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 called 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 military device to the purposes of an industrial age.
[23] Since the invention of artillery, the rectangular
street-plan has been regarded by soldiers as useful in defending
the streets of a town. Aristotle, however, expressly observes in
the _Politics_ that, in street warfare, tortuous lanes were far
better than straight avenues for the defence, and he recommends
that the rectangular pattern should be adopted only 'in parts and
in places', though he does not explain how this would work out
(_Politics,_ iv. 11, p. 1330).
[Illustration: FIG. 6. GENERAL OUTLINE OF PRIENE.
A, B, C. Gates. D, E, F, H, M, P. Temples (see fig. 7). G. Agora,
Market. I. Council House, K. Prytaneion. L, Q. Gymnasium. N. Theatre,
O. Water-reservoir, R. Race-course.]
[Illustration: FIG. 7. PART OF PRIENE AS EXCAVATED 1895-8.
(From the large plan by Wiegand and Schrader.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 8. PRIENE, PANORAMA OF THE TOWN.
(As restored by Zippelius.)]
_Priene_ (figs. 6-8).
The best instance of the new system is not perhaps the most famous.
Priene was a little town on the east coast of the Aegean. The high
ridge of Mycale towered above it; Miletus faced it across an estuary;
Samos stood out seawards to the west. In its first dim days it had
been perched on a crag that juts out from the overhanging mountain;
there its life began, we hardly know when, in the dawn of Greek
history. But it had been worn down in the fifth century between the
upper and the nether millstone of the rival powers of Samos and
Miletus. Early in the Macedonian age it was refounded. The old
Acropolis was given up. Instead, a broad sloping terrace, or more
exactly a series of terraces, nearer the foot of the hill, was laid
out with public buildings--Agora, Theatre, Stoa, Gymnasium, Temples,
and so forth--and with private houses. The whole covered an area of
about 750 yds. in length and 500 yds. in width. Priene was, therefore,
about half the size of Pompeii (p. 63). It had, as its excavators
calculate, about 400 individual dwelling-houses and a population
possibly to be reckoned at 4,000.
In the centre was the Agora or market-place, with a temple and other
large buildings facing on to it; round them were other public
buildings and some eighty blocks of private houses, each block
measuring on an average 40 x 50 yds. and containing four or five
houses. The broader streets, rarely more than 23 ft. wide, ran level
along the terraces and parallel to one another. Other narrower
streets, generally about 10 ft. wide, ran at right angles up the
slopes, with steps like those of the older Scarborough or of
Assisi.[24] The whole area has not yet been explored and we do not
know whether the houses were smaller or larger, richer or poorer, in
one quarter than in another, but the regularity of the street-plan
certainly extended over the whole site.
[24] Compare Soluntum, p. 36, n. 2.
Despite this reasoned and systematic arrangement, no striking artistic
effects appear to have been attempted. No streets give vistas of
stately buildings. No squares, save that of the Agora--120 by 230 ft.
within an encircling colonnade--provide open spaces where larger
buildings might be grouped and properly seen. Open spaces, indeed,
such as we meet, in mediaeval and Renaissance Italy or in modern
English towns of eighteenth century construction, were very rare in
Priene. 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.[25]
[25] Wiegand and Schrader, _Priene, Ergebnisse der Ausgrabung in
den Jahren 1895-8_ (Berlin, 1904). Professor P. Gardner gave a
good account to the Town-Planning Conference (_Proceedings_, pp.
112-122). I am indebted to him for two of my illustrations.
_Miletus_ (fig. 9).
The skill of German archaeologists has revealed what town-planning
meant in a small town rebuilt in the Alexandrine period. No other even
approximately complete example has been as yet uncovered on any other
site. But spade-work at the neighbouring and more famous city of
Miletus has uncovered similar street-planning there. In one quarter,
the only one yet fully excavated, the streets crossed at right angles
and enclosed regular blocks of dwelling-houses measuring 32 x 60 yds.
