[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; Expedition scientifique de Moree,
    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.