[Illustration: STREETS IN TIMGAD.
From a photograph.]
ANCIENT TOWN-PLANNING
By
F. HAVERFIELD
Oxford
at The Clarendon Press
1913
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
London::Edinburgh::Glasgow::New York
Toronto::Melbourne::Bombay
HUMPHREY MILFORD
Publisher to the University
PREFACE
The following pages are an enlargement of a paper read to the
University of London as the Creighton Lecture for 1910, and also
submitted in part to the London Conference on Town-planning in the
same year.
The original lecture was written as a scholar's contribution to a
modern movement. It looked on town-planning as one of those new
methods of social reform, which stand in somewhat sharp contrast with
the usual aims of political parties and parliaments. The latter
concern mainly the outward and public life of men as fellow-citizens
in a state; they involve such problems as Home Rule, Disestablishment,
Protection. The newer ideals centre round the daily life of human
beings in their domestic environment. Men and women--or rather, women
and men--have begun to demand that the health and housing and food and
comfort of mankind, and much else that not long ago seemed to lie
outside the scope of legislation, should be treated with as close
attention and logic and intelligence as any of the older and more
conventional problems of politicians. They will not leave even the
tubes of babies' feeding-bottles to an off-hand opportunism.
Among these newer efforts town-planning is one of the better known.
Most of us now admit that if some scores of dwellings have to be run
up for working-men or city-clerks--or even for University teachers
in North Oxford--they can and should be planned with regard to the
health and convenience and occupations of their probable tenants.
Town-planning has taken rank as an art; it is sometimes styled a
science and University professorships are named after it; in the
London Conference of 1910 it got its _deductio in forum_ or at
least its first dance. But it is still young and its possibilities
undefined. Its name is apt to be applied to all sorts of
building-schemes, and little attempt is made to assign it any specific
sense. It is only slowly making its way towards the recognized method
and the recognized principles which even an art requires. Here, it
seemed, a student of ancient history might proffer parallels from
antiquity, and especially from the Hellenistic and Roman ages, which
somewhat resemble the present day in their care for the well-being of
the individual.
In enlarging the lecture I have tried not only to preserve this point
of view, but also to treat the subject in a manner useful to classical
scholars and historians. The details of Greek and Roman town-planning
are probably little known to many who study Greek and Roman life, and
though they have often been incidentally discussed,[1] they have never
been collected. The material, however, is plentiful, and it
illuminates vividly the character and meaning of that city-life which,
in its different forms, was a vital element in both the Greek and the
Roman world. Even our little towns of Silchester and Caerwent in Roman
Britain become more intelligible by its aid. The Roman student gains
perhaps more than the Hellenist from this inquiry, since the ancient
Roman builder planned more regularly and the modern Roman
archaeologist has dug more widely. But admirable German excavations at
Priene, Miletus, and elsewhere declare that much may be learnt about
Greek towns and in Greek lands.
[1] For example, by Beloch in his volume on the cities of
Campania, by Schulten in various essays, by Barthel in a recent
inquiry into Roman Africa, and by others, to be cited below. Dr.
J. Stübben in his _Städtebau_ (Darmstadt, ed. 2, 1907) and Mr.
Raymond Unwin in his _Town planning in practice_ (London, 1909)
have given interesting notices and illustrations of the subject
for modern builders.
The task of collecting and examining these details is not easy. It
needs much local knowledge and many local books, all of which are hard
to come by. Here, as in most branches of Roman history, we want a
series of special inquiries into the fortunes of individual Roman
towns in Italy and the provinces, carried out by men who combine two
things which seldom go together, scientific and parochial knowledge.
But a body of evidence already waits to be used, and though its
discussion may lead--as it has led me--into topographical minutiae,
where completeness and certainty are too often unattainable and errors
are fatally easy, my results may nevertheless contain some new
suggestions and may help some future workers.
I have avoided technical terms as far as I could, and that not merely
in the interests of the general reader. Such terms are too often both
ugly and unnecessary. When a foreign scholar writes of a Roman town as
'scamnirt' or 'strigirt', it is hard to avoid the feeling that this
is neither pleasant nor needful. Perhaps it is not even accurate, as I
shall point out below. I have accordingly tried to make my text as
plain as possible and to confine technicalities to the footnotes.
