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financial order it brought with it. Some of the cities they knew had already made similar moves - Rhodes for example, and Halicarnassus not very far away on the other side of the Ceramic Gulf. At the proposed new site Knidos would have sheltered harbours, a haven from the dreaded Boreas, the North wind, which brought cold and rain from as far as the Black Sea and the steppes of Southern Russia. And it was going to be protected by huge monumental walls which would encompass the hills overlooking the sea. And with a civic flourish, they adopted a new style of city planning too which was to make Knidos one of the finest city-scapes in the Mediterranean. The tip of the peninsula, also known as Cape Crio, was going to be invested with a Hippodamian Grid.

The plan the Knidian masons adopted was invented by one Hippodamus who hailed from the Ionian city of Miletus. He was born around 500 BC and came to be certainly the greatest, if not the very first, urban planner of his day. He is also credited with being an architect, physician, mathematician, meteorologist and penseur extraordinaire, but town planning seems to have been his real forte. Aristotle, who never met the man, believed him to be an eccentric if talented fop.

“Some people thought he carried things too far,” wrote the metaphysical philosopher, “with his long hair, expensive ornaments, and the same cheap, warm clothing worn winter and summer.”

Whoever gave him that idea we shall never know, since Aristotle was born over one hundred years after Hippodamus. Nevertheless, Hippodamus had excelled himself by redesigning the Piraeus, the harbour out-port of Athens, which he had done at the request of no less a politico than Pericles. His concept of urban philosophy was to create a city which was a grid iron in plan, with straight streets running parallel to each other at even intervals, and cross streets, also at even intervals, running perpendicular to them. This might seem relatively simple, a sort of Manhattan of the ancient east, except

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