athenian housing

Athenian Housing
Housing for the Athenians seems like a joke for us today, but back then it was the only protection and shelter they had, which was not good enough.
The city had no planned housing and houses were built where the owners wanted to build their house. The random development caused houses to be very varied in price and extremely varied throughout the whole city. As one of socrates statements was written down it expressed how varied and difficult housing prices were. Socrates states to his rich friend krioboulos, “I expect that if I found a good buyer, everything [the barn and fields] including the house would fetch 5 minai, whereas your house, I bet, would sell for more than a hundred times that amount”. The majority of the housing was poor and simple. The great ... wrote that “Most of the houses are mean, the pleasant ones few. A stranger would doubt, on first acquaintance, that this was really the renowned city of the Athenians.” This clearly states the Athenians effort for the construction of houses and shelter for themselves and their families were way below minimum standards for a city like Athens.
Up to three generations of the same family, along with wives and children, lived in one extremely small to moderately large house, which was insanitary and very crowded all of the time. The daughters would move out to their husbands house when they were married. When they married the bride permanently moved to the grooms house.

The houses were of no use to the protection of families or valuable items. The walls were so thin and weak that people could literally knock a hole through the wall and enter the house. The walls were made of brick that could be baked but was not necessary. We get the term burglar, which literally means “wall digger”, from the robbers ability to just go through walls steal and then disappear, thanks to these weak walls they could.
Very few houses are left even partially preserved today, but there are a few houses of the bronze age that were hit by a volcano and perfectly preserved. Quite a few with paintings all over the walls and even though the second floor was gone one the best examples, the rest of the building was still perfect and most of the second floor was salvageable. Even though these houses were found untouched, the houses before the golden age were, like stated, very simple, varied, and unstable. The previous houses also lacked any sort of luxury, which was not normal for the Athenians.
At first housing was hard and complex for the Athenians. Later on they were able to prefect housing, the costs to build and sell, and the structural stability for a stable shelter.