2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of to-day’s and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness.[146] Even in this final shape of his being, the Classical man’s form-ideal remains the corporeal point. Whereas the giant cities of our present confess our irresistible tendency towards the infinite--our suburbs and garden cities, invading the wide country-side, our vast and comprehensive network of roads, and within the thickly built areas a controlled fast traffic on, below, and above straight, broad streets--the genuine Classical world-city ever strove, not to expand, but to thicken--the streets narrow and cramped, impossible for fast traffic (although this was fully developed on the great Roman roads), entire unwillingness to live in suburbs or even to make suburbs possible.[147] Even at that stage the city must needs be a body, thick and round, σῶμα in the strictest sense. The synœcism that in the early Classical had gradually drawn the land-folk into the cities, and so created the type of the Polis, repeated itself at the last in absurd form; everyone wanted to live in the middle of the city, in its densest nucleus, for otherwise he could not feel himself to be the urban man that he was. All these cities are only _cités_, inner towns. The new synœcism formed, instead of suburban zones, _the world of the upper floors_. In the year 74 Rome, in spite of its immense population, had the ridiculously small perimeter of nineteen and a half kilometres [twelve miles].[148] Consequently these city-bodies extended in general not in breadth, but more and more upward. The block-tenements of Rome such as the famous Insula Feliculæ, rose, with a street breadth of only three to five metres [ten to seventeen feet][149] to heights that have never been seen in Western Europe and are seen in only a few cities in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already reached to the level of the hill-saddle.[150] But always the splendid mass-cities harbour lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man--in Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome.