Ancient Town-Planning

PUBLIC AND

ion 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 t

hese 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 est

d 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

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. stre

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

ord, 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 f

-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 c

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 oblo

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 ob

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 we

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

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 late