(according to the excavators) but sub-divided into blocks of about 32
yds. square (fig. 9). These blocks differ somewhat in shape from those
of Priene, which are more nearly square; whether they differ in date
is more doubtful. They are certainly not earlier than the Macedonian
era, and one German archaeologist places the building or rebuilding of
this quarter of Miletus after that of Priene and in a 'late
Hellenistic' and apparently Roman period. There is unquestionably much
Roman work in Miletus; there seems, however, no sufficient reason for
ascribing the house-blocks shown on fig. 7 to any date but some part
of the Macedonian period. Though differently shaped, they do not
differ very greatly in actual area from those of Priene. They are
somewhat smaller, but only by about 60 sq. yds. in each average-sized
plot.[26]
[26] Wiegand, _Abhandlungen der Berliner Akademie_, 1911, Anhang;
_Archäol. Anzeiger_, 1911, 420 foll.
[Illustration: FIG. 9. MILETUS, AS EXCAVATED BY WIEGAND.
(_Archãologischer Anzeiger_, 1911, p. 421.)]
_Alexandria_.
A yet more famous town, founded by Alexander himself, is definitely
recorded by ancient writers to have been laid out in the same
quasi-chess-board fashion, with one long highway, the Canopic Street,
running through it from end to end for something like four miles.[27]
Unfortunately the details of the plan are not known with any
certainty. Excavations were conducted at the instigation of Napoleon
III in 1866 by an Arab archaeologist, Mahmud Bey el Fallaki, and,
according to him, showed a regular and rectangular scheme in which
seven streets ran east and west while thirteen ran north and south at
right angles to them. The house-blocks divided by these streets were
thought to vary somewhat in size but to measure in general about 300 x
330 metres.[28] More recent research, however, has not confirmed
Mahmud's plans. The excavations of Mr. Hogarth and M. Botti suggest
that many of his lines are wrong and that even his Canopic Street is
incorrectly laid down. Mr. Hogarth, indeed, concludes that 'it is
hopeless now to sift his work; those who would treat the site of
Alexandria scientifically must ignore him and start _de novo_'. More
recent excavation, carried out by Dr. Noack in 1898-9, seemed to show
that the ancient streets which can now be traced beneath Alexandria
belong to a Roman age, though they may of course follow older lines,
and that, if some items in Mahmud's plans are possibly right, the
errors and omissions are serious. We may accept as certain the
statement that Alexandria was laid out with a rectangular town-plan;
we cannot safely assume that Mahmud has given a faithful picture of
it.[29]
[27] Strabo, xvii. 793.
[28] Mahmud Bey, _Mémoire sur l'ancienne Alexandrie_ (Copenhagen,
1872); Néroutsos Bey, _L'ancienne Alexandrie_ (Paris, 1888).
[29] D.G. Hogarth, _Archaeological Report of the Egypt
Exploration Fund_, 1894-5, p. 28, and _Hellenic Journal_, xix.
326; F. Noack, _Athen. Mitteil._ xxv. (1900), pp. 232, 237. Dr.
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. One of the most characteristic is known to us from
literature, Nicaea in Bithynia, founded by one of the Macedonians in
316 B.C. and renamed by another some years later in honour of his wife
Nicaea. Strabo, writing about A.D. 15, describes it and his
description no doubt refers to arrangements older than the Romans. It
formed, he says, a perfect square in which each side measured four
stades, a little over 800 yds. In each side--apparently in the middle
of each side--there was one gate, and the streets within the walls
were laid out at right angles to one another. A man who stood at a
certain spot in the middle of the Gymnasium could see straight to all
the four gates.[30] Here is the chess-board pattern in definite form,
though the central portion of the city may have been laid out under
the influence of spectacular effect rather than of geometry.
[30] Strabo, 565, 566.
_Sicyon, Thebes, &c._
Another Macedonian town-plan may be found at Sicyon, a little west of
Corinth. This old Greek city was rebuilt by Demetrius Poliorcetes
about 300 B.C., and is described by a Greek writer of the first
century B.C. as possessing a regular plan and roads crossing at right
angles. The actual remains of the site, explored in part by English
and French archaeologists early in the nineteenth century, show some
streets which run with mathematical straightness from north-east to
south-west and others which run from north-west to south-east.[31]
These streets might, indeed, date from the period when Sicyon was the
chief town of the Roman province of Achaia, the period (that is)
between the overthrow of Corinth in 146 B.C. and its restoration just
a century later. But that was not an epoch when such rebuilding is
likely to have been carried through. 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.
