[48] Mau, Fuehrer (1910), p. 5, 'um die Schiefwinkeligkeit zu vermindern.' Truly, a very inadequate reason.

These streets which lie round and east of the Forum suggest a different development. Pompeii may have begun with a little Oscan town planted in what became its south-western corner, near the Water-Gate and the Forum, within the area of Regions II and IV. Here is a little network of streets, about 300 by 400 yds. across (25 acres), which harmonizes ill with the streets in the rest of the town, which lies close to the river-haven on the Sarno, which includes the Forum and Basilica—probably the oldest public sites, though not the oldest surviving structures, in Pompeii—and which is large enough to have formed the greater part or even the whole of a prehistoric city. The earliest building as yet excavated at Pompeii, the Doric Temple, with its precinct now known as the Forum Triangulare, stood on the edge of this area looking out from its high cliff over the plain of the Sarno. Originally this Temple may have stood just within the first town-wall, or perhaps just without it, sheltered by the precipice which it crowns. This area has all the appearance of an 'Altstadt'. No doubt it has been much altered by later changes. In particular, Forum and Basilica have grown far beyond their first proportions, and the buildings which surround them have been added, altered, enlarged out of all resemblance to the original plan. Nevertheless, this theory seems to account better than any other for this curious little corner of streets that are hardly regular even in their relations to one another and are wholly irreconcilable to the rest of the town.

Round this primitive city grew up the greater Pompeii. The growth must have been rather by two or three distinct accretions than a gradual and continuous development. At present we cannot trace these stages. To do that we must wait till the excavations can be carried deeper down, and till the other half of the city has been uncovered, or at least till the lines of its streets and the shapes of its house-blocks have been determined, like those of Priene (p. 42), by special inquiry. All that is as yet certain is that Regions I, III, V, and VI were laid out, and their houses were (in part at least) in existence before—perhaps long before—80 B.C., when the Sullan colony was planted,[49] and we see also that Region VI is planned differently from I and III.

[49] Region VI contains an ancient column of the sixth century B.C. (Mau, Fuehrer, p. 113), but this may not be in situ.

Another fact claims notice. The town-planning of Pompeii is in the main trapezoidal, not rectangular. Neither its oblongs, nor its squares, nor its street-crossings exhibit true right angles, though many of the rooms and peristyles in the private houses are regular enough. In this feature Pompeii resembles the trapezoidal outlines of the Terremare (fig. 11). It resembles also much Roman military work, both of Republican and of Imperial date, which disregards the strict right angle and accepts squares and oblongs which are, so to say, askew. The motive of the Terremare is supposed to have been, as I have said above, that of providing an easy flow for the water in the encircling moat. The motive of various military camps may perhaps be found rather in a wish to secure the same area as that of an orthodox rectangle, even though the ground forbade the strict execution of the orthodox figure. Whatever the reason, the trapezoidal house-blocks of Pompeii exhibit a feature which is not alien to the earlier town-planning of Italy, though it is strange to the cities of Greece.

Norba.

Not only do we need to know more of Pompeii itself. We need evidence also from other Italian towns of similar age. Here our ignorance is deep. Only one site which can help has been even tentatively explored. Norba, which once crowned a spur of the Monti Lepini above the Pontine marshes, was founded as a Roman town, according to the orthodox chronology, in 492 B.C.[50] But the received chronology of the earlier Republic, minute as it looks, probably deserves no more credence than the equally minute but mainly fictitious dates assigned by the Saxon Chronicle to the beginnings of English History. Actual remains found at Norba suggest rather that it was founded (not necessarily by Rome) about, or a little before, 300 B.C.; it is therefore later than the Terremare and Marzabotto, and later also than the Oscan age of Pompeii. On the other hand, it came to an end in the Sullan period (82 B.C.). Its excavation has little more than begun, but it already indicates a scheme of streets somewhat resembling that of Pompeii,[51] and it is a useful adjunct to our better knowledge of the more famous town. The two together furnish examples of the town-planning of middle Italy of about 400-300 B.C., in days that are only half historic, and thus help to fill the gap between the Terremare and the fully developed system of the Roman Imperial period.

[50] Livy ii. 34, contradicted, however, by xxvii. 10 and by Dionysius Halic. vii. 13 ad fin.

[51] Notizie degli Scavi, 191, p. 558, 1903, p. 261; Frothingham, Roman Cities, plate ix. I am indebted to Dr. T. Ashby, Director of the British School at Rome, for information as to the site. Excavations made in 1823 at the Roman Falerii (founded 241 B.C.) show streets crossing at right angles, but the piece unearthed was small and the date uncertain (Canina, Etruria Maritima i, plate ix).

It may be permitted in this context to add a plan of a north Italian city, in which some of the modern streets recall one quarter of Pompeii (fig. 14). Modena, the Roman Mutina, was founded as a 'colonia' with 2,000 male settlers in 183 B.C., and despite various misfortunes became one of the chief towns in the Lombard plain. One part of this town shows a row of long narrow blocks measuring about 20 x 160 metres (fig. 14, plan A), with a second row of shorter blocks of the same width and about half the length (plan B). These blocks have been much marred and curtailed by the inevitable changes of town life, but their symmetry cannot be accidental, and if they date back, as is quite possible, to Roman days, they may be put beside the Sixth Region of Pompeii which contains two rows of similar blocks.[52]

[52] Fig. 14 is taken from Zuccagni-Orlandini (1844). Kornemann suggests that Mutina was refounded about 40-20 B.C., but there seems to be no evidence of this break in its continuity.



(iv) There remains, fourthly, evidence relating to early Rome itself, and to customs and observances which obtained there. These customs belong to the three fields of religion, agrarian land-settlement and war. All three exhibit the same principle, the division of a definite space by two straight lines crossing at right angles at its centre, and (if need be) the further division of such space by other lines parallel to the two main lines. The Roman augur who asked the will of Heaven marked off a square piece of sky or earth—his templum—into four quarters; in them he sought for his signs. The Roman general who encamped his troops, laid out their tents on a rectangular pattern governed by the same idea. The commissioners who assigned farming-plots on the public domains to emigrant citizens of Rome, planned these plots on the same rectangular scheme—as the map of rural Italy is witness to this day.

These Roman customs are very ancient. Later Romans deemed them as ancient as Rome itself, and, though such patriotic traditions belong rather to politics than to history, we find the actual customs well established when our knowledge first becomes full, about 200 B.C.[53] The Roman camp, for example, had reached its complex form long before the middle of the second century, when Polybius described it in words. Here, one can hardly doubt, are things older even than Rome. Scholars have talked, indeed, of a Greek origin or of an Etruscan origin, and the technical term for the Roman surveying instrument, groma, has been explained as the Greek word 'gnomon', borrowed through an Etruscan medium. But the name of a single instrument would not carry with it the origin of a whole art, even if this etymology were more certain than it actually is. Save for the riddle of Marzabotto (p. 61), we have no reason to connect the Etruscans with town-planning or with the Roman system of surveying. When the Roman antiquary Varro alleged that 'the Romans founded towns with Etruscan ritual', he set the fashion for many later assertions by Roman and modern writers.[54] But he did not prove his allegation, and it is not so clear as is generally assumed, that he meant 'Etruscan ritual' to include architectural town-planning as well as religious ceremonial.

[53] The prologue to the Poenulus of Plautus (verse 49) which mentions 'limites' and a 'finitor', may well be as old as Plautus himself. But the 'centuriation' still visible in north Italy around colonies planted about 180 B.C. is no full proof of rectangular surveying at that date. These towns were re-founded at a much later date, and their lands, and even their streets, may have been laid out anew.

[54] Varro ling. lat. 5. 143 oppida condebant Etrusco ritu, id est, iunctis bobus, cf. Frontinus de limit. (grom. i. p. 27).

These are Italian customs, far older than the beginnings of Greek influence on Rome, older than the systematic town-planning of the Greek lands, and older also than the Etruscans. They should be treated as an ancestral heritage of the Italian tribes kindred with Rome, and should be connected with the plan of Pompeii and with the far older Terremare. Many generations in the family tree have no doubt been lost. The genealogy can only be taken as conjectural. But it is a reasonable conjecture.

In their original character these customs were probably secular rather than religious. They took their rise as methods proved by primitive practice to be good methods for laying out land for farming or for encamping armies. But in early communities all customs that touched the State were quasi-religious; to ensure their due performance, they were carried out by religious officials. At Rome, therefore, more especially in early times, the augurs were concerned with the delimitation alike of farm-plots and of soldiers' tents. They testified that the settlement, whether rural or military, was duly made according to the ancestral customs sanctioned by the gods. After-ages secularized once more, and as they secularized, they also introduced science. It was, perhaps, Greek influence which brought in a stricter use of the rectangle and a greater care for regular planning.

It may be asked how all this applies to the planning of towns. We possess certainly no such clear evidence with respect to towns as with respect to divisions agrarian or military. But the town-plans which we shall meet in the following chapters show very much the same outlines as those of the camp or of the farm plots. They are based on the same essential element of two straight lines crossing at right angles in the centre of a (usually) square or oblong plot. This is an element which does not occur, at least in quite the same form, at Priene or in other Greek towns of which we know the plans, and it may well be called Italian. We need not hesitate to put town and camp side by side, and to accept the statement that the Roman camp was a city in arms. Nor need we hesitate to conjecture further that in the planning of the town, as in that of the camp, Greek influence may have added a more rigid use of rectangular 'insulae'. When that occurred, will be discussed in Chapter VI.

