having laid out the Peiræus on a regular plan. The marketplace, or one of them at least, permanently bore his name,— the Hippodamian agora.[1] At a time when so many great architects were displaying their genius in the construction of temples, we are not surprised to hear that the structure of towns began to be regularized also: moreover, we are told that the new colonial town of Thurii, to which Hippodamus went as a settler, was also constructed in the same systematic form as to straight and wide streets.[2]
The new scheme upon which the Peiraeus was laid out, was not without its value as one visible proof of the naval grandeur of Athens. But the buildings in Athens and on the acropolis formed the real glory of the Periklean age. A new theatre, termed the Odeon, was constructed for musical and poetical representations at the great Panathenaic solemnity; next, the splendid temple of Athene, called the Parthenon, with all its masterpieces of decorative sculpture and reliefs; lastly, the costly portals erected to adorn the entrance of the acropolis, on the western side of the hill, through which the solemn processions on festival days were conducted. It appears that the Odeon and the Parthenon were both finished between 445 and 437 B.C.: the Propylæa somewhat later, between 437 and 431 B.C., in which latter year the Peloponnesian war began.[3] Progress was also made in restoring or reconstructing the Erechtheion, or ancient temple of Athene Polias, the patron goddess of the city, which had been burnt in the invasion of Xerxes; but the breaking out of the Peloponnesian war seems to have prevented the completion of this, as well as of the great temple of Demeter, at Eleusis, for the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries,— that of Athene, at Sunium, — and that of Nemesis, at Rhamnus. Nor was the sculpture less memorable than the architecture: three statues of Athene, all by the hand of Pheidias, decorated the acropolis, one colossal, forty-seven feet high, of ivory, in the Parthenon, [4] — a second of bronze, called the Lemnian Athene,