F.H.
CONTENTS
LIST OF PLANS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
TABLE OF MEASURES
1. PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON ANCIENT TOWN-PLANNING
2. GREEK TOWN-PLANNING. THE ORIGINS: BABYLON
3. GREEK TOWN-PLANNING. FIRST EFFORTS
4. GREEK TOWN-PLANNING. THE MACEDONIAN AGE
5. ITALY. THE ORIGINS
6. ITALY. THE LATE REPUBLIC AND EMPIRE
7. ITALIAN TOWNS
8. ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWNS. I
9. ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWNS. II
10. ROMAN BUILDING LAWS
11. THE SEQUEL
APPENDIX. TOWN-PLANNING IN CHINA
INDEX
LIST OF PLANS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
(For precise references to sources see the various footnotes.)
STREETS IN TIMGAD. From a photograph
1. BABYLON. After Koldewey and others
2. PIRAEUS. After Milchõfer
3. SELINUS. After Cavallari and Hulot and Fougères
4. CYRENE. After Smith and Porcher, 1864
5. SOLUNTUM. After Cavallari, 1875
6. PRIENE, GENERAL OUTLINE. After Zippelius
7. PRIENE, DETAILS OF A PART OF THE EXCAVATED AREA. After the large
plan by Wiegand and Schrader, 1904
8. PRIENE, PANORAMA OF THE TOWN. As restored by Zippelius
9. MILETUS. After Wiegand, 1911
10. GERASA. After Schumacher
11. TERRAMARA OF CASTELLAZZO DI FONTANELLATO. After T.E. Peet
12. MARZABOTTO. After Brizio and Levi
13. POMPEII. After Mau, 1910
14. MODENA. From the plan of Zuccagni-Orlandini, 1844
15. TURIN. Reduced from a plan published by the Society for the
diffusion of Useful Knowledge (_Maps_, London, 1844, vol. ii)
after Zuccagni-Orlandini, 1844
16. AOSTA. From Promis and others
17. FLORENCE. (A) Modern Florence. (B) After L. Bardi (1795?) and
Zuccagni-Orlandini
18. LUCCA. From Sinibaldi, 1843
19. HERCULANEUM. After Ruggiero and Beloch
20. NAPLES. From the Neapolitan Government map of 1865
21. INSCRIPTION OF ORANGE. From the _Comptes-rendus de l'Académie
des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres_, 1904
22. TIMGAD. After R. Cagnat and the large plan by A. Ballu (_Ruines
de Timgad, Sept années de découvertes_ (Paris, 1911))
23. DETAILS OF INSULAE IN TIMGAD. After R. Cagnat, _Timgad_, p. 337
24. A PART OF CARTHAGE. Plan based on the _Carte archéologique des
ruines de Carthage_, by Gauckler and Delattre
25. A PART OF LAIBACH. From a plan by Dr. W. Schmid (_VI. Bericht
der römisch-germanischen Kommission_, 1910-1911)
26. LINCOLN, OUTLINE OF ROMAN WALLS
27. LINCOLN, BASES OF THE COLONNADE UNDER BAILGATE. From a photograph
28. LINCOLN, SEWER UNDER BAILGATE. From a photograph
29. AUTUN. After H. de Fontenay (_Autun et ses Monuments_, Autun,
1889)
