[3] For the connexion between such towns and their local food-supply, note the story of Alexander the Great and the architect Dinocrates told by Vitruvius (II. i).  Dinocrates had planned a new town; Alexander asked if there were lands round it to supply it with corn, and on hearing there were none, at once ruled out the proposed site.

Even under less kindly conditions, the art has not been wholly dormant.  Special circumstances or special men have called it into brief activity.  The ‘bastides’ and the ‘villes neuves’ of thirteenth-century France were founded at a particular period and under special circumstances, and, brief as the period was and governed by military urgencies, they were laid out on a more or less definite plan (p. 143).  The streets designed by Wood at Bath about 1735, by Craig at Edinburgh about 1770, by Grainger at Newcastle about 1835, show what individual genius could do at favourable moments.  But such instances, however interesting in themselves, are obviously less important than the larger manifestations of town-planning in Greece and Rome.

In almost all cases, the frequent establishment of towns has been accompanied by the adoption of a definite principle of town-planning, and throughout the principle has been essentially the same.  It has been based on the straight line and the right angle.  These, indeed, are the marks which sunder even the simplest civilization from barbarism.  The savage, inconsistent in his moral life, is equally inconsistent, equally unable to ‘keep straight’, in his house-building and his road-making.  Compare, for example, a British and a Roman road.  The Roman road ran proverbially direct; even its few curves were not seldom formed by straight lines joined together.  The British road was quite different.  It curled as fancy dictated, wandered along the foot or the scarp of a range of hills, followed the ridge of winding downs, and only by chance stumbled briefly into straightness.  Whenever ancient remains show a long straight line or several correctly drawn right angles, we may be sure that they date from a civilized age.

In general, ancient town-planning used not merely the straight line and the right angle but the two together.  It tried very few experiments involving other angles.  Once or twice, as at Rhodes (pp. 31, 81), we hear of streets radiating fan-fashion from a common centre, like the gangways of an ancient theatre or the thoroughfares of modern Karlsruhe, or that Palma Nuova, founded by Venice in 1593 to defend its north-eastern boundaries, which was shaped almost like a starfish.  But, as a rule, the streets ran parallel or at right angles to each other and the blocks of houses which they enclosed were either square or oblong.