of the same shape, and the plan of the town was indistinguishable from
a chess-board. Or, instead of squares, oblong house-blocks formed a
pattern not strictly that of a chess-board but geometrical and
rectangular. Often the outline of the town was irregular and merely
convenient, but the streets still kept, so far as they could, to a
rectangular plan. Sometimes, lastly, the rectangular planning was
limited to a few broad thoroughfares, while the smaller side-streets,
were utterly irregular. Other variations may be seen in the prominence
granted or refused to public and especially to sacred buildings. In
some towns full provision was made for these; ample streets with
stately vistas led up to them, and open spaces were left from which
they could be seen with advantage. In others there were neither vistas
nor open spaces nor even splendid buildings.

A measure of historical continuity can be traced in the occurrence of
these variations. The towns of the earlier Greeks were stately enough
in their public buildings and principal thoroughfares, but they
revealed a half-barbaric spirit in their mean side-streets and
unlovely dwellings. In the middle of the fifth century men rose above
this ideal. They began to recognize private houses and to attempt an
adequate grouping of their cities as units capable of a single plan.
But they did not carry this conception very far. The decorative still
dominated the useful. Broad straight streets were still few and were
laid out mainly as avenues for processions and as ample spaces for
great facades.[4] Private houses were still of small account. The
notion that the City was the State, helpful and progressive as it was,
did something also to paralyse in certain ways the development of
cities.

[4] Pindar mentions 'the paved road cut straight to be smitten by
horse-hoofs in processions of men that besought Apollo's care' at
Cyrene (_Pyth._ v. 90). An inscription from the Piraeus, of 320
B.C., orders the Agoranomi (p. 37) to take care 'of the broad
roads by which the processions move to the temple of Zeus the
Saviour'.

A change came with the new philosophy and the new politics of the
Macedonian era. The older Greek City-states had been large, wealthy,
and independent; magnificent buildings and sumptuous festivals were as
natural to them as to the greater autonomous municipalities in all
ages. But in the Macedonian period the individual cities sank to be
parts