[31] Diodorus Sic. xx. 102; _Expédition scientifique de Morée,
archit. et sculpture_, iii (1838), plate LXXXI.
To the same Macedonian epoch we may perhaps ascribe the building or
rather the rebuilding of Boeotian Thebes, which one who passes for a
contemporary writer under the name of Dicaearchus, describes as
'recently divided up into straight streets'.[32] To the same period
Strabo definitely assigns the newer town of Smyrna, lying in the plain
close to the harbour. It was due, he says, to the labours of the
Macedonians, Antigonus, and Lysimachus.[33] 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. With a south wind, the wind of damp and rain, every one
was ill. With a north-west wind, every one coughed. With a north wind,
no one could stand out of doors for the chilliness of its blasts.[34]
Streets that lay open to the north and the north-west and the south,
equally and alike, could only be found in a town-plan fashioned like a
fan. But perhaps Vitruvius only selected three of the plagues of
Lesbos.
[32] Dicaearchus, p. 143.
[33] Strabo, 646.
[34] Vitruvius, i. 6.
In other cases the same planning was probably adopted, although the
evidence as yet known shows only a rectangular plan of main streets,
such as we have met in Pre-Macedonian Greece. In Macedonia itself,
Thessalonika, laid out perhaps about 315 B.C., had at least one main
street running southwards to the sea and two more running east and
west at right angles to that.[35] In Asia two Syrian towns, which
occupy sites closed to Hellenic culture before Alexander, may serve as
examples. Apamea on the Orontes was built by the Macedonians, rose
forthwith to importance, and retained its vigorous prosperity through
the Roman Empire; in A.D. 6 it was 'numbered' by Sulpicius Quirinius,
then the governor of Syria, and the census showed as many as 117,000
citizens settled in the city and its adjacent 'territory'. Its ruins
seem to be mainly earlier than the Romans, and its streets may well
date from its Macedonian founders. In outline it is an irregular
oblong, nearly an English mile in length and varying in width from
half to two-thirds of a mile. A broad and straight street, lined
throughout with colonnades, runs from end to end of its length and
passes at least five great buildings, which seem to be the temples and
palaces of the Seleucid kings. Two other streets cross this main
street at right angles. Whether the smaller thoroughfares took the
same lines can be determined only by excavation. It would be a gentle
guess to think so.[36]
[35] Tafrali, _Topographie de Thess._ pp. 121 foll. and plan.
[36] E. Sachau, _Reise in Syrien_ (1883), p. 76; Mommsen,
_Ephemeris epigr_. iv, p. 514, and _Mon. Ancyr._ (ed. 2), p. 540.
Further south, on the edge of the Haurân, stood the town of Gerasa.
This too, like Apamea, was built by the Macedonians and flourished not
only in their days but during the following Roman age. Its general
outline was ovoid, its greatest diameter three quarters of a mile, its
area some 235 acres--nearly the same with Roman Cologne and Roman
Cirencester. Its streets resembled those of Apamea. A colonnaded
highway ran straight through from north to south; two other streets
crossed at right angles, and its chief public buildings, the Temple of
the Sun and three other temples, two theatres and two public baths,
stood near these three streets (fig. 10). Again the evidence proves
rectangular town-planning in broad outline; excavation alone can tell
the rest.[37]
[37] _Zeitschrift des deutschen Palãstina-Vereins_, xxv (1902),
plate 6; Bãdeker, _Palestine and Syria_ (1906), p. 140. For the
neighbouring Bostra, see p. 136.
[Illustration: FIG. 10. GERASA]
In the towns just described a distinctive feature is the 'chess-board'
pattern of streets and rectangular house-blocks. That, of course, is
the feature which most concerns us here. It may not have looked so
predominant to their builders and inhabitants. The towns which the
Macedonians founded were not seldom rich and large; several were the
capitals of powerful and despotic rulers. In such towns we expect
great public buildings, temples, palaces. It is not surprising if
sometimes those who reared them cared solely for the spectacular
grouping of magnificent structures and forgot the private houses and
the general plan of the town.
