d. About 300
B.C. it was a hill-town where a Macedonian chief could bestow a
war-chest. It grew both populous and splendid in the third and second
centuries B.C. under the Attalid kings; later builders, Augustus or
Trajan or other, added little either to its general design or to its
architectural glory. The dominant idea was that of a semi-circle of
great edifices, crowning the crest and inner slopes of a high
crescent-shaped ridge. Near the northern and highest end of this ridge
stood the palace of the Attalid princes, afterwards buried beneath a
temple in honour of Trajan. Next, to the south, was the Library--with
stores of papyri worth more perhaps to the world than all the
architecture of Pergamon. The middle of the crescent held the shrine
of Athena, goddess of Pergamon, and beside it the Altar of Zeus the
Saviour, gigantic in size, splendid with sculpture, itself the equal
of an Acropolis. Lastly, the southern or lower end of the ridge bore a
temple of Dionysus and an Agora for Assemblies.

[38] Ephesus, refounded by Lysimachus about 281 B.C., might
perhaps be another. But the repeated excavations there, though
they have taught us much about the temples and other large
edifices of the great city, seem to have left the streets
comparatively unexplored.

These buildings ringed the hill-top in stately semi-circle; below
them, a theatre was hewn out of the slopes and a terrace 250 yds. long
was held up by buttresses against precipitous cliffs. Lower yet,
beneath the Agora, the town of common men covered the lower hill-side
in such order or disorder as its steepness allowed. Here was no
conventional town-planning. Only a yet lower and later city, built in
Roman days on more or less level spaces beside the stream Selinus,
seems perhaps to have been laid out in chess-board fashion.[39] The
Attalid kings, the founders of Pergamon, cared only for splendid
buildings splendidly adorned. If their abrupt hill-side forbade the
straight and broad processional avenues of some other Greek cities,
they crowned their summits instead with a crescent of temples and
palaces which had not its like on the shores of the Aegean.

[39] P. Schatzmann, _Athen. Mitteil_. xxxv. (1910) 385; _Archaol.
Anzeiger_ (1910), p. 541. This lowest city is covered by a swarm
of modern houses and hovels, and has not been very fully
explored.

Yet even Pergamon had its building-laws and by-laws for the protection
of