poet uses the noun in a general
sense from which it was afterwards specialized. Some of the
regulations recur at Rome (p. 137).
The municipal by-laws which these passages suggest clearly came into
use before, though perhaps not long before, the middle of the fourth
century. They do not directly concern town-planning; they involve
building regulations only as one among many subjects, and those
regulations are such as might be, and in many cases have been, adopted
where town-planning was unknown. But they are natural forerunners of
an interest in town-planning. As in modern England, so in
fourth-century Greece, their appearance suggests the growth of a care
for well-ordered town life and for municipal well-being which leads
directly to a more elaborate and methodical oversight of the town as
an organized combination of houses and groups of houses.
As we part from this early Greek town-planning, we must admit that
altogether we know little of it. There was such a thing: among its
main features was a care for stately avenues: its chief architect was
Hippodamus. Thus much is clear. But save in so far as Milchhoefer's
plans reproduce the Piraeus of B.C. 450 or 400, we cannot discern
either the shape or the size of the house-blocks, or the grouping
adopted for any of the ordinary buildings, or the scheme of the
ordinary roads. We may even wonder whether such things were of much
account in the town-planning of that period.
CHAPTER IV
GREEK TOWN-PLANNING: THE MACEDONIAN AGE, 330-130 B.C.
The Macedonian age brought with it, if not a new, at least a more
systematic, method of town-planning. That was the age when Alexander
and his Macedonian army conquered the East and his successors for
several generations ruled over western Asia, when Macedonians and
Greeks alike flocked into the newly-opened world and Graeco-Macedonian
cities were planted in bewildering numbers throughout its length and
breadth. Most of these cities sprang up full-grown; not seldom their
first citizens were the discharged Macedonian soldiery of the armies
of Alexander and his successors. The map of Turkey in Asia is full of
them. They are easily recognized by their names, which were often
taken from those of Alexander and his generals and successors, their
wives, daughters, and relatives. Thus, one of Alexander's youngest
generals, afterwards Seleucus I, sometimes styled Nicator, founded
several towns called Seleucia, at least three ca
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