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Updated: July 15, 2025
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.
I. The value of town-planning to Roman civilization was twofold. It increased the comfort of the common man; it made the towns stronger and more coherent units to resist the barbarian invasions. When, after 250 years of conflict, the barbarians triumphed, its work was done.
There are no gardens and no trees, and all enterprise in the way of town-planning and the like is impossible owing to the Russian habit of cheating. They have tried for sixteen years to start electric trams, but everyone wants too much for his own pocket. The morals become dingier and dingier as one gets nearer Tartar influence, and no shame is thought of it.
At present we cannot trace these stages. Another fact claims notice. The town-planning of Pompeii is in the main trapezoidal, not rectangular. Neither its oblongs, nor its squares, nor its street-crossings exhibit true right angles, though many of the rooms and peristyles in the private houses are regular enough.
The Macedonian age brought with it, if not a new, at least a more systematic, method of town-planning.
Noack thought that his results confirmed Mahmud; to me, as to some others, they seem rather to yield the conclusions indicated in the text. Nicaea. Priene, Miletus, and Alexandria supply more or less well-known instances of Macedonian town-planning. They can be reinforced by a crowd of less famous examples, attested by literature or by actual remains.
For a while the Greeks turned their minds to those details of daily life which in their greater age they had somewhat ignored. Lastly, the town-planning of the Macedonian era combined, as I believe, with other and Italian elements and formed the town system of the later Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.
It was due, he says, to the labours of the Macedonians, Antigonus, and Lysimachus. We may perhaps assign to the same period the town-planning of Mitylene in Lesbos, which Vitruvius mentions as so splendid and so unhealthy, were it not that his explanation of its unhealthiness suggests rather a fan-shaped outline than a square. It was, he says, intolerable, whatever wind might blow.
Others have preferred to think that the town-planning reveals Greek influences; they point to the Greek city of Naples, 7 miles west of Herculaneum, and the Doric temple at Pompeii, much the same distance east of it. It is possible, though there is no record of the fact, that it received a settlement of discharged soldiers somewhere about 30 B.C. and was then laid out afresh.
Some markets, such as the cattle market, were held in the streets. These two market-places were the principal public open spaces, parts of a town that are given such importance in modern town-planning schemes. Other open spaces were the cloisters and gardens of the monasteries, the courts of the Castle, the graveyards of the churches, and private gardens.
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