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. But save in so far as Milchhöfer's
plans reproduce the Piraeus of B.C. 450 or 400, we cannot discern
either the shape or the size of the house-blocks, or the grouping
adopted for any of the ordinary buildings, or the scheme of the
ordinary roads. We may even wonder whether such things were of much
account in the town-planning of that period.
CHAPTER IV
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.
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