-

-
Bastides bienvenue :
-
-
.
-
Villes Neuves
-
- en EUROPE :
-
Présentation générale
-
France
-
Espagne
-
Grande
Bretagne
-
Italie
-
Pologne
-
Portugal
-
Suisse
-
Scandinavie : -Finlande
-
**Recherche
: Interreg
- .
- hors d'EUROPE,
-
Amérique
-
Afrique
-
Asie
- .
-
Bastides:
- 1-
tableau des "modèles"
- 2- ..Libourne.
..Monpazier..Monflanquin.
- ..Vianne..Villeneuve/Lot
-
Bastides Gironde.
- .
- *
-
Définition de "Bastide",
-
leurs caractéristiques,
-
leurs Chartes.
-
Le Tracé orthogonal,
-
la Place,
-
la Halle,
-
les Maisons,
-
les Cornières un problème,
-
les Andrones,
-
L'église
-
les Remparts : avec ou sans.
-
Chateau : avec ou sans
-
Puits et ponts
-
Bastides Modèles.
-
Contexte historique.
- .
-
Présentation par :
-
Cartographie
-
Musée des Bastides,
-
Centre Etude Bastides,
-
Bibliographie,
-
Glossaire,
-
Toponymie
- .
-
Bastides Répertoire
-
par fondateurs:
-
Cisterciens
-
par départements,
-
sur sites internet
-
par bastides :
-
A à M
-
N à V
-
par Thèmes
- .
-
L'orthogonalité :
- dans l'Antiquité,
-
dans la théorie.
- dans les
arts
- .
- *
-
Annexes sur :
-
les
villes en étoile,
-
les "circulades",
-
Sauvetés et castelnaus


| |
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Town-Planning, by F. Haverfield
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
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Title: Ancient Town-Planning
Author: F. Haverfield
Release Date: November 28, 2004 [EBook #14189]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANCIENT TOWN-PLANNING ***
Produced by Ted Garvin and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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.
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
(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.
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 ¼ 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 69½ x 69½ 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]
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.
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.
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.
CHAPTER II
GREEK TOWN-PLANNING. THE ORIGINS, BABYLON
The beginnings of ideas and institutions are seldom well known or well
recorded. They are necessarily insignificant and they win scant notice from
contemporaries. Town-planning has fared like the rest. Early forms of it appear
in Greece during the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.; the origin of these forms
is obscure. The oldest settlement of man in town fashion which has yet been
explored in any land near Greece is that of Kahun, in Egypt, dating from about
2500 B.C. Here Professor Flinders Petrie unearthed many four-roomed cottages
packed close in parallel oblong blocks and a few larger rectangular houses: they
are (it seems) the dwellings of the workmen and managers busy with the
neighbouring Illahun pyramid.[6]
But the settlement is very small, covering less than 20 acres; it is not in
itself a real town and its plan has not the scheme or symmetry of a town-plan.
For that we must turn to western Asia, to Babylonia and Assyria.
Here we find clearer evidence. The great cities of the Mesopotamian plains
show faint traces of town-planning datable to the eighth and following
centuries, of which the Greeks seem to have heard and which they may have
copied. Our knowledge of these cities is, of course, still very fragmentary, and
though it has been much widened by the latest German excavations, it does not
yet carry us to definite conclusions. The evidence is twofold, in part literary,
drawn from Greek writers and above all Herodotus, and in part archaeological,
yielded by Assyrian and Babylonian ruins.
The description of Babylon given by Herodotus is, of course, famous.[7]
Even in his own day, it was well enough known to be parodied by contemporary
comedians in the Athenian theatre. Probably it rests in part on first-hand
knowledge. Herodotus gives us to understand that he visited Babylon in the
course of his many wanderings and we have no cause to distrust him; we may even
date his visit to somewhere about 450 B.C. He was not indeed the only Greek of
his day, nor the first, to get so far afield. But his account nevertheless
neither is nor professes to be purely that of an eyewitness. Like other writers
in various ages,[8]
he drew no sharp division between details which he saw and details which he
learnt from others. For the sake (it may be) of vividness, he sets them all on
one plane, and they must be judged, not as first-hand evidence but on their own
merits.