_Pergamum_.
One such instance from the Macedonian age, perhaps the most
instructive which we could ever hope to get,[38] is Pergamum, in the
north-west of Asia Minor. This has been thoroughly explored by German
science; its remains are superb; its chief buildings date from an age
when town-planning had grown familiar to the Greek world. About 300
B.C. it was a hill-town where a Macedonian chief could bestow a
war-chest. It grew both populous and splendid in the third and second
centuries B.C. under the Attalid kings; later builders, Augustus or
Trajan or other, added little either to its general design or to its
architectural glory. The dominant idea was that of a semi-circle of
great edifices, crowning the crest and inner slopes of a high
crescent-shaped ridge. Near the northern and highest end of this ridge
stood the palace of the Attalid princes, afterwards buried beneath a
temple in honour of Trajan. Next, to the south, was the Library--with
stores of papyri worth more perhaps to the world than all the
architecture of Pergamon. The middle of the crescent held the shrine
of Athena, goddess of Pergamon, and beside it the Altar of Zeus the
Saviour, gigantic in size, splendid with sculpture, itself the equal
of an Acropolis. Lastly, the southern or lower end of the ridge bore a
temple of Dionysus and an Agora for Assemblies.
[38] Ephesus, refounded by Lysimachus about 281 B.C., might
perhaps be another. But the repeated excavations there, though
they have taught us much about the temples and other large
edifices of the great city, seem to have left the streets
comparatively unexplored.
These buildings ringed the hill-top in stately semi-circle; below
them, a theatre was hewn out of the slopes and a terrace 250 yds. long
was held up by buttresses against precipitous cliffs. Lower yet,
beneath the Agora, the town of common men covered the lower hill-side
in such order or disorder as its steepness allowed. Here was no
conventional town-planning. Only a yet lower and later city, built in
Roman days on more or less level spaces beside the stream Selinus,
seems perhaps to have been laid out in chess-board fashion.[39] The
Attalid kings, the founders of Pergamon, cared only for splendid
buildings splendidly adorned. If their abrupt hill-side forbade the
straight and broad processional avenues of some other Greek cities,
they crowned their summits instead with a crescent of temples and
palaces which had not its like on the shores of the Aegean.
[39] P. Schatzmann, _Athen. Mitteil_. xxxv. (1910) 385; _Archãol.
Anzeiger_ (1910), p. 541. This lowest city is covered by a swarm
of modern houses and hovels, and has not been very fully
explored.
Yet even Pergamon had its building-laws and by-laws for the protection
of 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 be summed up as right-angled and four-sided and
equal-sided, while the details of its street-planning and its general
arrangement are precisely parallel to those of a city' (VI. 31, 10).
He was comparing the Greek town, as he knew it in his own country,
with the encampment of the Roman army; he found in the town the aptest
and simplest parallel which he could put before his readers. A much
later writer, living in a very different environment and concerned
with a very different subject, fell nevertheless under the influence
of the same ideas. Despite his 'sombre scorn' for things Greek and
Roman, St. John, when he wished to figure the Holy City Jerusalem,
centre of the New Heaven and New Earth, pictured it as a city lying
foursquare, the length as large as the breadth, and entered by twelve
gates, 'on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the
south three gates, and on the west three gates.'[41]
[41] Revelation xxi. 13, 16. Some of the details are, no doubt,
drawn from the later chapters of Ezekiel, but the difference
between the two writers is plain.
The instances and items cited in the preceding paragraphs lie within
the limits of the Greek world and of the Roman Empire. We might
perhaps wish to pursue our speculations and ask whether this vigorous
system influenced foreign lands, and whether the Macedonian army
carried the town-plan of their age, in more or less perfect form, as
far as their conquests reached. Alexander settled many soldiers in
lands which were to form his eastern and north-eastern frontiers, as
if against the central-asiatic nomads. Merv and Herat, Khokand and
Kandahar,[42] have been thought--and, it seems, thought with some
reason--to date from the Macedonian age and in their first period to
have borne the name Alexandria. But no Aurel Stein has as yet
uncovered their ruins, and speculation about them is mere speculation.
[42] See p. 145 below.