30. TRIER. Plan reduced from plan (1:10,000) by the late Dr. Hans
Gräven, _Die Denkmalpflege_, 14 Dec. 1904
31. SILCHESTER, GENERAL PLAN. Reduced from the large plan by W.H.
St. John Hope (1:1800), _Archaeologia_ lxi, plate 85
32. SILCHESTER, DETAILS OF FOUR INSULAE, THE FORUM AND CHRISTIAN
CHURCH. From _Archaeologia_
33. CAERWENT, GENERAL PLAN. Reduced from plan by F. King (1:900),
_Archaeologia_ lxii, plate 64
34. BOSTRA. From a plan in Baedeker's _Guide to Palestine_
35. SAUVETERRE-DE-GUYENNE, A BASTIDE OF A.D. 1281. From plan by Dr.
A.E. Brinckmann
36. RUINS OF KHARA-KHOTO, A CHINESE TOWN OF ABOUT A.D. 1100.
_Geographical Journal_, Sept. 1910
For the loan of blocks I am indebted to the Académie des Inscriptions
et Belles-Lettres (fig. 21), to the German Imperial Archaeological
Institute (fig. 9), to the Royal Geographical Society (fig. 36), and
to the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Editors of the
_Transactions of the Town-Planning Conference_, 1911 (figs. 7, 8, 17,
30, 32, 35). Fig. 11 is from Mr. T.E. Peet's _Stone and Bronze Ages in
Italy_. The other 26 blocks have been prepared for this volume.
TABLE OF MEASURES
The following figures may be found convenient by readers who wish to
take special account of the dimensions cited in the following pages,
and may also help them to correct any errors which I have unwittingly
admitted.
1 Roman foot = 0.296 metres = 0.97 English feet. For practical
purposes 100 Roman feet = 97 English feet.
1 Iugerum = 120 x 240 Roman feet = 116.4 x 233.8 English feet. For
practical purposes a _Iugerum_ may be taken to be rather over
2/3 of an acre and rather over 1/4 of a hectare, and more exactly
2523.3 sq. metres.
1 Metre = 1.09 English yards, a trifle less than 40 ins. 402.5 metres
equal a quarter of a mile.
1 Hectare (10000 sq. metres) = 2.47 acres (11955 sq. yds.).
1 Acre = nearly 69-1/2 x 69-1/2 yds. (208.7 ft. square) = 4840 sq. yds.
CHAPTER I
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
Town-planning--the art of laying out towns with due care for the
health and comfort of inhabitants, for industrial and commercial
efficiency, and for reasonable beauty of buildings--is an art of
intermittent activity. It belongs to special ages and circumstances.
For its full unfolding two conditions are needed. The age must be one
in which, whether through growth, or through movements of population,
towns are being freely founded or freely enlarged, and almost as a
matter of course attention is drawn to methods of arranging and laying
out such towns. And secondly, the builders of these towns must have
wit enough to care for the well-being of common men and the due
arrangement of ordinary dwellings. That has not always happened. In
many lands and centuries--in ages where civilization has been tinged
by an under-current of barbarism--one or both of these conditions have
been absent. In Asia during much of its history, in early Greece, in
Europe during the first half of the Middle Ages, towns have consisted
of one or two dominant buildings, temple or church or castle, of one
or two processional avenues for worshippers at sacred festivals, and a
little adjacent chaos of tortuous lanes and squalid houses. Architects
have devised beautiful buildings in such towns. But they have not
touched the chaos or treated the whole inhabited area as one unit.
Town-planning has been here unknown.[2]
[2] Compare Brinckmann's remarks on mediaeval towns: 'Der
Nachdruck liegt auf den einzelnen Gebäuden, der Kathedrale, dem
Palazzo publico, den festen Palästen des Adels, nicht auf ibrer
einheitlichen Verbindung. Ebenso erscheint die ganze Stadt nur
eine Ansammlung einzelner Bauten. Strassen und Plätze sind
unbebaute Reste.'
In other periods towns have been founded in large numbers and
full-grown or nearly full-grown, to furnish homes for multitudes of
common men, and their founders have built them on some plan or system.
One such period is, of course, our own. Within the last half-century
towns have arisen all over Europe and America. They are many in
number. They are large in area. Most of them have been born almost
full-grown; some have been established complete; others have developed
abruptly out of small villages; elsewhere, additions huge enough to
form separate cities have sprung up beside towns already great.
Throughout this development we can trace a tendency to plan, beginning
with the unconscious mechanical arrangements of industrial cities or
suburbs and ending in the conscious efforts of to-day.