Babylon, says Herodotus, was planted in an open plain and formed an exact
square of great size, 120 stades (that is, nearly 14 miles) each way; the whole
circuit was 480 stades, about 55 miles. It was girt with immense brick walls,
340 ft. high and nearly 90 ft. thick, and a broad deep moat full of water, and
was entered through 100 gates; presumably we are intended to think of these
gates as arranged symmetrically, 25 in each side. From corner to corner the city
was cut diagonally by the Euphrates, which thus halved it into two roughly equal
triangles, and the river banks were fortified by brick defences—less formidable
than the main outer walls—which ran along them from end to end of the city.
There was, too, an inner wall on the landward side. The streets were also
remarkable:
'The city itself (he says) is full of houses, three or four storeys high,
and has been laid out with its streets straight, notably those which run at
right angles, that is, those which lead to the river. Each road runs to a
small gate in the brick river-wall: there are as many gates as lanes.'[9]
In each part of the city (that is, on either bank of the Euphrates) were
specially large buildings, in one part the royal palaces, in the other the
temple of Zeus Belos, bronze-gated, square in outline, 400 yards in breadth and
length.
So far, in brief, Herodotus. Clearly his words suggest town-planning. The
streets that ran straight and the others that ran at right angles are
significant enough, even though we may doubt exactly what is meant by these
other streets and what they met or cut at right angles. But his account cannot
be accepted as it stands. Whatever he saw and whatever his accuracy of
observation and memory, not all of his story can be true. His Babylon covers
nearly 200 square miles; its walls are over 50 miles long and 30 yds. thick and
all but 120 yds. high; its gates are a mile and a half apart. The area of London
to-day is no more than 130 square miles, and the topmost point of St. Paul's is
barely 130 yds. high. Nanking is the largest city-site in China and its walls
are the work of an Empire greater than Babylon; but they measure less than 24
miles in circuit, and they are or were little more than 30 ft. thick and 70 ft.
high.[10]
Moreover, Herodotus's account of the walls has to be set beside a statement
which he makes elsewhere, that they had been razed by Darius sixty or seventy
years before his visit.[11]
The destruction can hardly have been complete. But in any case Herodotus can
only have seen fragments, easily misinterpreted, easily explained by local
ciceroni as relics of something quite unlike the facts.
Turn now to the actual remains of Babylon, as known from surveys and
excavations. We find a large district extending to both banks of the Euphrates,
which is covered rather irregularly by the mounds of many ruined buildings. Two
sites in it are especially notable. At its southern end is Birs Nimrud and some
adjacent mounds, anciently Borsippa; here stood a huge temple of the god Nebo.
Near its north end, ten or eleven miles north of Borsippa, round Babil and Kasr,
is a larger wilderness of ruin, three miles long and nearly as broad in extreme
dimensions; here town-walls and palaces of Babylonian kings and temples of
Babylonian gods and streets and dwelling-houses of ordinary men have been
detected and in part uncovered. Other signs of inhabitation can be traced
elsewhere in this district, as yet unexplored.
Not unnaturally, some scholars have thought that this whole region represents
the ancient Babylon and that the vast walls of Herodotus enclosed it all.[12]
This view, however, cannot be accepted. Quite apart from the considerations
urged above, the region in question is not square but rather triangular, and
traces of wall and ditch surrounding it are altogether wanting, though
city-walls have survived elsewhere in this neighbourhood and though nothing can
wholly delete an ancient ditch. We have, in short, no good reason to believe
that Babylon, in any form or sense whatever, covered at any time this large
area.
