great facades.[4] Private houses were still of small account. The
notion that the City was the State, helpful and progressive as it was,
did something also to paralyse in certain ways the development of
cities.

[4] Pindar mentions 'the paved road cut straight to be smitten by
horse-hoofs in processions of men that besought Apollo's care' at
Cyrene (_Pyth._ v. 90). An inscription from the Piraeus, of 320
B.C., orders the Agoranomi (p. 37) to take care 'of the broad
roads by which the processions move to the temple of Zeus the
Saviour'.

A change came with the new philosophy and the new politics of the
Macedonian era. The older Greek City-states had been large, wealthy,
and independent; magnificent buildings and sumptuous festivals were as
natural to them as to the greater autonomous municipalities in all
ages. But in the Macedonian period the individual cities sank to be
parts of a larger whole, items in a dominant state, subjects of
military monarchies. The use of public buildings, the splendour of
public festivals in individual cities, declined. Instead, the claims
of the individual citizen, neglected too much by the City-states but
noted by the newer philosophy, found consideration even in
town-planning. A more definite, more symmetrical, often more rigidly
'chess-board' pattern was introduced for the towns which now began to
be founded in many countries round and east of the Aegean. Ornamental
edifices and broad streets were still indeed included, but in the
house-blocks round them due space and place were left for the
dwellings of common men. For a while the Greeks turned their minds to
those details of daily life which in their greater age they had
somewhat ignored.