common life. A Pergamene inscription contains part of a 'Royal Law'
which apparently dates from one of the Attalid rulers. It is
imperfect. But we can recognize some of the items for which it
provided. Houses which fell or threatened to fall on to the public
street, or which otherwise became ruinous, could be dealt with by the
Astynomi; if their owners failed to repair them, these magistrates
were to make good the defects themselves and to recover the cost, and
a fine over and above it, from the owners; if the Astynomi neglected
their duty, the higher magistrates, the Strategi, were to take up the
matter. Streets were to be cleaned and scavenged by the same Astynomi.
Brick-fields were expressly forbidden within the city. The widths of
roads outside the town were fixed and owners of adjacent land were
held liable for their repair, and there was possibly some similar
rule, not preserved on the inscription, for roads inside the walls; at
Priene, it seems, these latter were in the care of the municipality.
There were provisions, too, for the repair of common walls which
divided houses belonging to two owners, and also for the prevention of
damp where two houses stood side by side on a slope and the wall of
the lower house stood against the soil beneath the upper house.[40]
[40] Kolbe, _Athen. Mitteil_. xxvii. 47 and xxix. 75; Hitzig,
_Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung, roman. Abteilung_ xxvi. 433.
These rules are very like those which were coming into use before 330
B.C. (p. 37). Only, they are more elaborate, and it is significant
that the inscriptions begin in Macedonian and later days to give more
and fuller details as to the character of these laws and as to the
existence in many cities of officials to execute them. It is not
surprising to find that Roman legislation of the time of Caesar and
the early Empire applies these or very similar rules to the local
government of the Roman municipalities of the Empire (p. 137).
So common in the Macedonian world was the town-planning which has been
described above, that the literature of the period, even in its casual
phrases and incidental similes, speaks of towns as being normally
planned in this fashion. Two examples from two very different authors
will suffice as illustration. Polybius, writing somewhere about B.C.
150, described in well-known chapters the scheme of the Roman camp,
and he concludes much as follows: 'This being so, the whole outline of
the camp may
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