Hippodamus of Miletus
Hippodamus of Miletus (
Hippodamus was born in Miletus and lived during the 5th century BC, on the spring of the Ancient Greece classical epoch. His father was Euryphon. According to Aristotle, Hippodamus was the first author who wrote upon the theory of government, without any knowledge of practical affairs.[2]
His plans of Greek cities were characterised by order and regularity in contrast to the intricacy and confusion common to cities of that period, even Athens. He is seen as the originator of the idea that a town plan might formally embody and clarify a rational social order. However, as cities were built with orthogonal plans centuries before his birth, he cannot be the originator of the concept.[3]
Personality
He is referred to in the works of Aristotle, Stobaeus, Strabo, Hesychius, Photius, and Theano.
He evidently had a reputation as a lover of attention. According to Aristotle's description in Politics, "Some people thought he carried things too far, indeed, with his long hair, expensive ornaments, and the same cheap warm clothing worn winter and summer."[4]
In the treatise On Virtue, Theano (apparently the wife of Pythagoras) addressed a certain Hippodamus of Thurium (presumably this same man) that her work contains the doctrine of the golden mean.[5]
Achievements
The "Best State"
According to Aristotle (in Politics ii.8), Hippodamus was a pioneer of urban planning, and he devised an ideal city to be inhabited by 10,000 men[4] (free male citizens), while the overall population (including women, children, and slaves) would reach 50,000. He studied the functional problems of cities and linked them to the state administration system. As a result, he divided the citizens into three classes (soldiers, artisans and 'husbandmen'), with the land also divided into three (sacred, public and private).
Aristotle criticized the monopolization of
Urban planner
According to Aristotle, he was the first urban planner to focus attention to proper arrangements of cities. He laid out the Piraeus (the port of Athens) for Pericles, with wide streets radiating from the central Agora, which was generally called the Hippodameia (Ἱπποδάμεια) in his honour,[7][8] and built the refounded city of Rhodes[9] in the form of a theater. In 440 BC he went out among the Athenian colonists[10] and planned the new city of Thurium (later Thurii), in Magna Graecia, with streets crossing at right angles; as a consequence he is sometimes referred to as Hippodamus of Thurium. His principles were later adopted in many important cities, such as Halicarnassus, Alexandria and Antioch.[11]
Strabo[12] credited the architect of Piraeus with the layout of the new city of Rhodes in 408 BC; however, as Hippodamus was involved in 479 BC with helping the reconstruction of Miletus he would have been very old when this project took place.
The grid plans attributed to him consisted of series of broad, straight streets, cutting one another at right angles.[13] In Miletus we can find the prototype plan of Hippodamus. What is most impressive in his plan is a wide central area, which was kept unsettled according to his macro-scale urban prediction/estimation and in time evolved to the "Agora", the centre of both the city and the society.[citation needed]
Writings
The Urban Planning Study for Piraeus (451 BC), which is considered to be a work of Hippodamus, formed the planning standards of that era and was used in many cities of the classical epoch. According to this study, neighbourhoods of around 2,400 m2 blocks were constructed where small groups of 2-floor houses were built. The houses were lined up with walls separating them while the main facets were towards the south. The same study uses polynomial formulas for the pumping infrastructure manufacture.
Philosophy
From Hippodamus came the earliest notions of
Hippodamus does not seem to have been involved in politics, but several writings attributed to him dealt with issues of the state, including Περί Πολιτείας (On the State), Περί Ευδαιμονίας (On Happiness), Πυθαγορίζουσαι Θεωρίαι (Pythagoras Theorems).[16]
References
- ISBN 978-1-59420-277-3
- ^ Lytton, Edward Bulwer (1847). Athens, its rise and fall : with views of the literature, philosophy, and social life of the Athenian people. p. 144.
- ^ "Hippodamian Plan - Livius".
- ^ a b "Aristotle, Politics, Book 2, section 1267b". www.perseus.tufts.edu. Retrieved 2022-02-03.
- ISBN 9780837103020.
- ^ ISBN 0-945999-28-3.
- ^ As by Demosthenes, Against Tmotheus sect. 22, and Andocides, On the Mysteries, sect. 45.
- ^ Suda, iota, 555
- ^ Strabo, xiv.2.
- ^ William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, s.v. Hippodamus.
- ISBN 9780486145921.; problems of disentangling Hippodamus' direct participation from the Hippodamian city plan are addressed in Alfred Burns, "Hippodamus and the planned city", Historia: Zeitschrift fur Alte Geschichte 25/4 (1976): 414-428.
- ^ Geographia, xiv.2
- ^ public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hippodamus". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 519. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^ Merges, Robert Patrick; Duffy, John Fitzgerald (2002). Patent Law and Policy: Cases and Materials (Third ed.). LexisNexis.
- ^ Aristotle (1996). "II.8". In Everson, Stephen (ed.). The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. Cambridge University Press.
- JSTOR 443872.