Whether the nomenclature of the augur, the soldier and the land-commissioner was adopted in the towns, is a more difficult, but fortunately a less important question. Modern writers speak of the cardo and the decumanus of Roman towns, and even apply to them more highly technical terms such as striga and scamnum. For the use of cardo in relation to towns there is some evidence (p. 107). But it is very slight, and for the use of the other terms there is next to no evidence at all.[55] The silence alike of literature and of inscriptions shows that they were, at the best, theoretical expressions, confined to the surveyor's office.[56]

[55] Whether the possessores ex vico Lucretio scamno primo of Cologne (Corpus XIII. 8254) had their property inside the 'colonia' of that place or in the country outside, may be doubted (Schulten, Bonner Jahrb. ciii. 28).

[56] The phrase Roma Quadrata ought, perhaps, to be mentioned in this chapter. It does not seem, however, to be demonstrably older than the Ciceronian age. The line et qui sextus erat Romae regnare quadratae, once attributed to Ennius (ed. Vablen, 1854, 158), is clearly of much later date. As a piece of historical evidence, the phrase merely sums up some archaeologist's theory (very likely a correct theory, but still a theory) that the earliest Rome on the Palatine had a more or less rectangular outline.



CHAPTER VI

ITALIAN TOWN-PLANNING: THE LATE REPUBLIC AND EARLY EMPIRE

During the later Republic and the earlier Empire many Italian towns were founded or re-founded. To this result several causes contributed. Like the Greeks before them, the Romans of the Republic sent out from time to time compact bodies of emigrants whenever the home population had grown too large for its narrow space. These bodies were each large enough to form a small town, and thus each migration meant—or might mean—the foundation of a new town full-grown from its birth. The Greeks generally established new and politically independent towns. The Romans followed another method. Their colonists remained subject to Rome and constituted new centres of Roman rule, small quasi-fortresses of Roman dominion in outlying lands. Often the military need for such a stronghold had more to do with the foundation of a 'colonia' than the presence of too many mouths in the city. Cicero, speaking of a 'colonia' planted at Narbo (now Narbonne) in southern Gaul about 118 B.C., and planted perhaps with some regard to an actual overflow of population in contemporary Rome, calls it nevertheless 'a colonia of Roman citizens, a watch-tower of the Roman people, a bulwark against the wild tribes of Gaul'. Those words state very clearly the main object of many such foundations under Republic and Empire alike.

Another reason for the establishment of 'coloniae' may be found in the history of the dying Republic and nascent Empire. During the civil wars of Sulla, of Caesar and of Octavian, huge armies were brought into the field by the rival military chiefs. As each conflict ended, huge masses of soldiery had to be discharged almost at once. For the sake of future peace it was imperative that these men should be quickly settled in some form of civic life in which they would abide. The form chosen was the familiar form of the 'colonia'. The time-expired soldiers were treated—not altogether unreasonably—as surplus population, and they were planted out in large bodies, sometimes in existing towns which needed population or at least a loyal population, sometimes in new towns established full-grown for the purpose. This method of dealing with discharged soldiers was continued during the early Empire, though it was then employed somewhat intermittently and the 'coloniae' were oftener planted in the provinces than in Italy itself; indeed the establishment of Italian 'coloniae', as distinct from grants of colonial rank by way of honour, almost ceased after A.D. 68.

It is not easy to determine the number of such new foundations of towns in Italy. Some seventy or eighty are recorded from the early and middle periods of the Republic—previous to about 120 B.C.; Sulla added a dozen or so; Octavian (Augustus) in his earlier years established or helped to establish about thirty.[57] But these figures can hardly represent the whole facts. The one certainty is that, through the causes just detailed, a very large number of the Italian towns were either founded full-grown or re-founded under new conditions during the later Roman Republic and the earlier Empire. Few towns in Italy developed as Rome herself developed, expanding from small beginnings in a slow continuous growth which was governed by convenience and opportunism and untouched by any new birth or systematic reconstruction.

[57] See Mommsen, Gesamm. Schriften v. 203; Nissen, Ital. Landeskunde ii. 27; Kornemann in Pauly-Wissowa, Encycl. iv. 520 foll.

Coincident with these processes of urban expansion, we find, in many towns which can be connected with the later Republic or the Empire, examples of a definite type of town-planning. This type has obvious analogies with earlier Italy and with the town-planning of the Greek world, but is also in certain respects distinct from either. The town areas with which we have now to deal are small squares or oblongs; they are divided by two main streets into four parts and by other and parallel streets into square or oblong house-blocks ('insulae'), and the rectangular scheme is carried through with some geometrical precision. The 'insulae', whatever their shape—square or oblong—are fairly uniform throughout. Only, those which line the north side of the E. and W. street are often larger than the rest (pp. 88, 125).[58] The two main streets appear to follow some method of orientation connected with augural science. As a rule, one of them runs north and south, the other east and west, and now and again the latter street seems to point to the spot where the sun rises above the horizon on the dawn of some day important in the history of the town.[59]

[58] Modern plans seem sometimes to imply that the 'insulae' which abutted on the walls were also abnormally large. That is because the corresponding modern blocks often include, with the original 'insula', the space between it and the wall, and also the wall itself which has been disused and built over.

[59] See on this point some remarks by W. Barthel, Bonner Jahrbuecher, cxx. 101-108.

The public buildings of these towns are in general somewhat small and arranged with little attempt at processional or architectural splendour; they seldom dominate or even cross the scheme of streets. Open spaces are rare; the Forum, which corresponds to the Greek Agora, contains, like that, a paved open court, but this court is almost as much enclosed as the cloister of a mediaeval church or the quadrangle of a mediaeval college. Theatre and amphitheatre[60] might, no doubt, reach huge dimensions, but externally they were more often massive than ornamental and the amphitheatre often stood outside the city walls. Here and there a triumphal arch spanned a road where it approached a town, and provided the only architectural vista to be seen in most of these Roman towns.

[60] In western Europe the provincial Roman amphitheatre averaged 45 x 70 yds. for its arena.

Dimensions, of course, varied. There was no normal size for an infant town. Some, when first established, covered little more than 30 acres, the area of mediaeval Warwick. Others were four or five times as spacious; they were twice or nearly twice as large as mediaeval Oxford, no mean city in thirteenth-century England. Most of them, doubtless, grew beyond their first limits; a few spread as far as a square mile, twice the extent of mediaeval London. Similarly the 'insulae' varied from town to town. In one, Timgad, they were only 70 to 80 ft. square. Often they measured 75 to 80 yds. square, rather more than an acre, as at Florence, Turin, Pavia, Piacenza.[61] Occasionally they were larger, but they seldom exceeded three acres, and their average fell below the prevalent practice of modern chess-board planning.

[61] For Florence and Turin see below; for Piacenza, the plans on the scale of 1:1000 and 1:5000 in L. Buroni's Acque potabili di Piacenza (1895).

In most towns, though not in all, the dimensions of the 'insulae' show a common element. In length or in breadth or in both, they usually approximate to 120 ft. or some multiple of that. The figure is significant. The unit of Roman land-surveying, the 'iugerum', was a rectangular space of 120 by 240 Roman feet—in English feet a tiny trifle less—and it seems to follow that 'insulae' were often laid out with definite reference to the 'iugerum'. The divisions may not have always been mathematically correct; our available plans are seldom good enough to let us judge of that,[62] and we do not know whether we ought to count the surface of the streets with the measurement of the 'insulae'. But the general practice seems clear, and it extended even to Britain (p. 129), and though blocks forming exactly a 'iugerum' or a half 'iugerum' are rare, the Italian land-measure certainly affected the civilization of the provincial towns.

[62] Silchester and Timgad are the only two sites which have been planned well enough to provide accurate measurements. The large modern town-plans (e.g. of Turin, p. 86) are useful, but inadequate to our purpose; for one thing, they often exaggerate the width of the streets. One really needs actual measurements made on the spot.

In this system perhaps the most peculiar feature is the intermixture of square and oblong 'insulae'. It is not merely the variation which can be traced in Priene (fig. 5), where some blocks are rather more square or oblong than others, but where all approach the same norm. The Roman towns which we are now considering show two varieties of house-blocks. Sometimes the blocks are square; sometimes, perhaps more often, they are oblong approximating to a square, like the blocks of Priene. But in a few cases, as at Naples among the more ancient, and at Carthage among the later foundations, they are oblong and the oblongs are very long and narrow.

It is hard to detect any principle underlying the use of these various forms. No doubt differences of historical origin are ultimately the causes of the mixture. But our present knowledge does not reveal these origins. The evidence is, indeed, contradictory at every point. If the Graeco-Macedonian fashion be quoted as precedent for square or squarish 'insulae', the Terremare show the same. If the theoretical scheme of the earlier Roman camp seemed based on the long narrow oblong, the actual remains of legionary encampments of the second century B.C. at Numantia include many squares. If one part of Pompeii exhibits oblongs, another part is made up of squares. If Piacenza, first founded in north Italy about 183 B.C., and founded again a hundred and fifty years later, is laid out in squares, its coeval neighbour Modena prefers the oblong. If the old Greek city of Naples embodies an extreme type of oblong, so does the later Augustan Carthage (pp. 100, 113). In the historic period, it would seem, no sharp line was drawn, or felt to exist, between the various types of 'insulae'. In the main, the square or squarish-oblong was preferred. Local accidents, such as the convenience of the site at Carthage, led to occasional adoption of the narrower oblong.