On the other hand, the special ruins of Babil and Kasr and adjacent mounds
seem to preserve both the name and the actual remains of Babylon (fig. 1). Here,
on the left bank of the Euphrates, are vast city-walls, once five or six miles
long.[13]
They may be described roughly as enclosing half of a square bisected
diagonally by the river, much as Herodotus writes; there is good reason to think
that they had some smaller counterpart on the right bank, as yet scantily
explored. Within these walls were the palaces of the Babylonian kings,
Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar (625-561 B.C.), the temples of the national god
Marduk or Merodach and other Babylonian deities, a broad straight road,
Aiburschabu, running north and south from palaces to temples, a stately portal
spanning this road at the Istar Gate, many private houses in the Merkes quarter,
and an inner town-wall perhaps of earlier date. Street and gate were built or
rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar. He, as he declares in various inscriptions, 'paved
the causeway with limestone flags for the procession of the Great Lord Marduk.'
He made the Istar Gate 'with glazed brick and placed on its threshold colossal
bronze bulls and ferocious serpent dragons'. Along the street thus built the
statue of Marduk was borne in solemn march on the Babylonian New Year's Day,
when the king paid yearly worship to the god of his country.[14]
FIG I.
BABYLON
Such are the remains of the city of Babylon, so far as they are known at
present. They do not fit ill with the words of Herodotus. We can detect in them
the semblance not indeed of one square but of two unequal half-squares, divided
by the river; we can trace at least one great street parallel to the river and
others which run at right angles to it towards the river. If the brick defences
along the water-side have vanished, that may be due to their less substantial
character and to the many changes of the river itself. To the student of
Babylonian topography, the account of Herodotus is of very little worth. But it
is as good as most modern travellers could compile, if they were let loose in a
vast area of buildings, without plans, without instruments, and without any
notion that a scientific description was expected of them.
The remains show also—and this is more to our purpose—the idea of the sacred
processional avenue which recurs in fifth-century Greece—and is indeed beloved
of architects in the most modern times. Here is a germ of town-planning. But
whether this laying out of streets extended beyond the main highways, is less
clear. The Merkes excavations occasionally show streets meeting at right angles
and at least one roughly rectangular insula, of 150 x 333 ft. But the
adjoining house-blocks agree neither in size nor shape, and no hint seems to
have yet come to light of a true chess-board pattern.[15]
A little further evidence can be drawn from other Mesopotamian sites. The
city of Asshur had a long, broad avenue like the sacred road of Babylon, but the
one insula of its private houses which has yet been excavated, planned
and published, shows no sign of rectangular planning.[16]
There is also literary evidence that Sanherib (765-681 B.C.) laid out a
'Kingsway' 100 ft. wide to promote easy movement through his city of Nineveh,
and Delitzsch has even credited the Sargonid dynasty generally (722-625 B.C.)
with a care for the dwellings of common men as well as of gods and of kings.[17]
In conclusion, the mounds of Babil and Kasr and others near them seem to
represent the Babylon alike of fact and of Herodotus. It was a smaller city than
the Greek historian avers; its length and breadth were nearer four than fourteen
miles. But it had at least one straight, ample, and far-stretching highway which
gave space for the ceremonies and the processions, if not for the business or
the domestic comforts, of life. In a sense at least, it was laid out with its
streets straight. Nor was it the only city of such a kind in the Mesopotamian
region. Asshur and Nineveh, both of them somewhat earlier in date than Babylon,
possessed similar features. These towns, or at least Babylon, seem to have been
known to Greek travellers, and probably suggested to them the adornment of their
Hellenic homes with similar streets. The germ of Greek town-planning came from
the east.
CHAPTER III
GREEK TOWN-PLANNING: FIRST EFFORTS
Greek town-planning began in the great age of Greece, the fifth century B.C.
But that age had scant sympathy for such a movement, and its beginnings were
crude and narrow. Before the middle of the century the use of the processional
highway had established itself in Greece. Rather later, a real system of
town-planning, based on streets that crossed at right angles, became known and
practised. Later still, in the early fourth century, the growing care for
town-life produced town by-laws and special magistrates to execute them. In some
form or other, town-planning had now taken root in the Greek world.
The two chief cities of Greece failed, indeed, to welcome the new movement.
