certain spot in the middle of the Gymnasium could see straight to all
the four gates.[30] Here is the chess-board pattern in definite form,
though the central portion of the city may have been laid out under
the influence of spectacular effect rather than of geometry.

[30] Strabo, 565, 566.


_Sicyon, Thebes, &c._

Another Macedonian town-plan may be found at Sicyon, a little west of
Corinth. This old Greek city was rebuilt by Demetrius Poliorcetes
about 300 B.C., and is described by a Greek writer of the first
century B.C. as possessing a regular plan and roads crossing at right
angles. The actual remains of the site, explored in part by English
and French archaeologists early in the nineteenth century, show some
streets which run with mathematical straightness from north-east to
south-west and others which run from north-west to south-east.[31]
These streets might, indeed, date from the period when Sicyon was the
chief town of the Roman province of Achaia, the period (that is)
between the overthrow of Corinth in 146 B.C. and its restoration just
a century later. But that was not an epoch when such rebuilding is
likely to have been carried through. Friendly as the Republican
government of Rome showed itself in other ways to Hellas, there is no
reason to think that it spent money on town-planning in Hellenic
cities. It is far more probable that the town-plan of Sicyon dates
from the Macedonians.

[31] Diodorus Sic. xx. 102; _Expédition scientifique de Morée,
archit. et sculpture_, iii (1838), plate LXXXI.