The Roman land-surveyors, it is true, distinguished the square and the oblong in a very definite way. The square, they alleged, was proper to the Italian land or to such provincial soil as enjoyed the privilege of being taxed—or freed from taxation—on the Italian scale. The oblong they connected with the ordinary tax-paying soil of the provinces. This distinction, however, was not carried out even in the agrarian surveys with which these writers were especially concerned,[63] and it applies still less to the towns. No doubt it is a fiction of the office. It would be only human nature if the surveyors, finding both forms in use, should invent a theory to account for them.

[63] Schulten, Bonner Jahrbuecher, ciii. 23, and references given there.

The system sketched in the preceding paragraphs seems, as has been said (p. 73), to have sprung from a fusion of Greek or Graeco-Macedonian with Italian customs. Roman town-planning, like Roman art, was recast under Hellenistic influence and thus gained mathematical precision and symmetry. When this happened is doubtful. Foreign scholars often ascribe it to Augustus and find a special connexion between the first emperor and the chess-board town-plan. But the architect Vitruvius, who dedicated his book to Augustus and who gives some brief notice to town-planning, urges strongly that towns should not be laid out on the chess-board pattern, but rather on an eight-sided or (as we might call it) star-shaped plan.[64] He would hardly have denounced a scheme which had been specially taken up by his patron, nor indeed does his criticism of the chess-board system sound as if he were denouncing a novelty in Italian building.

[64] i. 5 (21), 6 (28, 29).

On the other hand there seems no great difficulty in the idea that the regularization of the old Italian town-plan by Greek influence took place spontaneously in the late Republic. We cannot, indeed, date the change. It must remain doubtful whether it came by degrees or all at once,[65] and whether the right-angled plans of towns like Aquileia[66] or Piacenza belonged to their first foundation, i.e. to about 180 B.C., or to later rearrangements. But it seems reasonable to believe that a Graeco-Italian rectangular fashion of town-planning did supersede an earlier, irregular, Italian style, and had become supreme before the end of the Republic.

[65] Perhaps about 180 B.C., Mommsen, Roman Hist. iii. 206.

[66] Aquileia was set up in 181 B.C. to guard the north-east gate of Italy, and was reinforced in 169. Its remains, so far as excavated, show a rectangular plan of oblong 'insulae'—some of 1-1/2 acres (74 by 94 yards), some larger—while, till its downfall, about A.D. 450, we hear no word of refoundation or wholesale rebuilding. But if its original area be the space of 70 acres which is usually assigned, that is not rectangular but a square somewhat askew, which fits very badly with the rectangular street-plan, and one would incline to ascribe the latter to a later date. See Maionica, Fundkarte von Aquileia.



CHAPTER VII

INSTANCES OF ITALIAN TOWN-PLANS

The preceding chapters have dealt with the origins and general character of the Italian town-plan. We pass now to the remains which it has left in its own home, in Italy. These are many. In one city indeed, the greatest of all, no town-planning can be detected. Like Athens and Sparta, Rome shows that conservatism which marks so many capital cities. No part of it, so far as we know, was laid out on a rectangular or indeed on any plan.[67] It grew as it could. Its builders, above all its imperial builders, cared much for spectacular effects and architectural pomp. Even in late Republican times the gloomy mass of the Tabularium and the temples of the Capitol must have towered above the Forum in no mere accidental stateliness, and imperial Rome contained many buildings in many quarters to show that it was the capital of an Empire. But for town-planning we must go elsewhere.

[67] The traces of prehistoric planning detected by some writers in Rome are very dubious.

The sources of our knowledge are twofold. In a few cases archaeological excavation has laid bare the paving of Roman streets or the foundation of Roman house-blocks. More often mediaeval and modern streets seem to follow ancient lines and the ancient town-plan, or a part of it, survives in use to-day. Such survivals are especially common in the north of Italy. It is not, indeed, possible to gather a full list of them. He who would do that needs a longer series of good town-maps and good local histories than exist at present; he needs, too, a wider knowledge of mediaeval Italian history and a closer personal acquaintance with modern Italian towns, than a classical scholar can attempt. But much can be learnt even from our limited material.[68]

[68] See the seventeenth century Atlases of Blaeu, Janssons, and others, the modern maps prepared by Grassellini and others about 1840-50 (some on the scale 1:4,000), and in particular the Atlante geografico of Attilio Zuccagni-Orlandini (Firenze, 1844), and the recent town-maps of various Italian cities (mostly about 1:10,500). Different maps of the same town sometimes differ much in their detail. The Italian Government maps of the largest scale (1:25,000) are small for our present purpose and have been issued mainly for northern Italy.

The evidence of the streets needs, however, to be checked in every case. It would be rash to assume a Roman origin for an Italian town simply because its streets are old and their plan rectangular. There are many rectangular towns of mediaeval or modern origin. Such is Terra Nova, near the ancient Gela in Sicily, built by Frederick Stupor Mundi early in the thirteenth century. Such, too, Livorno, built by the Medici in the sixteenth century. Such, too, the many little military colonies of the Italian Republics, dotted over parts of northern and middle Italy. Often it is easy to prove that, despite their chess-board plans, these towns do not stand on Roman sites. Often the inquiry leads into regions remote from the study of ancient history.

Fortunately, enough examples can be identified as Roman to serve our purpose. Some of these occur in the Lombardy plain where, both under the Republic and at the outset of the Empire, many 'coloniae' were planted full-grown and where town-life on the Roman model was otherwise developed. Not all these towns survive to-day; not all of the survivors retain clear traces of their Roman town-plan; in nine cases, at least, the streets seem unmistakably to follow Roman lines. Four of the nine date from early days; in the late third and the early second centuries (218-183 B.C.), Piacenza, Bologna, Parma, and Modena, were built as new towns with the rank of 'colonia'. The first three of these were later refounded, about 40-20 B.C.—whether their streets were then laid out afresh is an open question—and Turin and Brescia were added. In addition, Verona, Pavia, and Como won municipal status in or before this later date, though when or how they came to be laid out symmetrically is not certain.[69] And there are other less certain examples.

[69] Milan (Mediolanium), once the chief Roman town of north Italy, is usually stated to preserve to-day no trace of Roman street-planning. But the line of the Via Manzoni, Via Margherita, and Via Nerino (cutting the Ambrosian Library) seems really to represent one of its main streets, and the line of the Fulcorino and Corso di Porta Romana the other, while one or two traces of 'insulae' can be detected near the Ambrosian Library. The town was destroyed in A.D. 539 and again in 1162, and more survivals cannot be expected.

Other instances, but not so many, may be quoted from south of the Apennines. At Florence, for example, and at Lucca 'coloniae' were planted full-grown and the street-plans still record the fact. At Naples, at Herculaneum, perhaps at Sorrento,[70] proofs survive of similar planning. But the towns of central Italy were in great part more ancient than the era of precise town-planning, and many of them were perched in true Italian fashion on lofty crags—praeruptis oppida saxis—which gave no room for square or oblong house-blocks. In the period of the dying Republic and nascent Empire fewer 'coloniae' were planted here than in the north, while in much of southern Italy towns have in all ages been comparatively rare.

[70] Beloch, Campanien, p. 252.

In the towns just noted we can trace many, though not all, of the original house-blocks. Usually the blocks are square or nearly so, as at Turin, Verona, Pavia, Piacenza, Florence, Lucca. Less often they are long and even narrow rectangles, as at Modena, and Sorrento, and above all Naples, and as usual it is not easy to understand the reason for the difference (p. 80).

Turin (fig. 15).

Of all the examples of Roman town-planning known to us in Italy, Turin is by far the most famous.[71] Here the streets have survived almost intact, and excavations have confirmed the truth of the survival by revealing both the ancient road-metalling and the ancient town-walls and gates. Turin, Augusta Taurinorum, began about 28 B.C. as a 'colonia' planted by Augustus. Its walls enclosed an oblong of about 745 x 695 metres (127 acres).[72] The sides are represented (1) on the north by the Via Giulio, in the western part of which the southern edge of the street actually coincides with the line of the Roman town-wall, while further east the Porta Palatina enshrines an ancient gate; (2) on the west by the Via della Consolata, and the Via Siccardi, the east side of which latter street seems to stand upon the Roman town-wall; and (3) on the south by the Via della Cernaia and Via Teresa, the north side of which stands over the Roman southern town-wall. (4) The east wall agrees with no existing street but may be represented by a line drawn through the Carignano Theatre and the western front of the Palazzo Madama, which contains the actual towers of the Roman east gate.[73] The north-west corner, uncovered in 1884, is a sharp right angle. This feature recurs at Aosta and at Laibach (pp. 90, 116), both founded, like Turin, in the Augustan age, and seems to belong to that period; later, it gave place to the rounded angle visible at Timgad (p. 109) and in many Roman forts of the middle Empire.

[71] Carlo Promis, Storia dell' antico Torino (Torino, 1869); Alfredo d'Andrade, Relazione dell' ufficio regionale per la conservazione dei monumenti del Piemonte, 1883-91 (Torino, 1899); Schultze, Bonner Jahrbuecher, cxviii. 339; Barthel, ibid. cxx. 105; Pianta di Torino (1-10,000), by G.B. Paravia.

[72] I take these figures from the plan of Paravia, which is said to be the most correct plan of Turin at present available. Promis gives smaller dimensions, 720 x 670 m., and he measured from what is now known to be a point too far to the east (the Via Accademia delle Scienze) instead of from the west front of the Palazzo Madama; he has, however, been usually followed. Other maps give other dimensions, Orlandini (1844), 758 x 780 m.; Vallardi (1869), 680 x 740 m.; Maggi (1876), 730 x 800 m.; Ashby (Art. 'Turin' in Encycl. Britannica) gives 2,526 x 2,330 ft. which must be too large. I reproduce here (fig. 15) the plan of Orlandini, since it shows well the extent of street-survivals in Turin before the great modern rebuildings or expansions.

