for the proper
grouping of dwelling-houses and also paid special heed to the
combination of the different parts of a town in a harmonious whole,
centred round the market-place. But there seems to be no evidence for
the statement sometimes made, that he had any particular liking for
either a circular or a semicircular, fan-shaped town-plan.
_Piraeus_ (fig. 2).
Three cities are named as laid out by Hippodamus. Aristotle tells us
that he planned the Piraeus, the port of Athens, with broad straight
streets. He does not add the precise relation of these streets to one
another. If, however, the results of recent German inquiries and
conjectures are correct, and if they show us his work and not--as is
unfortunately very possible--the work of some later man, his design
included streets running parallel or at right angles to one another
and rectangular blocks of houses; the longer and presumably the more
important streets ran parallel to the shore, while shorter streets ran
at right angles to them down to the quays. Here is a rectangular
scheme of streets, though the outline of the whole town is necessarily
not rectangular (fig. 2).
[Illustration: FIG. 2. PLAN OF PIRAEUS]
_Thurii_.
Another town ascribed to Hippodamus is the colony which the Athenians
and others planted in 443 B.C. at Thurii in southern Italy, of which
Herodotus himself is said to have been one of the original colonists.
Its site has never been excavated, and indeed one might doubt whether
excavation would show the street plan of 443 B.C. or that of a later
and possibly even of a Roman age, when the town was recolonized on the
Roman system. But the historian Diodorus, writing in the first century
B.C. and no doubt embodying much older matter, records a pertinent
detail. The town, he says, was divided lengthways by four streets and
crossways by three. Plainly, therefore, it had a definite and
rectangular street-planning, though the brevity of the historian does
not enable us to decide how many house-blocks it had and how far the
lesser streets were symmetrical with these seven principal
thoroughfares. In most of the cases which we shall meet in the
following sections of this treatise, the number of streets
running-straight or at right angles is very much greater than the
number assigned to Thurii. I may refer for example to the plans of
Priene, Miletus, and Timgad.
_Rhodes_.
A third city assigned to Hippodamus is Rhodes. This, according to
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