The first entrance to Athens will thus bring to a stranger, full of the city’s fame and expectant of meeting objects of beauty at every turn, almost instant disappointment. The narrow, dirty, ill-paved streets are also very crooked. One can readily be lost in a labyrinth of filthy little lanes the moment one quits the few main thoroughfares. High over head, to be sure, the red crags of the Acropolis may be towering, crowned with the red, gold, and white tinted marble of the temples, but all around seems only monotonous squalor. The houses seem one continuous series of blank walls; mostly of one, occasionally of two stories, and with flat roofs. These walls are usually spread over with some dirty gray or perhaps yellow stucco. For most houses, the only break in the street walls are the simple doors, all jealously barred and admitting no glance within. There are usually no street windows, if the house is only one story high. If it has two stories, a few narrow slits above the way may hint that here are the apartments for the slaves or women. There are no street numbers. There are often no street names. “So-and-so lives in such-and-such a quarter, near the Temple of Heracles;” that will enable you to find a householder, after a few tactful questions from the neighbors; and after all, Athens is a relatively small city[*] (as great cities are reckoned), very closely built, and her regular denizens do not feel the need of a directory. [* ]Every guess at the population of Athens rests on mere conjecture; yet, using the scanty data which we possess, it seems possible that _the population of all Attica_ at the height of its prosperity was about _200,000 free persons_ (including the _metics_—resident foreigners without citizenship); and a rather smaller number of slaves—say 150,000 or less. Of this total of some 350,000, probably something under one half resided in the city of Athens during times of peace, the rest in the outlying farms and villages. _Athens may be imagined as a city of about 150,000_—possibly a trifle more. During serious wars there would be of course a general removal into the city. So the crowd elbows its way onward: now thinning, now gaining, but the main stream always working towards the Market Place.