[73] d'Andrade, Relazione, pp. 8-20; Notizie degli Scavi, 1885, pp. 173, 271, and 1902, p. 277.

Of the interior buildings of the town little is known. The Forum perhaps stood near the present Palazzo di Citta, and the Theatre was traced in 1899 in the north-east corner of the town, occupying apparently, a complete insula;[74] of the private houses nothing definite seems to be recorded.

[74] Notizie, 1903, p. 3.

But the street-plan has survived intact, except in two outlying corners. The town was divided up into square or nearly square blocks, of which there were nine counting from east to west and eight from north to south. Most of these 'insulae' measured about 80 yds. square.[75] A few were larger, 80 x 120 yds.; these were ranged along the north side of the street now called Via Garibaldi (formerly Dora Grossa), which represents the Roman main street between the east and west gates—in the language of the Roman land-surveyors, the decumanus maximus. This street cut the town into two equal halves. The other divisions of the town were no less symmetrical. But, as there were nine 'insulae' from east to west, the main north and south street could not bisect the town. Indeed, the south gate seems to have had five house-blocks west of it and four east of it, while the Porta Palatina stands further west, with six blocks on the west side of it. The north and south gates, therefore, are not opposite.[76] Whether this was the original plan is not clear, nor is the age of the surviving walls and gates quite certain; the bonding courses in some of the masonry of the walls does not seem Augustan. But the street plan may unhesitatingly be assigned to the first establishment of the town, about 28 B.C. Since, it has been extended far beyond the Roman walls. Nearly all modern Turin has been laid out, bit by bit, in imitation and continuation of the original Roman lines.

[75] An insula is mentioned in Notizie, 1901, p. 391, which measured 74 x 80 metres. It is likely that there were small unevennesses in the ancient as there are in the modern house-blocks. The 'insulae' which abutted on the town-walls are represented to-day by unduly large blocks, oblong rather than square, but these latter contain not only the areas of the Roman 'insulae' in question, but also the space between them and the town-walls and the lines of the wall themselves (p. 77).

[76] This failure in symmetry recurs in one or two other Roman towns as probably at Timgad (p. 109) and at Cologne (E. and W. gates), at Silchester and Caerwent, but it may sometimes be the result of alteration. Occasionally it appears in military sites (Ritterling, Lager bei Hofheim, p. 29 note). It is presumably a mere matter of convenience; no superstition attaches to it such as that which led the Chinese not to put their gates opposite each other (p. 148).



Aosta (fig. 16).

Another example of an Italian town-plan, from the same date and district as Turin, is supplied by Augusta Praetoria, now Aosta, some fifty miles north of Turin in the Dora Baltea Valley, not far from the foot of Mont Blanc.[77] Aosta was founded by Augustus in 25 B.C. on a hitherto empty spot, to provide homes for time-expired soldiers and to serve as a quasi-fortress in an important Alpine valley. Its first inhabitants were 3,000 men discharged from the Praetorian Guard, with their wives and children; its population may have numbered at the outset some 15,000 free persons, besides slaves. The town, as it is known to us from excavation and observation, formed a rectangle 620 yds. long and 780 yds. wide, and covered an area of about 100 acres (fig. 16). The walls formed sharp right angles at the corners, as at Turin. Within the walls were an amphitheatre, a theatre, public baths, a structure covering nearly 2 acres and interpreted as a granary or (perhaps more correctly) as a cistern,[78] and private houses as yet unexplored. Beneath the chief streets were sewers, by which indeed these streets were mainly traced.

[77] C. Promis, Antichita di Aosta (Torino, 1862), with plan, plate 3, dating from 1838; Notizie degli Scavi, 1899, p. 108, with a later plan, but lacking a scale; Nissen, Ital. Landeskunde, ii. 171.

[78] Durm Baukunst der Roemer, p. 458.



The whole was divided by a regular network of streets into rectangular blocks. According to the latest plan of the site, there were sixteen blocks, nearly identical in shape and averaging 145 x 180 yds. (5-1/2 acres). That, however, is an incredible area for single house-blocks, and it is to be noted that Promis shows two further roads (A, A in fig. 16). If these are survivals of other such roads, Aosta may have contained thirty-two oblong 'insulae', each nearly 220 x 540 ft., or even sixty-four smaller and squarer 'insulae', measuring half that size.[79] Four gates gave entrance; those in the two longer sides which face north-west and south-east, are curiously far from the centre and indeed close to the south-western end of the town. It is, of course, impossible to determine, without spade-work, which of the recognizable buildings of Aosta date from the foundation of the place in 25 B.C. But the general internal scheme and the symmetrical and practically 'chess-board' pattern of streets must date from the first foundation.[80]

[79] Promis, p. 140; his plan has no proper scale. There seems no decisive evidence and the modern streets of Aosta do not help us.

[80] The town of Concordia in north-east Italy, where Augustus planted a 'colonia', doubtless of discharged soldiers, is said to have possessed a ground-plan of oblong blocks very like that of Augusta Praetoria. But this plan rests mainly on the authority of a workman who apparently did not know how to read or write (he is described as 'analfabeta') and I therefore omit it here. See Notizie degli Scavi, 1880, p. 412, and Plate XII (the text gives no dimensions and the plan lacks a scale), and compare 1882, p. 426, and 1894, p. 399.

Florence (fig. 17).

A yet more interesting instance of a Roman town-plan preserved in many streets may be found in Florence.[81] In Roman times Florence was a 'colonia'. When this 'colonia' was planted is very doubtful. Perhaps the age of Sulla (90-80 B.C.) is the likeliest date; all that is actually certain is that the foundation was made before the end of the first century A.D. This 'colonia', like others, was laid out in chess-board fashion, and vestiges of its streets survive in the Centro which forms the heart of the present town. The Centro of Florence, as we see it to-day, is very modern. It was, indeed, laid out a generation ago by Italian architects who designed the broad streets crossing at right angles which form its characteristic. But this 'Haussmannization' revived, consciously or unconsciously, an old arrangement. The plan of Florence in 1427 shows a group of twenty unmistakable 'insulae', each of them about 1-1/8 acre in area, that is, very similar in size to the 'insulae' of Turin. This group is bounded by the modern streets Tornabuoni on the west, Porta Rossa on the south, Calzaioli on the east, Teatina on the north; it covers a rectangle of some 305 x 327 yds., not quite 21 acres.

[81] On Roman and early mediaeval Florence see Villani, Cronica (written about 1345, published 1845), i. 61, 89, 120; R. Davidsohn, Geschichte von Florenz and Forschungen (Berlin, 1886); L.A. Milani, Notizie degli Scavi, 1887, p. 129; plan of the Centro in 1427 by Comm. Guido Carocci, Studi storici sul Centro di Firenze (Florence, 1889); Monumenti antichi, vi. 15. Nissen (Ital. Landeskunde, ii. 296) fixes its area at 400 x 600 m., about 58 acres.



The original Roman town presumably extended beyond these narrow limits. But it is not easy to fix its area, nor are unmistakable 'insulae' to be detected outside them. On the west the Via Tornabuoni seems to have marked the Roman limit, as it does to-day. On the north, a probable line is given by the gateway, Por Episcopi, which once spanned the passage—now an open space—on the east side of the Archbishop's Palace (plan 17 B). That gateway stood between the Via Teatina and the next street to the north, the Via dei Cerretani, and the Roman north wall and ditch apparently ran along the intervals between these two modern streets—as indeed the lines of certain mediaeval lanes suggest. On the east the 'colonia' is supposed to have stretched to the Via del Proconsolo and the old Por S. Piero, probably the original east gate. Here the traces of 'insulae' are ill preserved; the space in question would contain, and the mediaeval streets would admit of, twelve blocks in addition to the twenty noted above.

The southern limit of Roman Florence towards the Arno is altogether doubtful. There are, or were, traces of Roman baths in the Via delle Terme, and it has been thought that the town stretched riverwards as far as the old gate Por S. Maria and the Piazza S. Trinita. The gate, however, is ill-placed and the line of wall implied by this theory is irregular. The mediaeval streets point rather to a south wall near the Via Porta Rossa. The baths might perhaps be due to a later Roman extension, such as we shall meet at Timgad (p. 113). The Por S. Maria may even be due to one of the reconstructions of Florence in the Middle Ages. At the end we must admit that without further evidence the limits of Roman Florence cannot be fixed for certain. But the limits indicated above give the not unsuitable dimensions of 46 acres (380 x 590 yds.), while the history of the twenty indubitable insulae of the Centro remains full of interest. We see here, as clearly as anywhere in the Roman world, how the regular Roman plan has gradually been distorted by encroachments and how, even in its irregularity, it has had power to drive modern builders towards its ancient fashion.

Of the interior of the Roman town little is known. The streets now called Strozzi and Speziali plainly preserve the Roman main street from east to west, while the Via Calimara overlies that which ran from north to south. Where these crossed was the mediaeval Mercato Vecchio, now enlarged into a patriotic Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele; here we may put the Roman forum, and here too, by the former church of S. Maria in Campidoglio, was the temple of Capitoline Juppiter. There were also theatres, a shrine of Isis, and, outside the Roman limit, an amphitheatre still discernible in the curves of certain streets (plan 17 B). However small Florentia was, it possessed the true elements of the Roman town.

Lucca (fig. 18).

