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Updated: June 15, 2025
We pass now to the remains which it has left in its own home, in Italy. These are many. In one city indeed, the greatest of all, no town-planning can be detected. Like Athens and Sparta, Rome shows that conservatism which marks so many capital cities. No part of it, so far as we know, was laid out on a rectangular or indeed on any plan. It grew as it could.
To them must be added, fourthly, the important evidence which points to the use of a system closely akin to town-planning in early Rome itself. More than a hundred of these strange settlements have been examined by Pigorini, Chierici, and other competent Italians.
If Greek and Macedonian town-planning are fairly well known, the Roman Empire offers a yet larger mass of certain facts, both in Italy and in the provinces. The beginnings, naturally, are veiled in obscurity. We can trace the system in full work at the outset of the Empire; we cannot trace the steps by which it grew.
But such instances, however interesting in themselves, are obviously less important than the larger manifestations of town-planning in Greece and Rome. In almost all cases, the frequent establishment of towns has been accompanied by the adoption of a definite principle of town-planning, and throughout the principle has been essentially the same.
Cracow, for example, owes to German settlers in the mid-thirteenth century that curious chess-board pattern of its innermost and oldest streets which so much puzzles the modern visitor. It is unnecessary here to follow further the renaissance of town-planning. By intervals and revivals it continued to spread. In 1652 it reached Java, when the Dutch built Batavia.
Friendly as the Republican government of Rome showed itself in other ways to Hellas, there is no reason to think that it spent money on town-planning in Hellenic cities. It is far more probable that the town-plan of Sicyon dates from the Macedonians. Diodorus Sic. xx. 102; Expédition scientifique de Morée, archit. et sculpture, iii , plate LXXXI.
Again the evidence proves rectangular town-planning in broad outline; excavation alone can tell the rest. Zeitschrift des deutschen Palãstina-Vereins, xxv , plate 6; Bãdeker, Palestine and Syria , p. 140. For the neighbouring Bostra, see p. 136. In the towns just described a distinctive feature is the 'chess-board' pattern of streets and rectangular house-blocks.
Gardens, too, must have been almost entirely absent. In the area as yet uncovered, scarcely a single dwelling-house possessed any garden ground or yard. I am indebted to him for two of my illustrations. The skill of German archaeologists has revealed what town-planning meant in a small town rebuilt in the Alexandrine period.
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.
The use of public buildings, the splendour of public festivals in individual cities, declined. Instead, the claims of the individual citizen, neglected too much by the City-states but noted by the newer philosophy, found consideration even in town-planning.
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