several generations ruled over western Asia, when Macedonians and
Greeks alike flocked into the newly-opened world and Graeco-Macedonian
cities were planted in bewildering numbers throughout its length and
breadth. Most of these cities sprang up full-grown; not seldom their
first citizens were the discharged Macedonian soldiery of the armies
of Alexander and his successors. The map of Turkey in Asia is full of
them. They are easily recognized by their names, which were often
taken from those of Alexander and his generals and successors, their
wives, daughters, and relatives. Thus, one of Alexander's youngest
generals, afterwards Seleucus I, sometimes styled Nicator, founded
several towns called Seleucia, at least three called Apamea, and
others named Laodicea and Antiochia, thereby recording himself, his
Iranian wife Apama, his mother Laodice and his father Antiochus, and
his successors seem to have added other towns bearing the same name.
Indeed, two-thirds of the town-names which are prominent in the later
history of Asia Minor and Syria, date from the age of Alexander and
his Macedonians.

Many discoveries show that these towns were laid out with a regular
'chess-board' street-plan. That method of town-planning now made
definite entry into the European world. No architect or statesman is
recorded to have invented or systematically encouraged it. Alexander
himself and his architect, one Dinocrates of Rhodes or perhaps of
Macedonia, seem to have employed it at Alexandria in Egypt, and this
may have set the fashion. Seven years after Alexander's death it
recurs at Nicaea in Bithynia, which was refounded by one of
Alexander's successors in 323 B.C. and was laid out on this fashion.
But no ancient writer credits either the founder or the architect of
Alexandria or the founder of Nicaea with any particular theory on the
subject. If the chess-board fashion becomes now, with seeming