Ancient Town-Planning

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

d 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 C

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.

midst 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

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. Aqu

] 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 unc

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ument. 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

G.

TION OF

endus de l'Académie

ris) I (

C. Naevius Rusticus: surety for him C.

feet; ground rent (?), 69? denarii (in margin). Yearly rent

ot VI, next to the Ludus (gladiat

her 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 so

(figs.

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 Tr

G.

NAT AND B

own in detail in fig. 23. Unshaded

G.

LAE' IN S

Prof. C

house each; 108, 109,

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 me

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 Aurès south of it, just as Aosta watched its Alpine valley. As Machiavelli thought it worth while to ob

est 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

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] 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 stree

G.

OF CA

ologique des ruines de Cartha

h (fig

Lincoln

nd 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 ? 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

G.

T OF

W. S

G.

UTLINE OF

p.

G.

OF COLONNADE

11

s wholly insignificant. Over the débris 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

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

erulamium (for example) near St. Albans, a local archaeologist long ago claimed to detect a scheme of symmetrical house-blocks

G.

SEWER UND