lands round the eastern Mediterranean and in the wide empire of Rome,
urban life increased rapidly at certain periods through the
establishment of towns almost full-grown. The earliest towns of Greece
and Italy were, through sheer necessity, small. They could not grow
beyond the steep hill-tops which kept them safe, or house more
inhabitants than their scanty fields could feed.[3] But the world was
then large; new lands lay open to those who had no room at home, and
bodies of willing exiles, keeping still their custom of civil life,
planted new towns throughout the Mediterranean lands. The process was
extended by state aid. Republics or monarchs founded colonies to
extend their power or to house their veterans, and the results were
equally towns springing up full-grown in southern Europe and, western
Asia and even northern Africa. So too in remoter regions. Obscure
evidence from China suggests that there also in early times towns were
planted and military colonies were sent to outlying regions on
somewhat the same methods as were used by the Greeks and Romans.

[3] For the connexion between such towns and their local
food-supply, note the story of Alexander the Great and the
architect Dinocrates told by Vitruvius (II. i). Dinocrates had
planned a new town; Alexander asked if there were lands round it
to supply it with corn, and on hearing there were none, at once
ruled out the proposed site.

Even under less kindly conditions, the art has not been wholly
dormant. Special circumstances or special men have called it into
brief activity. The 'bastides' and the 'villes neuves' of
thirteenth-century France were founded at a particular period and
under special circumstances, and, brief as the period was and governed
by military urgencies, they were laid out on a more or less definite