lled Apamea, and
others named Laodicea and Antiochia, thereby recording himself, his
Iranian wife Apama, his mother Laodice and his father Antiochus, and
his successors seem to have added other towns bearing the same name.
Indeed, two-thirds of the town-names which are prominent in the later
history of Asia Minor and Syria, date from the age of Alexander and
his Macedonians.

Many discoveries show that these towns were laid out with a regular
'chess-board' street-plan. That method of town-planning now made
definite entry into the European world. No architect or statesman is
recorded to have invented or systematically encouraged it. Alexander
himself and his architect, one Dinocrates of Rhodes or perhaps of
Macedonia, seem to have employed it at Alexandria in Egypt, and this
may have set the fashion. Seven years after Alexander's death it
recurs at Nicaea in Bithynia, which was refounded by one of
Alexander's successors in 323 B.C. and was laid out on this fashion.
But no ancient writer credits either the founder or the architect of
Alexandria or the founder of Nicaea with any particular theory on the
subject. If the chess-board fashion becomes now, with seeming
suddenness, the common--although not the universal--rule, that is
probably the outcome of the developments sketched in the last chapter.
Approximations to chess-board planning had been here and there
employed in the century before Alexander. When his conquests and their
complicated sequel led, amongst other results, to the foundation of
many new towns, it was natural that the most definite form of planning
should be chosen for general use.

We might, however, wonder whether its adoption was helped by the
military character of the generals who founded, and the discharged
soldiers who formed the first inhabitants of so many among these
towns. Military men are seldom averse to rigidity. It is worth noting,
in this connexion, that when chess-board planning came into common use
in the Roman Empire, many--perhaps most--of the towns to which it was
applied were 'coloniae' manned by time-expired soldiers. So, too, in
the Middle Ages and even in comparatively modern times, the towns laid
out with rectangular street-plans in northern Italy, in Provence, in
the Rhine Valley, are for the most part due in some way or other to
military needs.[23] In our own days rectangular planning is a dominant
feature of the largest and newest industrial towns. They are adapting
a milita