A good parallel to Florence may be found at Lucca, the ancient Luca, where again the streets preserve a rectangular pattern without showing clearly what was its full extent. Luca is said to have been founded as a 'colonia' in 177 B.C., but the statement is of doubtful truth. Certainly it was a 'municipium' in Cicero's days, and a little later, in the period 40-20 B.C., it received the rank of 'colonia' and many colonists, taken (as an inscription says) from discharged soldiers of Legions VII and XXVI. Whether the surviving traces of town-planning date from this latter event or from some earlier age is not easy to say. But of the street-plan there can be no doubt, though its original size is uncertain. A rectangular area about 700 yds. from east to west and 360 yds. from north to south is divided into fifteen square or squarish 'insulae' arranged in three rows. Each insula is about 3 acres, but those of the middle row are larger than the rest (150 x 150 yds.). The Via S. Croce which runs along the south side of this row was perhaps the main east and west thoroughfare of the town, the 'decumanus maximus', so that the larger 'insulae' correspond to those which appear in the same position at Turin and elsewhere (p. 88).



Whether there were other 'insulae' besides the fifteen is doubtful. On the east there were certainly none: the two narrow parallel streets at the east end of the area just described are obviously due to a growth of houses along the line of the original east wall. The other limits are more obscure. Probably the north and west walls stood a little outside of the Via Galli Tassi (once S. Pellegrino) and the Via S. Giorgio, but there may well have been a row of insulae, now obliterated, south of the Via del Battistero. One or two interior buildings are known. The Forum appears to have stood where is now the Piazza S. Michele in Foro; close by was a temple; in the north-eastern quarter, at the Piazza del Carmine, was probably the theatre; near it but outside the walls was the amphitheatre, its outlines still visible in the Piazza del Mercato (110 x 80 yds. in greatest dimensions).[82]

[82] Plan by P. Sinibaldi, 1843, 1:4,000. Notizie degli Scavi, 1906, p. 117, &c. Nissen (Ital. Landeskunde, ii. 288) gives the area as 800 x 1,200 metres, which seems much too large.

Herculaneum (fig. 19).

To these examples from north Italy may be added two from the south, Herculaneum and Naples. Herculaneum had much the same early history as its more important neighbour Pompeii. First an Oscan settlement, then Etruscan, then Samnite, it passed later under Roman rule. After the Social Wars (89 B.C.) it appears as a 'municipium'; of its history from that date till its destruction (A.D. 79) we know next to nothing. But excavations, commenced in the eighteenth century and now long suspended, have thrown light on its ground-plan.[83] This was a rectangular pattern of oblong house-blocks, measuring 54 x 89 yds., or in some cases a little more, and divided by streets varying from 15 to 30 ft. in width which ran at right angles or parallel to one another. Only a part of the town has been as yet unearthed. In that a broad colonnaded main street ran from north-west to south-east; on the north-east side of this street stood a row of house-blocks with a structure taken to be a Basilica, and on the south-west of it were ten house-blocks, one of which includes some public baths. At the north end of this area are a theatre and temple, at the south end two large structures which have been called temples but are more like large private houses; on the east (according to the eighteenth-century searchers) are graves.

[83] M. Ruggiero, Scavi di Ercolano (Naples, 1885), plates ii and xii; Beloch. Campanien, pp. 215 foll.; Nissen, Ital. Landeskunde, ii. 759; Waldstein and Shoobridge, Herculaneum (London, 1908), pp. 60 foil.; E.R. Barker, Buried Herculaneum (1908); Gall in Pauly-Wissowa, viii. (1912) 532-48.



How much of the town has been uncovered, how much still lies hidden beneath the lava which overflowed it in A.D. 79, is disputed. Of its town-walls and gates no trace has yet been found. But nearly all its public buildings seem to be known; the graves on the east side, if correctly mapped by their discoverers and if coeval with the streets and houses, leave no room for further 'insulae' in that direction, while the great country-house called the 'Casa dei Papiri' plainly stood outside the town on the north-west. From these facts one modern writer has calculated that Herculaneum was less than a quarter of a mile long, less than 350 yds. broad, and less than 26 acres in extent—in short, not a sixth part of Pompeii. These measures are probably too small. The 'Basilica' on the north side of the main street cannot have stood on the extreme edge of the town. There must have been not three but four rows of house-blocks from south-west to north-east; the graves once noted in this quarter must be older than our Herculaneum or otherwise unconnected with it. The whole town must have been 40 or 45 rather than 25 acres in area. Even so it is a little town. The unenthusiastic references to it in ancient literature are, after all, truthful. Apart from the great villa outside it—possibly an imperial residence—it hardly deserved, or to-day deserves, to be excavated at the extraordinary cost which its excavation would involve.

The date of its planning is as doubtful as the extent of its area. One recent writer, Nissen, has suggested that it was reconstructed after an earthquake in A.D. 63 and was hardly completed before the eruption of 79. The earthquake is well attested. But it cannot possibly have wrecked the town so utterly as to cause wholesale rebuilding on new lines, and an inscription points rather to the time of Augustus. One Marcus Nonius Balbus (the text runs) built 'a basilica, gates and a wall at his own cost', and this builder Balbus was probably a contemporary of Augustus.[84] Others have preferred to think that the town-planning reveals Greek influences; they point to the Greek city of Naples, 7 miles west of Herculaneum, and the Doric temple at Pompeii, much the same distance east of it. However, neither the town-planning of Naples, to be discussed in the next paragraphs, nor that of Pompeii (p. 68), seems to be necessarily Greek, and Herculaneum itself contains nothing which cannot be explained as Italian. It is possible, though there is no record of the fact, that it received a settlement of discharged soldiers somewhere about 30 B.C. and was then laid out afresh. But here, as throughout this inquiry, more light is needed if the inquirer is to pass from guesswork to proven fact.

[84] CIL. x. 1425; compare Dessau, 896. It is, no doubt, possible that this Nonius Balbus is the M. Nonius ... who built something in honour of Titus in A.D. 72, but the identification is not likely.

Naples (fig. 20).

One more example, from the neighbourhood of Herculaneum, may complete the list of Italian street-plans. Naples, the Greek and Roman Neapolis, was a Greek city, the most prosperous of the Greek towns in Campania.[85] After 90 B.C. it appears to have become a Roman 'municipium'. But it retained much of its Greek civilization. A writer of the early first century after Christ, Strabo, states that abundant traces of Greek life survived there, 'gymnasia, and athletic schools, and tribal divisions, and Greek names even for Roman things.' Even later Tacitus calls it a 'Greek city', and Greek was still used for official inscriptions there in the third century.

[85] Beloch, Campanien (Berlin, 1879), p. 26; Capasso, Napoli Greco-Romana (Napoli, 1905). The Forum, Market, and some other buildings marked by Capasso seem to me (and even to him or his editors) very dubious (p. 63). Two theatres (p. 82) and a Temple of the Dioscuri are better established. For plans see Piante topogr. dei quartieri di Napoli 1861-5 (1:3,888) and Pianta della citta di N. (Off. della Guerra, 1865), from which latter fig. 20 is adapted.



This Neapolis town had, as certain existing streets declare, a peculiar form of town-planning. The area covered by these streets is an irregular space of 250 acres in the heart of the modern city, about 850 yds. from north to south and 1,000 yds. from east to west.[86] In Roman days three straight streets ran parallel from east to west and a large number of smaller streets, twenty or so, ran at right angles to them from north to south. The house-blocks enclosed by these streets were all of similar size and shape, a thin oblong of 35 x 180 metres (39 x 198 yds.). Some of the public buildings naturally trespassed on to more than one 'insula'; a theatre appears indeed to have stretched over parts of three. In general, the oblongs seem to have been laid out with great regularity and the angles are right angles, though the 'insulae' in the northern and southern rows of house-blocks cannot have been fully rectangular and symmetrical.

[86] The limits are the Castel Capuano on the east, the Strada dell' Orticello on the north, the church of S. Pietro a Majella on the west, and on the south the churches of S. Marcellino and S. Severino.

This town-plan of Naples differs from any of those noted above. Its blocks are narrower than those in any Italian town, unless in Modena, and while they resemble the 'insulae' of the sixth region of Pompeii (fig. 13), are far more regular than those. Almost the only close parallel is that of Roman Carthage (fig. 24). As Naples was by origin and character a Greek city, these narrow oblongs have been supposed to represent a Greek arrangement. They do not, however, correspond to anything that is known in the Greek lands, either of the Macedonian or of any earlier period. The conclusion is difficult to avoid that this Greek city of Naples adopted an Italian street-scheme, but laid it out with more scientific regularity than the early Italians themselves. When this occurred and why, is wholly unknown. That the result is not an unpractical form of building is shown by the fact that similar long and narrow house-blocks are a characteristic feature of modern Liverpool, though they seldom occur in other English towns, unless intermixed with square and other blocks.



CHAPTER VIII

ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWN-PLANS. I

The provinces, and above all the western provinces of the Roman Empire, tell us even more than Italy about Roman town-planning. But they tell it in another way. They contain many towns which were founded full-grown, or re-founded and at the same time rebuilt, and which were in either case laid out on the Roman plan. But the modern successors of these towns have rarely kept the network of their ancient streets in recognizable detail. Though walls, gates, temples, baths, palaces, amphitheatres still stand stubbornly erect amidst a flood of modern dwellings, they are but the islands which mark a submerged area. The paths and passages by which men once moved across that area have vanished beneath the waves and cannot be recovered from any survey of these visible fragments. There is hardly one modern town in all the European and African provinces of the Roman Empire which still uses any considerable part of its ancient street-plan. In our own country there is no single case. In Gaul and Germany, two or three streets in Cologne and one or two in Trier are the sole survivals.[87] In Illyricum there is no example unless possibly at Belgrade. In the Spanish peninsula the town of Braga in northern Portugal seems to stand alone. In Roman Africa—Tunis, Algiers and Morocco—no instance has survived the Arab conquest.[88]

[87] For Orange see p. 107. Nimes may possibly retain one or two streets of the Roman Nemausus, but it is very doubtful; see Menard's map of 1752. See further in general p. 142.

