciation of the play as comedy, may still have some possible value in other ways, and should be carefully sifted.

Greek Town-Planning

IN the sixth and fifth centuries, when Hellenic civilization was well advanced and the architectural growth of the city-state pretty well complete, the Greeks were still frequently creating new cities — colonies, capitals for federal states and leagues, and replacements of towns very thoroughly destroyed by the Persians and others. In such circumstances it would have been surprising if the inventive genius of the Greeks had not produced some way of town-planning, and attempted to create a city deliberately instead of simply letting it grow; and in fact by the fifth century practical needs had suggested methods, and at the same time architects had had visions of an ideal architectural form for the polis, and were attempting to put them into practice, though aesthetic theory was never allowed to predominate.