‘chess-board’ pattern was introduced for the towns which now began to be founded in many countries round and east of the Aegean.  Ornamental edifices and broad streets were still indeed included, but in the house-blocks round them due space and place were left for the dwellings of common men.  For a while the Greeks turned their minds to those details of daily life which in their greater age they had somewhat ignored.

Lastly, the town-planning of the Macedonian era combined, as I believe, with other and Italian elements and formed the town system of the later Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.  As in art and architecture, so also in city-planning, the civilization of Greece and of Italy merged almost inextricably into a result which, with all its Greek affinities, is in the end Roman.  The student now meets a rigidity of street-plan and a conception of public buildings which are neither Greek nor Oriental.  The Roman town was usually a rectangle broken up into four more or less equal and rectangular parts by two main streets which crossed at right angles at or near its centre.  To these two streets all the other streets ran parallel or at right angles, and there resulted a definite ‘chess-board’ pattern of rectangular house-blocks (insulae), square or oblong in shape, more or less uniform in size.  The streets themselves were moderate in width; even the main thoroughfares were little wider than the rest, and the public buildings within the walls were now merged in the general mass of houses.  The chief structure, the Forum, was an enclosed court, decorated indeed by statues and girt with colonnades, but devoid of facades which could dominate a town.  The town councils of the Roman world were no more free than those of Greece or modern England from the municipal vice of over-building.  But they had not the same openings for error.  On the other hand, there was in most of them a good municipal supply of water, and sewers were laid beneath their streets.

The reason for all this is plain.  These Roman towns, even more than the Greek cities of the Macedonian world, were parts of a greater whole.  They were items in the Roman Empire; their citizens were citizens of Rome.  They had neither the wealth nor the wish to build vast temples or public halls or palaces, such as the Greeks constructed.  Their greatest edifices, the theatre and the amphitheatre, witness to the prosperity and population not so much of single towns as of whole neighbourhoods which flocked in to periodic performances.[5] But these towns had unity.  Their various parts were, in some sense, harmonized, none being neglected and none grievously over-indulged, and the whole was treated as one organism.  Despite limitations which are obvious, the Roman world made a more real sober and consistent attempt to plan towns than any previous age had witnessed.

[5] Compare the crowd of Nucerians who made a riot in the amphitheatre at Pompeii in A.D. 59 (Tac. Ann. xiv. 17).  The common idea that the population of a town can be calculated by the number of seats in its theatre or amphitheatre is quite amiss.

CHAPTER II