[88] Though, curiously enough, the chess-board pattern of field divisions has survived in the neighbourhood of Carthage.

If, however, survivals of ancient streets are as rare in the provinces as they are common in Italy, the provinces yield other evidence unknown to Italy. In these lands, and above all in Africa, the sites of many Roman towns have lain desolate and untouched since Roman days, waiting for the excavator to recover the unspoilt pattern of their streets. If the Roman Empire brought to certain provinces, as it unquestionably did to Africa, the happiest period in their history till almost the present day, that only makes their remains the more noteworthy and instructive. Here the new art of excavation has already achieved many and varied successes. In the western Empire one town, Silchester in Britain, has been wholly uncovered within the circuit of its walls. Others, like Caerwent in Britain or Timgad and Carthage in Africa, have been methodically examined, though the inquiries have not yet touched or perhaps can never touch their whole areas. In others again, some of which lie in the east, occasional search or even chance discoveries have shed welcome light. Our knowledge is more than enough already for the purposes of this chapter.

We can already see that the town-plan described in the foregoing pages was widely used in the provinces of the Empire. We find it in Africa, in Central and Western Europe, and indeed wherever Rorrran remains have been carefully excavated; we find it even in remote Britain amidst conditions which make its use seem premature. Where excavation has as yet yielded no proofs, other evidence fills the gap. In southern Gaul, as it happens, archaeological remains are unhelpful. But just there an inscription has come to light, the only one of its kind in the Roman world, which proves that one at least of the 'coloniae' of Gallia Narbonensis was laid out in rectangular oblong plots. It is clear enough that this town-plan was one of the forms through which the Italian civilization diffused itself over the western provinces.

The exact measure of its popularity is, however, hard to determine. In the east it found little entrance. There, the very similar Macedonian and Greek methods of town-planning were rooted firmly, long before Rome conquered Greece or Asia Minor or Syria or Egypt. The few town-plans which have been noted in these lands, and which may be assigned more or less conjecturally to the Roman era, seem to be Hellenic or Hellenistic rather than Italian. They show broad stately streets, colonnades, vistas, which belong to the east and not to Italy. Even in the west, the rule of the chess-board was sometimes broken. Aquincum, near Budapest, became a 'municipium' under Hadrian; its ruins, so far as hitherto planned, exhibit no true street-planning. But that may be due to its history, for it seems not to have been founded full-grown, but to have slowly developed as best it could, and to have won municipal status at the end.

Roman Africa is here, as so often, our best source of knowledge. At Timgad (p. 109), a town laid out in Roman fashion with a rigid 'chess-board' of streets was subsequently enlarged on irregular and almost chaotic lines. At Gigthi, in the south-east of Tunis, the streets around the Forum, itself rectangular enough, do not run parallel or at right angles to it or to one another.[89] At Thibilis, on the border of Tunis and Algeria, the streets, so far as they have yet been uncovered, diverge widely from the chess-board pattern.[90] One French archaeologist has even declared that most of the towns in Roman Africa lacked this pattern.[91] Our evidence is perhaps still too slight to prove or disprove that conclusion. Few African towns have been sufficiently uncovered to show the street-plan.[92] But town-life was well developed in Roman Africa. It is hardly credible that the Africans learnt all the rest of Roman city civilization and city government, and left out the planning. The individual cases of such planning which will be quoted in the following pages tell their own tale—that, while the strict rule was often broken, it was the rule.

[89] Archives nouvelles des Missions scientifiques, xv. 1907, fasc. 4.

[90] Plan by Joly, Arch. Anzeiger, 1911, p. 270, fig. 17. The plan has been thought to imply 'insulae' twice as large as those of Timgad. To me it suggests nothing so regular.

[91] Toutain, Cites romaines de la Tunisie, p. 79 note: 'Ce qui toutefois est incontestable, c'est que cette disposition d'une regularite artificielle, autour de deux grandes voies exactement orientees et se coupant a angle droit, est tres rare dans l'Afrique romaine. Les villes de ce pays n'out pas ete toutes construites sur le meme plan: chacune d'elles a, pour ainsi dire, epouse la forme de son emplacement.'

[92] There are many in which it could be traced with some ease, apparently. Thelepte, Cillium, Ammaedara, Sufetula, Archives des Missions, 1887, pp. 68, 121, 161-171, Simitthu, Memoires presentes par divers savants, ser. I. x. 462, and Thuccabor, Tissot, Geogr. d'Afrique, ii. 292, seem to have visible streets, but no one has recorded them exactly. The plan of Utica, given by Tissot (Atlas, by Reinach, plate vi) on the authority of Daux, is open to doubt.



Orange (fig. 21).

The case which deserves the first place stands by itself. It is the one piece of written evidence (as distinct from structural remains) which has survived from Roman town-planning. Curiously enough, it was found not in Italy but in a province, and a province which, for all its wealth of Roman buildings, has not yet revealed the smallest structural proof of Roman town-planning. In April 1904 a scrap of inscribed marble, little more than 18 in. broad and high, was dug up at Orange, in southern France, right in the centre of the town. It is a waif from a lengthy document. But it chances to be intelligible. It enumerates six plots of land—'merides' it calls them, from a Greek word meaning 'share' or 'division'—which seem to have formed one parcel: each plot is numbered, and the length of its frontage on the public way (in fronte), the name of its lessee or manceps and that of his surety (fideiussor) are added. The frontages of four plots make up 200 ft. (those of the other two are lost), and it has been suggested that the six together made up 240 ft. The depth—which is not stated on the surviving fragment, but was doubtless uniform for all the plots—may then have been 120 ft., and the whole parcel may have covered 120 x 240 ft., that is, a Roman 'iugerum'. It was plainly a piece of town property. The largest 'meris', Plot v, measured only 25 by 40 yds. and no one would care for such a field or farm. Besides, this plot at one end adjoined a 'ludus' or gladiatorial school, and it fronted AD K, ad kardinem, on to the street called in surveying language the 'cardo'. The whole land apparently belonged to one lessee who held it from the municipality on something like a perpetual lease.[93]

[93] For the inscription see Esperandieu, Acad. des Inscriptions, Comptes rendus, 1904, p. 497; Cagnat, Annee Epigr., 1905, 12; and especially Schulten, Hermes, 1906, 1; a convenient English account is given by H.S. Jones, Companion to Roman Hist., p. 22. It has been suggested by Schulten that the blocks were at first divided into plots of 35 ft. frontage, and that the boundaries had become changed in the ordinary course of things before the survey was made. But this seems to carry conjecture rather far.

Here, in short, is the record of an oblong 'insula' in the Roman town of Orange. It is doubtless part of a longer record, a register of house-property in the whole town. Orange, Colonia Iulia Secundanorum Arausio, was a 'colonia' founded about 45 B.C. with discharged soldiers of Caesar's Second Legion. Possibly the register was drawn up at this date; more probably it is rather later and may be connected with a census of Gaul begun about 27 B.C. Certainly it was preserved with much care, as if one of the 'muniments' of the citizens. The spot where it was dug up is in the heart of the ancient as well as of the modern town, close to the probable site of the Forum, and the inscription may have been fastened up in all its length on the walls of some public building. If, as is likely, the town owned the soil of the town, the connexion of the inscription with the Forum becomes even clearer. In any case, the town was plainly laid out in a rectangular street-plan. To-day its lanes are as tortuous as those of any other Provencal town.[94] A strange chance reveals what it and many other of these towns must once have been.

[94] It has been said to show marks of streets laid out rectangularly, but neither the look of the town itself nor the plans of it seem to me to confirm this idea; compare Lentheric, Le Rhone, ii. 110.



Timgad (figs. 22, 23).

From this piece of half-literary evidence we pass to purely archaeological remains, and first to the province of Numidia in Roman Africa and to the town of Timgad. The town of Thamugadi, now Timgad, lay on the northern skirts of Mount Aures, halfway between Constantine and Biskra and about a hundred miles from the Mediterranean coast. Here the emperor Trajan founded in A.D. 100 a 'colonia' on ground then wholly uninhabited, and peopled it with time-expired soldiers from the Third Legion which garrisoned the neighbouring fortress of Lambaesis. The town grew. Soon after the middle of the second century it was more than half a mile in width from east to west, and its extent from north to south, though not definitely known, cannot have been much less. The first settlement was smaller. So far as it has been uncovered by French archaeologists—sufficiently for our purpose, though not completely—the 'colonia' of Trajan appears to have been some 29 or 30 acres in extent within the walls and almost square in outline (360 x 390 yds.). It was entered by four principal gates, three of which can still be traced quite clearly, and which stood in the middle of their respective sides; the position of the south gate is doubtful. According to Dr. Barthel, the street which joins the east and west gates was laid out to point to the sunrise of September 18, the birthday of Trajan.



