"Greek/Spartan scenery?" Topic

I plan to do a 28mm skirmish scenario set in 4-5th century Greece/Sparta. Beside temples I have not found any images of how buildings, walls and other structures would look like and what colour they might have. Grateful for any advice!

link

That's a great link, Margard.

Anyway .. that sort of thing. Simple block buildings of the type that are still popular in the Mediterranean.

Typical buildings probably had the ends of wooden roof joists sticking out as these seem to be echoed by the triglyphs in classical stone architecture* …

.. and there are references to walled enclosures (for keeping animals, but good places for light troops to corner hoplites!) …

Natural springs are important and fords are more common than bridges (or so it seems in my reading) …

Phil

*triglyphs, of course, are decorative, and have no structural function (so it is hard to see how they would arise other than to mimic the details of wooden and brick domestic buildings)

There is a book called Ancient Greek Houses by Bertha Carr Rider. It has everything you need.

Herma: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herma

For some truly Spartan scenery all you need is a bare table…. Rimshot!

Temples statues and houses were garishly painted by our mundane standards of today.

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If it's set in Sparta. The homes were all the same size, by law, including the homes of the two kings. They had wicker doors and used rough timber. Spartans often made fun of other Greeks and asked how they got the square trees for the beams in their houses. There were barracks for the boys, and mess halls for the men. There were few public buildings. Laws were passed on the lawn by the Eurotas River. Speakers stood on a foot bridge (no council chamber as in 300). The city had no walls (except its men).

Lots of great info! Many thanks!

Houses of that period were mainly rectilinear in plan. The basic construction method (for domestic buildings, as opposed to the monumental stone buildings) seems to have been a stone socle (about a foot or so high), with higher courses in mud brick or rubble; the external surfaces were sometimes rendered, I think. Internal walls (if you care) were often plastered, in which case the dominant colours were whitish and red. Floors in domestic settings were much more likely to be beaten earth than paved; though a dining room/andron might have a simple mosaic or other stone flooring. Two storeys were quite common, it would appear. Large houses would be likely arranged around a central courtyard, frequently with a south-facing porch (the Vari and Dema farmhouses in Attica have been reconstructed on paper and electronically by various people, and are worth a quick search; the former especially is usually presented as typical of a fairly large farm of your period).

Rubble or dry-stone walls would have been fairly common – both cattle pens and basic forts (and terraces). Free standing stoas of a simple, unadorned kind could serve all kinds of purposes in urban contexts. In some parts of Greece (not Laconia, but Attica and several of the islands) free-standing towers (serving various purposes, military and civilian; both square and round, and with all kinds of styles of masonry) were quite common features of the countryside. A small theatre (like those at Thorikos – do a google image search – or Euonymon) is a nice variation (and they're easy to model because again they're basically rectilinear, unlike the bigger ones in Athens and Epidauros). On a less ambitious scale, stone threshing floors and olive-presses would have been features of many substantial farms – and would have looked essentially like they did all around the Mediterranean.

If you are going to be using the the southern Peloponnese as a setting, then, pace Agesilaus, the sources we have for those aspects of Spartan egalitarianism may well have been affected by propagandists of the 'third-century revolution' of Agis IV and Cleomenes III, who may have tried to justify their socio-economic reforms by depicting them as a restoration of the ancient ways laid down by the (effectively mythical) lawgiver Lycurgus. Classical Sparta may not have been quite as Plutarch would have us believe it was (though it didn't look anything like 300 either, mind). Even if it had been, elsewhere in Laconia and Messenia the Perioikic communities and the farms worked by the helots would presumably have looked fairly typical of most of Greece.

EvilBen,

many thanks for sharing your expert konwledge. Walls could be useful. Not sure I know how a wall of "Rubble or dry-stone" would look like. Any pictures or links you can share?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that it wouldn't be any different, basically, than your typical New England field walls. Dry stone means no mortar, just fitted together.

It's especially common anywhere that you have a rocky soil, as the farmers needed something to do with those rocks every spring that burbled up to the surface. otherwise their plows would be destroyed pretty quickly.

Great,

thanks for the image. I think I have seen those before :)

In Classical times Sparta's theater was made of wood.

Different stone, but yes, absolutely. That's the kind of thing. Sorry not to have provided pics, but I don't have any to hand right now that are better than what Google can give you.

Agesilaus has a good point; the theatre of Dionysus in Athens would have used a lot of wooden structures too for most of your period. Market-places would have been full of wooden booths and stalls too, if you want an urban setting.

@Tkindred: Think I've helped build more than a few of those…

Vari farmhouse… link

Wow, that's really impressive. Bigger than I had expected, but I keep forgetting that people in the US were expected to be able to handle 640 acres of land with a single family…