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’