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 divided houses belonging to two owners, and also for the prevention of damp where two houses stood side by side on a slope and the wall of the lower house stood against the soil beneath the upper house.[40]

    [40] Kolbe, Athen.  Mitteil. xxvii. 47 and xxix. 75; Hitzig,
    Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung, roman.  Abteilung xxvi. 433.

These rules are very like those which were coming into use before 330 B.C. (p. 37).  Only, they are more elaborate, and it is significant that the inscriptions begin in Macedonian and later days to give more and fuller details as to the character of these laws and as to the existence in many cities of officials to execute them.  It is not surprising to find that Roman legislation of the time of Caesar and the early Empire applies these or very similar rules to the local government of the Roman municipalities of the Empire (p. 137).

So common in the Macedonian world was the town-planning which has been described above, that the literature of the period, even in its casual phrases and incidental similes, speaks of towns as being normally planned in this fashion.  Two examples from two very different authors will suffice as illustration.  Polybius, writing somewhere about B.C. 150, described in well-known chapters the scheme of the Roman camp, and he concludes much as follows:  ’This being so, the whole outline of the camp may be summed up as right-angled and four-sided and equal-sided, while the details of its street-planning and its general arrangement are precisely parallel to those of a city’ (VI. 31, 10).  He was comparing the Greek town, as he knew it in his own country, with the encampment of the Roman army; he found in the town the aptest and simplest parallel which he could put before his readers.  A much later writer, living in a very different environment and concerned with a very different subject, fell nevertheless under the influence of the same ideas.  Despite his ‘sombre scorn’ for things Greek and Roman, St. John, when he wished to figure the Holy City Jerusalem, centre of the New Heaven and New Earth, pictured it as a city lying foursquare, the length as large as the breadth, and entered by twelve gates, ’on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.’[41]