vast temples or public halls or palaces, such as the Greeks
constructed. Their greatest edifices, the theatre and the
amphitheatre, witness to the prosperity and population not so much of
single towns as of whole neighbourhoods which flocked in to periodic
performances.[5] But these towns had unity. Their various parts were,
in some sense, harmonized, none being neglected and none grievously
over-indulged, and the whole was treated as one organism. Despite
limitations which are obvious, the Roman world made a more real sober
and consistent attempt to plan towns than any previous age had
witnessed.

[5] Compare the crowd of Nucerians who made a riot in the
amphitheatre at Pompeii in A.D. 59 (Tac. _Ann_. xiv. 17). The
common idea that the population of a town can be calculated by
the number of seats in its theatre or amphitheatre is quite
amiss.




CHAPTER II

GREEK TOWN-PLANNING. THE ORIGINS, BABYLON


The beginnings of ideas and institutions are seldom well known or well
recorded. They are necessarily insignificant and they win scant notice
from contemporaries. Town-planning has fared like the rest. Early
forms of it appear in Greece during the fourth and fifth centuries
B.C.; the origin of these forms is obscure. The oldest settlement of