If we consider their size and their number together, these new
European and American towns surpass anything that the world has yet
seen. But, save in respect of size, the process of founding or
enlarging towns is no new thing. In the old world, alike in the Greek
lands round the eastern Mediterranean and in the wide empire of Rome,
urban life increased rapidly at certain periods through the
establishment of towns almost full-grown. The earliest towns of Greece
and Italy were, through sheer necessity, small. They could not grow
beyond the steep hill-tops which kept them safe, or house more
inhabitants than their scanty fields could feed.[3] But the world was
then large; new lands lay open to those who had no room at home, and
bodies of willing exiles, keeping still their custom of civil life,
planted new towns throughout the Mediterranean lands. The process was
extended by state aid. Republics or monarchs founded colonies to
extend their power or to house their veterans, and the results were
equally towns springing up full-grown in southern Europe and, western
Asia and even northern Africa. So too in remoter regions. Obscure
evidence from China suggests that there also in early times towns were
planted and military colonies were sent to outlying regions on
somewhat the same methods as were used by the Greeks and Romans.
[3] For the connexion between such towns and their local
food-supply, note the story of Alexander the Great and the
architect Dinocrates told by Vitruvius (II. i). Dinocrates had
planned a new town; Alexander asked if there were lands round it
to supply it with corn, and on hearing there were none, at once
ruled out the proposed site.
Even under less kindly conditions, the art has not been wholly
dormant. Special circumstances or special men have called it into
brief activity. The 'bastides' and the 'villes neuves' of
thirteenth-century France were founded at a particular period and
under special circumstances, and, brief as the period was and governed
by military urgencies, they were laid out on a more or less definite
plan (p. 143). The streets designed by Wood at Bath about 1735, by
Craig at Edinburgh about 1770, by Grainger at Newcastle about 1835,
show what individual genius could do at favourable moments. But such
instances, however interesting in themselves, are obviously less
important than the larger manifestations of town-planning in Greece
and Rome.
In almost all cases, the frequent establishment of towns has been
accompanied by the adoption of a definite principle of town-planning,
and throughout the principle has been essentially the same. It has
been based on the straight line and the right angle. These, indeed,
are the marks which sunder even the simplest civilization from
barbarism. The savage, inconsistent in his moral life, is equally
inconsistent, equally unable to 'keep straight', in his house-building
and his road-making. Compare, for example, a British and a Roman road.
The Roman road ran proverbially direct; even its few curves were not
seldom formed by straight lines joined together. The British road was
quite different. It curled as fancy dictated, wandered along the foot
or the scarp of a range of hills, followed the ridge of winding downs,
and only by chance stumbled briefly into straightness. Whenever
ancient remains show a long straight line or several correctly drawn
right angles, we may be sure that they date from a civilized age.
In general, ancient town-planning used not merely the straight line
and the right angle but the two together. It tried very few
experiments involving other angles. Once or twice, as at Rhodes (pp.
31, 81), we hear of streets radiating fan-fashion from a common
centre, like the gangways of an ancient theatre or the thoroughfares
of modern Karlsruhe, or that Palma Nuova, founded by Venice in 1593 to
defend its north-eastern boundaries, which was shaped almost like a
starfish. But, as a rule, the streets ran parallel or at right angles
to each other and the blocks of houses which they enclosed were either
square or oblong.
Much variety is noticeable, however, in details. Sometimes the outline
of the ancient town was square or almost square, the house-blocks were
of the same shape, and the plan of the town was indistinguishable from
a chess-board. Or, instead of squares, oblong house-blocks formed a
pattern not strictly that of a chess-board but geometrical and
rectangular. Often the outline of the town was irregular and merely
convenient, but the streets still kept, so far as they could, to a
rectangular plan. Sometimes, lastly, the rectangular planning was
limited to a few broad thoroughfares, while the smaller side-streets,
were utterly irregular. Other variations may be seen in the prominence
granted or refused to public and especially to sacred buildings. In
some towns full provision was made for these; ample streets with
stately vistas led up to them, and open spaces were left from which
they could be seen with advantage. In others there were neither vistas
nor open spaces nor even splendid buildings.
