Roman days on more or less level spaces beside the stream Selinus,
seems perhaps to have been laid out in chess-board fashion.[39] The
Attalid kings, the founders of Pergamon, cared only for splendid
buildings splendidly adorned. If their abrupt hill-side forbade the
straight and broad processional avenues of some other Greek cities,
they crowned their summits instead with a crescent of temples and
palaces which had not its like on the shores of the Aegean.

[39] P. Schatzmann, _Athen. Mitteil_. xxxv. (1910) 385; _Archãol.
Anzeiger_ (1910), p. 541. This lowest city is covered by a swarm
of modern houses and hovels, and has not been very fully
explored.

Yet even Pergamon had its building-laws and by-laws for the protection
of common life. A Pergamene inscription contains part of a 'Royal Law'
which apparently dates from one of the Attalid rulers. It is
imperfect. But we can recognize some of the items for which it
provided. Houses which fell or threatened to fall on to the public
street, or which otherwise became ruinous, could be dealt with by the
Astynomi; if their owners failed to repair them, these magistrates
were to make good the defects themselves and to recover the cost, and
a fine over and above it, from the owners; if the Astynomi neglected
their duty, the higher magistrates, the Strategi, were to take up the
matter. Streets were to be cleaned and scavenged by the same Astynomi.
Brick-fields were expressly forbidden within the city. The widths of
roads outside the town were fixed and owners of adjacent land were
held liable for their repair, and there was possibly some similar
rule, not preserved on the inscription, for roads inside the walls; at
Priene, it seems, these latter were in the care of the municipality.
There were provisions, too, for the repair of common walls which