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. Nîmes 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, _Cités romaines de la Tunisie_, p. 79 note: 'Ce qui
toutefois est incontestable, c'est que cette disposition d'une
régularité artificielle, autour de deux grandes voies exactement
orientées et se coupant a angle droit, est très rare dans
l'Afrique romaine. Les villes de ce pays n'out pas été toutes
construites sur le mème plan: chacune d'elles a, pour ainsi dire,
épousé 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, _Mémoires
présentés par divers savants_, ser. I. x. 462, and Thuccabor,
Tissot, _Géogr. 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.
[Illustration: FIG. 21. INSCRIPTION OF ORANGE.
(From the _Comptes-rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions_.)
Plot (_meris_) I (_lost_) ...
Plot II ... perpetual lessee (_manceps_) C. Naevius Rusticus: surety
for him C. Vesidius Quadratus. Fronting the Kardo.
(5) Plot III, frontage of 34-1/2 feet and Plot IV, frontage of 35 feet;
ground rent (?), 69-1/2 denarii (_in margin_). Yearly rent II ... (?).
Lessee and surety, as above. Fronting the Kardo.
(10) Plot V, frontage 55-1/2 feet, and Plot VI, next to the Ludus
(gladiators' school), frontage 75 feet ...]
_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, _Année Épigr._, 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.
[Illustration: FIG. 22. AFTER CAGNAT AND BALLU (1911).
(The six 'insulae' marked A are shown in detail in fig. 23. Unshaded
'insulae' are as yet unexcavated.)]
_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 Aurès, 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.
[Illustration: FIG. 23. SIX 'INSULAE' IN S.W. TIMGAD
(after Prof. Cagnat). Nos. 91, 92, 99, one house each; 108, 109,
3 houses; 100, Baths.]
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 Aurès 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 Jahrbücher_, 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 (Müller, _geogr. graeci min._
ii. 527); dispositione gloriosissima constat ... in directione
vicorum et platearum aequalibus lineis currens' (written probably
about A.D. 350).
[98] _Carte archéologique et topogr. des Ruines de Carthage_, by
Gauckler and Delattre (1:5,000); Schulten, _Archäol. 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.
[Illustration: FIG. 24. A PART OF CARTHAGE.
Plan based on the _Carte archéologique des ruines de Carthage_, by
Gauckler and Delattre.]
_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
römisch-germanischen Kommission_ 1910-11, p. 96. Müllner's
_Emona_ (Laibach, 1879), p. 19, plate 2, is wholly inadequate.
[Illustration: FIG. 25. A PART OF LAIBACH.
(From W. Schmid.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 26. LINCOLN, OUTLINE OF ROMAN WALLS.
(See p. 118.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 27. LINCOLN, BASES OF COLONNADE UNDER BAILGATE.
(p. 118).]
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 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 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 Göttingen, 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.
[Illustration: FIG. 28. LINCOLN. SEWER UNDER BAILGATE]