The interior of the town was divided by streets into a chess-board pattern of small square house-blocks; from north to south there were twelve such blocks and from east to west eleven—not twelve, as is often stated. The possible total of 132 'insulae' was, however, diminished by the space needed for public buildings, though it is not easy to tell how great this space was in the original town. Ultimately, as the excavations show, eight 'insulae' were taken up by the Forum, four by the Theatre, three by the various Baths, one by a Market, one by a Public Library, and one by a Christian church. But some of these edifices were certainly not established till long after A.D. 100 and the others, which must have existed from the first, were soon extended and enlarged. A competent writer on the subject, Dr. Barthel, allows seven blocks for public purposes in the original town, but this seems too little. The blocks themselves measured on the average a square of 70 Roman feet (23 x 23 yards), and may have contained one, two, three, or even four houses apiece, but they have undergone so many changes that their original arrangements are not at all clear. The streets which divided these blocks were 15 to 16 ft. wide; the two main streets, which ran to the principal gates, were further widened by colonnades and paved with superior flagging. All the streets had well-built sewers beneath them.

Trajan's Timgad was plainly small. On any estimate of the number of houses, the original draft of veterans sent there in A.D. 100 can hardly have exceeded 400, and the first population, apart from slaves, must have been under 2,000. This agrees with the figures of Aosta (p. 89). There, 100 acres took 3,000 veterans and their families; here the area is about one-third of 100 acres and the ground available for dwellings may perhaps have been one-sixth. In neither case was space wasted. There was not probably at Aosta, there certainly was not at Timgad, any provision of open squares, of handsome facades, of temples seen down the vista of stately avenues; there were not even private gardens. The one large unroofed space in Timgad was the half-acre shut within the Forum cloister. This economy of room is no doubt due to the fact that the 'colonia' was not only a home for time-expired soldiers, but, as Prof. Cagnat has justly observed, a quasi-fortress watching the slopes of Mount Aures south of it, just as Aosta watched its Alpine valley. As Machiavelli thought it worth while to observe, the shorter the line of a town's defence, the fewer the men who can hold it. The town-planning of Timgad was designed on other than purely architectural or municipal principles. For this reason, too, we should probably seek in vain any marked distinction between richer and poorer quarters and larger or smaller houses.[95] The centurions and other officers may have formed the first municipal aristocracy of Timgad, as retired officers did in many Roman towns, but there can have been no definite element of poor among the common soldiers.

[95] Ballu detects a 'quartier industriel' in the outer town, but the evidence does not seem to warrant so grand a term.

Such was Trajan's Timgad, as revealed by excavations now about two-thirds complete. The town soon burst its narrow bounds. A Capitol, Baths, a large Meat-market, and much else sprang up outside the walls. Soon the walls themselves, like those of many mediaeval towns—for example, the north and west town-walls of Oxford—were built over and hidden by later structures. The town grew from one of 360 to a breadth of over 800 yds. And as it expanded, it broke loose from the chess-board pattern. The builders of later Timgad did not resemble those of later Turin. Even the decumanus, the main 'east and west' street, wandered away north-west in an uncertain curve, and all that has been discovered of streets outside the walls of Trajan is irregular and complicated. A town-plan, it seems, was binding on the first builders of the 'colonia'. It lost its power within a very few years.[96]

[96] Boeswillwald, Cagnat and Ballu, Timgad (Paris, 1891-1905); see especially Appendix, pp. 339-349; Ballu, Ruines de Timgad (Paris, 1897-1911); Barthel, Bonner Jahrbuecher, cxx. 101.

Carthage (fig. 24).

It remains to note another example of town-planning in a Roman municipality of the western Empire, which is as important as it is abnormal. Carthage, first founded—though only in an abortive fashion—as a Roman 'colonia' in 123 B.C. and re-established with the same rank by Julius Caesar or Augustus, shows a rectangular town-plan in a city which speedily became one among the three or four largest and wealthiest cities in the Empire. The regularity of its planning was noted in ancient times by a topographical writer.[97] But the plan, though rectangular, is not normal. According to the French archaeologists who have worked it out, it comprised a large number of streets—perhaps as many as forty—running parallel to the coast, a smaller number running at right angles to these down the hillside towards the shore, and many oblong 'insulae', measuring each about 130 x 500 ft., roughly two Roman iugera. The whole town stretched for some two miles parallel to the shore and for about a mile inland, and covered perhaps 1,200 acres. Its street-plan can hardly be older than Caesar or Augustus, but the shape of its 'insulae' appears to be without parallel in that age. It comes closest to the oblong blocks of Pompeii and of Naples (pp. 63, 100), and its two theatres also recall those towns. One reason for its plan may no doubt be found in the physical character of the site. The ground slopes down from hills towards the shore, and encourages the use of streets which run level along the slopes, parallel to the shore, and not more or less steeply towards it.[98]

[97] Totius orbis descriptio, 61 (Mueller, geogr. graeci min. ii. 527); dispositione gloriosissima constat ... in directione vicorum et platearum aequalibus lineis currens' (written probably about A.D. 350).

[98] Carte archeologique et topogr. des Ruines de Carthage, by Gauckler and Delattre (1:5,000); Schulten, Archaeol. Anzeiger, 1905, p. 77; 1909, p. 190; 1911, p. 246; Audollent, Carthage romaine (Paris, 1901), pp. 309, 846. The older accounts of Daux and Tissot seem less trustworthy.



Laibach (fig. 25), Numantia, Lincoln (fig. 26).

Three or four more ordinary examples chosen at random from provincial municipalities may show the diffusion of town-planning in the western Roman world. One example, from the borders of Italy, may be found just outside the pleasant town of Laibach in southern Austria. Here Augustus in 34 B.C. planted a 'Colonia Iulia Augusta Emona', and recent work of Dr. W. Schmid has thrown much light on its character. The colony was in outline a rectangle of nearly 55 acres (480 x 560 yds.), and was divided up into forty-eight blocks by five streets which ran north and south and seven which crossed them at right angles; of these forty-eight blocks some must, of course, have been taken up by public buildings. They varied in size: the largest as yet planned (II in fig. 25) measured 170 x 195 ft., or 3/4 acre; two others measured 163 x 170 ft.; while one block, which contained one large house not unlike the Silchester 'inn', was 112 x 168 ft. (Plan, II), and the block next it was a trifle smaller. None of the dimensions show any trace of the normal 120 or 240 ft. (p. 79). The streets were very broad (37-40 ft.); one, which may be the 'cardo maximus', measured as much as 47 ft. across. Beneath the main streets were sewers, in the usual fashion. Round the whole town stood strong walls, reinforced at regular intervals by square projecting towers; the four corners were not rounded but rectangular, after the fashion of Aosta and Turin (pp. 87, 90).[99]

[99] Correspondenzblatt des Gesamtvereins der deutschen Geschichts und Altertumsvereine, April 1912; Bericht vi der roemisch-germanischen Kommission 1910-11, p. 96. Muellner's Emona (Laibach, 1879), p. 19, plate 2, is wholly inadequate.



For a second example turn to a remote corner of central Spain. The town of Numantia was famous in early days for its long struggle with the armies of the Roman Republic. Under Roman rule it was wholly insignificant. Over the debris of Numantine liberty a little Roman town grew up. But it is hardly mentioned save in one or two road-books. Yet it enjoyed some form of municipal status and its streets and houses show to the excavator traces of Roman town-planning. The streets ran parallel or at right angles to one another; the house-blocks measured some 50 yds. square.[100]

[100] Schulten, Abhandlungen der k. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Goettingen, phil.-hist. Kl., viii. (1905), p. 61, plan 2; the evidence seems adequate though not wholly decisive. The Roman town Emporiae, now Ampurias, in the extreme north-east of Spain, seems to have had a rectangular street-plan, though its Greek predecessor was irregular, Institut d'estudis catalans, anuari 1908, p. 185.

A third example may be drawn from our own country. Lincoln, the Roman Lindum, was established as a 'colonia' about A.D. 75, and the lines of its original area, its 'Altstadt'—for it was perhaps enlarged in Roman times,—can still be traced 'Above Hill' round the Castle and Cathedral (fig. 26). It formed a rectangle just over 41 acres in extent (400 x 500 yds.). Four gates, one of which still keeps its Roman arch, gave access to the two main streets which divided the town into four symmetrical quarters and crossed at right angles in the centre. Along one of these streets, which agrees, if only roughly, with the modern Bailgate, ran a stately colonnade (fig. 27), though whether this belonged to some special building or adorned the whole extent of street is not quite certain. Beneath the same street ran, as at Timgad and Laibach and elsewhere, the town sewer (fig. 28). Of the other main street and of side streets nothing is known, but we can hardly doubt that they carried out the chess-board pattern.[101]

[101] Archaeologia, liii. 236 and lvi. 371. The plan given by Mr. Fox in liii. 236 represents his own theory, which may be open to doubt.

Probably the other four municipalities in Britain were planned similarly, though the evidence is too slender to prove it. At Verulamium (for example) near St. Albans, a local archaeologist long ago claimed to detect a scheme of symmetrical house-blocks, resembling squares very slightly askew. Subsequent inquiry has shown that this scheme was merely or mostly imagination.[102]

[102] J.W. Grover, Brit. Archaeol. Assoc. Journal, xxvi. (1870), p. 45, plate 1. The theories of the late Mr. Bellows about the streets of Roman and modern Gloucester were equally astray, though in other ways.



CHAPTER IX

ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWN-PLANS. II

In the preceding chapters Roman town-planning has been treated in connexion with towns of definite municipal rank, which bore the titles 'colonia' or 'municipium'. The system is, of course, closely akin to such foundation or refoundation as the establishment of a 'colonia' implied in the early Empire, while the no less Roman character of the 'municipium' made town-planning appropriate to this class of town also.

