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

GREEK TOWN-PLANNING. THE ORIGINS, BABYLON

The beginnings of ideas and institutions are seldom well known or well
recorded. They are necessarily insignificant and they win scant notice
from contemporaries. Town-planning has fared like the rest. Early
forms of it appear in Greece during the fourth and fifth centuries
B.C.; the origin of these forms is obscure. The oldest settlement of
man in town fashion which has yet been explored in any land near
Greece is that of Kahun, in Egypt, dating from about 2500 B.C. Here
Professor Flinders Petrie unearthed many four-roomed cottages packed
close in parallel oblong blocks and a few larger rectangular houses:
they are (it seems) the dwellings of the workmen and managers busy
with the neighbouring Illahun pyramid.[6] But the settlement is very
small, covering less than 20 acres; it is not in itself a real town
and its plan has not the scheme or symmetry of a town-plan. For that
we must turn to western Asia, to Babylonia and Assyria.

[6] W.F. Petrie, _Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob_ (London, 1891), ch.
ii, plate xiv. The plan is reproduced in Breasted's _History of
Egypt_, p. 87, R. Unwin's _Town planning_, fig. 11 (with wrong
scale), &c.

Here we find clearer evidence. The great cities of the Mesopotamian
plains show faint traces of town-planning datable to the eighth and
following centuries, of which the