As regards Athens, it is necessary to guard against some misconceptions concerning the life conditions even of the Periclean period. Public buildings apart, it was not a rich or rich-looking city; on the contrary, partly by reason of the force of democratic sentiment, its houses were mostly mean, the well-to-do people presumably having their better houses in the country, where the land was now mostly owned by them. After the destruction of the city by Xerxes (480 B.C.), the first need was felt to be its refortification on a larger scale, even sepulchres as well as the remains of private houses being made to yield materials for the walls.[257] At the same time the Piræus and Munychia were walled on a still greater scale--the whole constituting a public work of extraordinary scope, rapidly carried through by the co-operation of the whole of the citizens. The further gradual rebuilding of the city, as well as the fresh flocking of the foreign trading population to the now safe Piræus, would help, with the public works of Pericles, to set up the conditions of general prosperity which prevailed before the Peloponnesian war.[258] According to Demosthenes, the public men of the generation of Salamis had houses indistinguishable from those of ordinary people, whereas in the orator's own day the statesmen had houses actually finer than the public buildings.[259] This would be the natural result of the control of the confederate treasure resulting from the Athenian supremacy. But Dicæarchus belongs to the same period, and his account represents the mass of the city as poor in appearance, the houses small and with projecting stairways, and the streets crooked.[260] We know further from Xenophon that there were many empty spaces, some of them doubtless made by the customary destruction of the houses of those ostracised. There was thus a considerable approach to a rather straitened equality among the mass of the town-dwelling free citizens, who, despite the meanness of their houses, had luxuries in the form of the public baths and gymnasia.