Both Athens, the city which by itself means Greece to most of us, and Sparta,
the rival of Athens, remained wholly untouched by it. Alike in the days of
Themistocles and Pericles and in all its later history, Athens was an almost
Oriental mixture of splendid public buildings with mean and ill-grouped houses.
An often-quoted saying of Demosthenes puts the matter in its most favourable
light:
'The great men of old built splendid edifices for the use of the State, and
set up noble works of art which later ages can never match. But in private
life they were severe and simple, and the dwelling of an Aristides or a
Miltiades was no more sumptuous than that of any ordinary Athenian citizen'
(Third Olynthiac Oration, 25).
This is that 'desire for beauty and economy' which Pericles (or Thucydides)
praised in the Funeral Oration. It has a less lovely side. Not a few passages in
Greek literature speak, more or less clearly, of the streets of Athens as narrow
and tortuous, unpaved, unlighted, and more like a chaos of mud and sewage than
even the usual Greek road. Sparta was worse. There neither public nor private
buildings were admirable, and the historian Thucydides turned aside to note the
meanness of the town.
Nevertheless, the art of town-planning in Greece probably began in Athens.
The architect to whom ancient writers ascribe the first step, Hippodamus of
Miletus,—born about or before 480 B.C.,—seems to have worked in Athens and in
connexion with Athenian cities, under the auspices of Pericles. The exact nature
of his theories has not been recorded by any of the Greek writers who name him.
Aristotle, however, states that he introduced the principle of straight wide
streets, and that he, first of all architects, made provision for the proper
grouping of dwelling-houses and also paid special heed to the combination of the
different parts of a town in a harmonious whole, centred round the market-place.
But there seems to be no evidence for the statement sometimes made, that he had
any particular liking for either a circular or a semicircular, fan-shaped
town-plan.
Piraeus (fig. 2).
Three cities are named as laid out by Hippodamus. Aristotle tells us that he
planned the Piraeus, the port of Athens, with broad straight streets. He does
not add the precise relation of these streets to one another. If, however, the
results of recent German inquiries and conjectures are correct, and if they show
us his work and not—as is unfortunately very possible—the work of some later
man, his design included streets running parallel or at right angles to one
another and rectangular blocks of houses; the longer and presumably the more
important streets ran parallel to the shore, while shorter streets ran at right
angles to them down to the quays. Here is a rectangular scheme of streets,
though the outline of the whole town is necessarily not rectangular (fig. 2).
FIG. 2.
PLAN OF PIRAEUS
Thurii.
Another town ascribed to Hippodamus is the colony which the Athenians and
others planted in 443 B.C. at Thurii in southern Italy, of which Herodotus
himself is said to have been one of the original colonists. Its site has never
been excavated, and indeed one might doubt whether excavation would show the
street plan of 443 B.C. or that of a later and possibly even of a Roman age,
when the town was recolonized on the Roman system. But the historian Diodorus,
writing in the first century B.C. and no doubt embodying much older matter,
records a pertinent detail. The town, he says, was divided lengthways by four
streets and crossways by three. Plainly, therefore, it had a definite and
rectangular street-planning, though the brevity of the historian does not enable
us to decide how many house-blocks it had and how far the lesser streets were
symmetrical with these seven principal thoroughfares. In most of the cases which
we shall meet in the following sections of this treatise, the number of streets
running-straight or at right angles is very much greater than the number
assigned to Thurii. I may refer for example to the plans of Priene, Miletus, and
Timgad.
Rhodes.
A third city assigned to Hippodamus is Rhodes. This, according to Strabo, was
laid out by 'the architect of the Piraeus'; according to others, it was built
round its harbour like the seats of an ancient theatre round the orchestra, that
is, fan-fashion like Karlsruhe. However, this case is doubtful. Rhodes was laid
out in 408 B.C., thirty-five years after the planting of Thurii and seventy
years after the approximate date of the birth of Hippodamus. It is conceivable
but not altogether probable that Hippodamus was still planning towns in his
extreme old age, nor is it, on political grounds, very likely that he would be
planning in Rhodes. As, however, we do not know the real date of his birth, and
as Strabo does not specifically mention his name, certainty is unattainable.[18]
If we cannot tell exactly how Hippodamus planned cities or exactly which he
planned, still less do we know how far town-planning on his or on any theory
came into general use in his lifetime or indeed before the middle of the fourth
century. Few Greek cities have been systematically uncovered, even in part.