A measure of historical continuity can be traced in the occurrence of
these variations. The towns of the earlier Greeks were stately enough
in their public buildings and principal thoroughfares, but they
revealed a half-barbaric spirit in their mean side-streets and
unlovely dwellings. In the middle of the fifth century men rose above
this ideal. They began to recognize private houses and to attempt an
adequate grouping of their cities as units capable of a single plan.
But they did not carry this conception very far. The decorative still
dominated the useful. Broad straight streets were still few and were
laid out mainly as avenues for processions and as ample spaces for
great facades.[4] Private houses were still of small account. The
notion that the City was the State, helpful and progressive as it was,
did something also to paralyse in certain ways the development of
cities.
[4] Pindar mentions 'the paved road cut straight to be smitten by
horse-hoofs in processions of men that besought Apollo's care' at
Cyrene (_Pyth._ v. 90). An inscription from the Piraeus, of 320
B.C., orders the Agoranomi (p. 37) to take care 'of the broad
roads by which the processions move to the temple of Zeus the
Saviour'.
A change came with the new philosophy and the new politics of the
Macedonian era. The older Greek City-states had been large, wealthy,
and independent; magnificent buildings and sumptuous festivals were as
natural to them as to the greater autonomous municipalities in all
ages. But in the Macedonian period the individual cities sank to be
parts of a larger whole, items in a dominant state, subjects of
military monarchies. The use of public buildings, the splendour of
public festivals in individual cities, declined. Instead, the claims
of the individual citizen, neglected too much by the City-states but
noted by the newer philosophy, found consideration even in
town-planning. A more definite, more symmetrical, often more rigidly
'chess-board' pattern was introduced for the towns which now began to
be founded in many countries round and east of the Aegean. Ornamental
edifices and broad streets were still indeed included, but in the
house-blocks round them due space and place were left for the
dwellings of common men. For a while the Greeks turned their minds to
those details of daily life which in their greater age they had
somewhat ignored.
Lastly, the town-planning of the Macedonian era combined, as I
believe, with other and Italian elements and formed the town system of
the later Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. As in art and
architecture, so also in city-planning, the civilization of Greece and
of Italy merged almost inextricably into a result which, with all its
Greek affinities, is in the end Roman. The student now meets a
rigidity of street-plan and a conception of public buildings which are
neither Greek nor Oriental. The Roman town was usually a rectangle
broken up into four more or less equal and rectangular parts by two
main streets which crossed at right angles at or near its centre. To
these two streets all the other streets ran parallel or at right
angles, and there resulted a definite 'chess-board' pattern of
rectangular house-blocks (_insulae_), square or oblong in shape, more
or less uniform in size. The streets themselves were moderate in
width; even the main thoroughfares were little wider than the rest,
and the public buildings within the walls were now merged in the
general mass of houses. The chief structure, the Forum, was an
enclosed court, decorated indeed by statues and girt with colonnades,
but devoid of facades which could dominate a town. The town councils
of the Roman world were no more free than those of Greece or modern
England from the municipal vice of over-building. But they had not the
same openings for error. On the other hand, there was in most of them
a good municipal supply of water, and sewers were laid beneath their
streets.
The reason for all this is plain. These Roman towns, even more than
the Greek cities of the Macedonian world, were parts of a greater
whole. They were items in the Roman Empire; their citizens were
citizens of Rome. They had neither the wealth nor the wish to build
vast temples or public halls or palaces, such as the Greeks
constructed. Their greatest edifices, the theatre and the
amphitheatre, witness to the prosperity and population not so much of
single towns as of whole neighbourhoods which flocked in to periodic
performances.[5] But these towns had unity. Their various parts were,
in some sense, harmonized, none being neglected and none grievously
over-indulged, and the whole was treated as one organism. Despite
limitations which are obvious, the Roman world made a more real sober
and consistent attempt to plan towns than any previous age had
witnessed.
[5] Compare the crowd of Nucerians who made a riot in the
amphitheatre at Pompeii in A.D. 59 (Tac. _Ann_. xiv. 17). The
common idea that the population of a town can be calculated by
the number of seats in its theatre or amphitheatre is quite
amiss.