Moree,
archit. et sculpture_, iii (1838), plate LXXXI.

To the same Macedonian epoch we may perhaps ascribe the building or
rather the rebuilding of Boeotian Thebes, which one who passes for a
contemporary writer under the name of Dicaearchus, describes as
'recently divided up into straight streets'.[32] To the same period
Strabo definitely assigns the newer town of Smyrna, lying in the plain
close to the harbour. It was due, he says, to the labours of the
Macedonians, Antigonus, and Lysimachus.[33] We may perhaps assign to
the same period the town-planning of Mitylene in Lesbos, which
Vitruvius mentions as so splendid and so unhealthy, were it not that
his explanation of its unhealthiness suggests rather a fan-shaped
outline than a square. It was, he says, intolerable, whatever wind
might blow. With a south wind, the wind of damp and rain, every one
was ill. With a north-west wind, every one coughed. With a north wind,
no one could stand out of doors for the chilliness of its blasts.[34]
Streets that lay open to the north and the north-west and the south,
equally and alike, could only be found in a town-plan fashioned like a
fan. But perhaps Vitruvius only selected three of the plagues of
Lesbos.

[32] Dicaearchus, p. 143.

[33] Strabo, 646.

[34] Vitruvius, i. 6.

In other cases the same planning was probably adopted, although the
evidence as yet known shows only a rectangular plan of main streets,
such as we have met in Pre-Macedonian Greece. In Macedonia itself,
Thessalonika, laid out perhaps about 315 B.C., had at least one main
street running southwards to the sea and two more running east and
west at right angles to that.[35] In Asia two Syrian towns, which
occupy sites closed to Hellenic culture before Alexander, may serve as
examples. Apamea on the Orontes was built by the Macedonians, rose
forthwith to importance, and retained its vigorous prosperity through
the Roman Empire; in A.D. 6 it was 'numbered' by Sulpicius Quirinius,
then the governor of Syria, and the census showed as many as 117,000
citizens settled in the city and its adjacent 'territory'. Its ruins
seem to be mainly earlier than the Romans, and its streets may well
date from its Macedonian founders. In outline it is an irregular
oblong, nearly an English mile in length and varying in width from
half to two-thirds of a mile. A broad and straight street, lined
throughout with colonnades, runs from end to end of its length and