It was, however, not limited to these towns. It appears not seldom in provincial towns of lower legal status, such as were not uncommon in Britain, in Gaul, and in some other districts. Four instances may be quoted from the two provinces just named. In the first, Autun, the town-planning is explained by the establishment of the town full-grown under Roman official influence. Unfortunately, however, little is known of the buildings, and it is difficult to judge of the actual character of the place. In the second case, Trier, we may conjecture a similar official origin. At Silchester, official influence seems also to have been at work, and it is not impossible that the fourth case, Caerwent, may be explained by the same cause. In these two latter, however, it is more important to observe the nature of the towns, which is better known than that of any others in western Europe. For they embody a type of urban life which is distinct from any that occurs in Italy or in the better civilized districts of the Empire, and which illustrates strikingly one stratum of provincial culture.

Autun (fig. 29).

Caesar won northern and central Gaul for the Roman Empire; it fell to Augustus to organize the conquered but as yet unromanized lands. Among many steps to that end, he seems to have planted new native towns which should take the places of old native tribal capitals and should drive out local Celtic traditions by new Roman municipal interests. These new towns did not, as a rule, enjoy the full Roman municipal status; northern Gaul was not quite ripe for that. But they were plainly devised to help Romanization forward, and their object is declared by their half-Roman, half-Celtic names—Augustodunum (now Autun), Caesaromagus (Beauvais), Augusta Suessionum (Soissons), Augusta Treverorum (Trier), and the like.[103] Of two of these, Autun and Trier, we chance to know the town-plans. The reader will notice a certain similarity between them.

[103] Hirschfeld, Haeduer und Arverner (Sitzungsber. der preuss. Akademie, 1897, p. 1102). Similar hybrid names have been created by the English in India, mostly on the North-west Frontier, where alone they have planted new inhabited sites—Lyallpur, Abbotabad, Edwardesabad, Robertsganj, and the like. But these are almost all small places or forts, and their names represent no policy of Anglicization.



Autun stands on the site and contains the stately ruins of the Roman Augustodunum, built by Augustus about 12 B.C. He, as it seems, brought down the Gaulish dwellers in the old native hill-fortress of Bibracte, on Mont-Beuvray, and planted them twelve miles away on an unoccupied site beside the river Arroux. The new town covered an area of something like 490 acres—that is, if the now traceable walls and gates are, as is generally thought, the work of Augustus. The town within the walls must have been laid out all at once. Quite a large part of it, perhaps has much as three-quarters, have revealed to the careful inquiries of French archaeologists a regular system of quadrangular street-planning, which may very likely have extended even through the unexplored quarter. The Roman street which ran through the town from south to north, from the Porte de Rome to the Porte d'Arroux, was fronted by at least thirteen 'insulae', and one of the streets which crossed it at right angles was fronted by eleven such blocks. They vary somewhat in size. The larger 'insulae', which lie west of the main north and south street, are oblong and measure about 150 x 100 yds. (say, 3 acres); many smaller ones are more nearly square (98 x 98 or 109 yds., about 2 acres).

But the regularity of the plan is plainly the work of civilized man. When the Celts were brought to live in a Roman city, care was taken that it should be really Roman.[104] Only we may perhaps wonder whether the plan may not have been drawn by Augustus with an eye more to the future than to the present and may have included more 'insulae' than there were actually inhabitants to occupy at once. That was the case certainly in the mediaeval English town of Winchelsea, where the rectangular building-plots laid out by Edward I have in great measure lain empty and untenanted to the present day.

[104] H. de Fontenay, Autun et ses monuments (Autun, 1889), pp. 49 foll. and map (1:6,250). The existence of a town-plan was first noticed by J. de Fontenay, Bulletin monumental, 1852, p. 365, but his map appears to be incorrect and his views generally are based too much on a priori assumptions.

Trier (fig. 30).

We may take another example from a northern city, Trier on the Mosel, in north-eastern Gaul (Augusta Treverorum). It was in its later days a large city, perhaps the largest Roman city in western Europe. When its walls were built and its famous north gate, the Porta Nigra, was erected, probably towards the end of the third century, they included a space of 704 acres, twenty-five times as much as the original Timgad, though, it must be added, this area may not have been wholly covered with houses. But it was then an old city. Its earliest remains date from the earliest days of the Roman Empire (A.D. 2), when it was founded, like Autun, on a spot which had (as it seems) never been inhabited before.[105] Of this first beginning we possess vestiges which concern us here. Eight or nine years ago, when the modern town was provided with drainage, the engineers of the work and the Trier archaeologists, headed by the late Dr. Graven, combined to note the points where the drainage trenches cut through pieces of Roman roadway.[106]

[105] Ademeit, Siedelungsgeographie des Moselgebiets, pp. 367, 431.

[106] H. Graeven, Stadtplan des roemischen Triers in Die Denkmalpflege, 14 Dec. 1904 (1:10,000); the plan has been often copied, as by Cramer, Das roem. Trier (Guetersloh, 1911), and Von Behr, Trierer Jahresberichte, i. 1908. Compare Barthel, Bonner Jahrbuecher, cxx. 106. Trier at some time or other became a 'colonia'. When this occurred, is hotly disputed; the evidence seems to me to suggest that it was founded without colonial status and became a 'colonia latina' in the course of the first century (see Domaszewski, Abhandlungen, p. 153). I have therefore inserted Trier in this chapter with Autun and not in Chapter VIII with Orange and Timgad.

These points yielded a regular plan of streets crossing at right angles, which in many of its features much resembles that of Autun. Thirteen streets were traced running east and west, and eight (Dr. Graven says seven but his plan shows eight) running north and south. The east and west streets, with two exceptions, lay some 320 ft. from one another. The north and south streets varied, some observing that distance, others being no more than 260 ft. apart. As a result, the rectangular house-blocks varied also in size. The largest seem to be those which fronted a street that crossed the town from east to west, from the Imperial Palace to the Baths and the West Gate, and corresponds roughly with the present Kaiserstrasse. This may well have been the decumanus, the main east and west street of the 'colonia', and hence the house-blocks fronting it may have been unusually large (p. 77). One of them, near the Neumarkt, reached the awkward size of nearly 3-1/2 acres (320 x 460 ft.). Others elsewhere were smaller, many measuring 320 x 320 ft., and others again 320 x 245 ft., rather less than 2 acres. In general, the 'insulae' on the east and west sides of the town were larger than those in the centre. The whole has a resemblance to Autun, and is more irregular than writers on Trier are ready to allow.[107]

[107] Graeven estimated that, except in the central street, all the 'insulae' measured 300 Roman ft. (290 English ft., 88 metres), but his plan suggests rather 100 metres. We need in reality that larger plan which he did not live to complete.

How many houses may have occupied either a large or a small 'insula' is uncertain; indeed, we know next to nothing of the private houses of Roman Trier. Nor can we fix the number of the 'insulae'. On the west, and still more on the east and south-east of the town, much of the area was not touched by the drainage works and therefore went unexplored. We have proof only of streets and buildings for a mile in length and half a mile in breadth.



Nevertheless we may make some guess at the original area. The streetage itself plainly dates from the original foundation of the Romano-Gaulish town by Augustus. There is, indeed, no other epoch in its history, so far as we know it, when a complete laying out could have been carried through. On the other hand, it is not probable that the first town was a mile long and half a mile wide. Possibly, as an acute German archaeologist has suggested, the small 'insulae' in the south of the town may indicate the line of an original wall and ditch which, like the first walls of Timgad, were overrun later by an expanding town. Certainly, early graves found hereabouts show that this space lay once outside the inhabited area, and similar evidence has been noted both on the north of the town in the Simeonstrasse, and on the west near the Mosel Bridge. If this be so, Augusta Treverorum may have at first covered only 120 or 130 acres; then, as the place spread beyond its original limits, its builders followed more or less closely the lines of the first streets, and, save near the Porta Nigra, continued the chess-board pattern as it was continued at Turin.

Silchester (figs. 31, 32).

Silchester, Calleva Atrebatum (fig. 31), shows a different picture, which is the more interesting because the excavations carried out in 1890-1909 have given us a fuller knowledge of the town than of any other Roman site in the western provinces.[108] It was, apparently, the old tribal capital of the Atrebates and the county-town of its district in Roman days; though not possessing the full municipal status, it was probably the seat of local government for a considerable neighbourhood. In outline it was an irregular eight-sided area of 100 acres, defended by a strong stone wall, which was added long after the original foundation. Internally it was divided up by streets which, except near the east gate, run parallel or at right angles to one another. Its buildings are: a Forum and Basilica, a suite of public baths, four small temples, a small Christian church, a hotel, and a large number of private houses. Its area is by no means filled with buildings. Garden ground must have been common and cheap, and the buildings themselves do not form continuous streets; they do not even front the roadway in the manner of houses in Italian towns. In these respects Silchester differs widely from any of the examples which we have already considered, so far as their internal buildings are known to us. I will not call it a 'garden city', for a garden city represents an attempt to add some of the features of the country to a town. Silchester, I fancy, represents the exact opposite. It is an attempt to insert urban features into a country-side.

[108] For accounts of the Silchester excavations, see Archaeologia, vols. lii-lxii, and Victoria Hist. of Hampshire, i. 271, 350; large plan by W.H. St. John Hope (1:1,800) in Archaeol. lxi.



Most of it must have been laid out at once. At any rate, the area of which the 'insulae' numbered X, XXI, XXXV, and XIX form the corners, and the Forum the centre, must have been planned complete from the first. This covers just 40 acres, and is divided into rectangular plots of which the smallest covers a little less than an acre and a half, while the largest fall little short of 3-1/2 acres.[109] Outside this area, the division of the town into 'insulae' is less completely carried through, although most of the streets run straight on as far as the walls, and one or two details may tempt us to think that the division into 'insulae' was at some time extended beyond the line ultimately taken by the walls.