B.C., mentions briefly the prosecution of those who built on to the public land, that is (apparently), who encroached upon the streets.  But it is silent as to specific officers, Astynomi or other.  Plato, however, in his ‘Laws’, which must date a little earlier than his death in 347, alludes on several occasions to such officers.  They were to look after the private houses ’in order that they may all be built according to laws’, and to police and clean the roads and water-channels, both inside and outside of the city.  A prohibition of balconies leaning over the public streets, and of verandas projecting into them, is also mentioned in two or three writers of the fourth century and is said to go back to a much earlier date, though its antiquity was probably exaggerated.[22]

[22] Plato, Laws 763 c, 779 c, &c.; Aristotle, Ath.  Pol. 50; Arist., Oec. ii. 5, p. 134; Xenophon, Ath.  Pol. iii. 4; Schol. to Aeschines, iii. 24.  The fact that the word ‘Astynomos’ occurs in Aeschylus does not justify the writer of an article in Pauly-Wissowa (Real-Encycl. ii. 1870) in stating that magistrates of this title were already at work in the earlier part of the fifth century; the poet uses the noun in a general sense from which it was afterwards specialized.  Some of the regulations recur at Rome (p. 137).

The municipal by-laws which these passages suggest clearly came into use before, though perhaps not long before, the middle of the fourth century.  They do not directly concern town-planning; they involve building regulations only as one among many subjects, and those regulations are such as might be, and in many cases have been, adopted where town-planning was unknown.  But they are natural forerunners of an interest in town-planning.  As in modern England, so in fourth-century Greece, their appearance suggests the growth of a care for well-ordered town life and for municipal well-being which leads directly to a more elaborate and methodical oversight of the town as an organized combination of houses and groups of houses.

As we part from this early Greek town-planning, we must admit that altogether we know little of it.  There was such a thing:  among its main features was a care for stately avenues:  its chief architect was Hippodamus.  Thus much is clear.  But save in so far as Milchhoefer’s plans reproduce the Piraeus of B.C. 450 or 400, we cannot discern either the shape or the size of the house-blocks, or the grouping adopted for any of the ordinary buildings, or the scheme of the ordinary roads.  We may even wonder whether such things were of much account in the town-planning of that period.

CHAPTER IV

GREEK TOWN-PLANNING:  THE MACEDONIAN AGE, 330-130 B.C.