Fewer still have revealed street-planning which can be dated previous to that
time. It does not follow, when we find streets in the ruins of an ancient city,
that they must belong to its earliest period. That is not true of towns in any
age, modern or mediaeval, Roman or Greek. Some Greek cities were founded in
early times, were rebuilt in the Macedonian period, and again rebuilt in the
Roman period. Without minute excavation it may be impossible to assign the
town-plan of such a place to its proper place among these three periods.
We have, however, at Selinus in Sicily and Cyrene on the north coast of
Africa, two cases which may belong to the age of Hippodamus. They are worth
describing, since they illustrate both the difficulty of reaching quite certain
conclusions and also the system which probably did obtain in the later fifth and
the early fourth century.
Selinus (fig. 3).
At Selinus the Italian archaeologists discovered some years ago, in the
so-called Acropolis, a town of irregular, rudely pear-shaped outline with a
distinct though not yet fully excavated town-plan. Two main thoroughfares ran
straight from end to end and crossed at right angles (fig. 3), the longer of
these thoroughfares being just a quarter of a mile long and 30 ft. wide. From
these two main streets other narrower streets (12-18 ft. wide) ran off at right
angles; the result, though not chess-board pattern, is a rectangular town-plan.
Unfortunately, it cannot be dated. Selinus was founded in 648 B.C., was
destroyed in 409, then reoccupied and rebuilt, and finally destroyed for ever in
249. Its town-planning, therefore, might be as early as the seventh century B.C.
Or (and this is the most probable conclusion) it may date from the days of
Selinuntine prosperity just before 409, when the city was growing and the great
Temple of Zeus or Apollo was rising on its eastern hill. Or again, though less
probably, it may have been introduced after 400. We may conclude that we have
here a clear case of town-planning and we may best refer it to the later part of
the fifth century.[19]
FIG. 3.
PLAN OF SELINUS
Cyrene (fig. 4).
FIG. 4.
PLAN OF CYRENE
At Cyrene the researches of two English archaeologists about 1860 disclosed a
town-plan based, like that of Selinus, on two main streets which crossed at
right angles (fig. 4). Here, however, the other streets do not seem to have been
planned uniformly at right angles to the two main thoroughfares, and the
rectangular scheme is therefore less complete and definite than at Selinus.
Cyrene, unfortunately, resembles Selinus in another respect, that we have no
proper knowledge of the date when its main streets were laid out. It was founded
somewhere in the seventh century B.C. and Pindar, in an ode written about 466
B.C., mentions a great processional highway there. Whether this was one of the
two roads above mentioned is not clear. But it is not probable, since Pindar's
road seems hardly to have been inside the city at all.[20]
In these two cases and in one or two others which might be noted from the
same or later times, the town-scheme includes rectangular elements without any
strict resemblance to the chess-board pattern. The dominant feature is the long
straight street, of great width and splendour, which served less as the main
artery of a town than as a frontage for great buildings and a route for solemn
processions. Here, almost as in Babylon, we have the spectacular element which
architects love, but which is, in itself, insufficient for the proper
disposition of a town. Long and ample streets, such as those in question, might
easily be combined, as indeed they are combined in some modern towns of southern
Europe and Asia, with squalid and ill-grouped dwelling-houses. Hippodamus
himself aimed at something much better, as Aristotle tells us. But it was not
till after 350 B.C. or some approximate date, that dwelling-houses were actually
arranged and grouped on a definite system.[21]
FIG. 5.
SOLUNTUM
It was probably, however, in the first half of the fourth century that the
Greek cities began to pass by-laws relating to the police, the scavenging and
the general public order of their markets and streets, and to establish
Agoranomi to control the markets and Astynomi to control the streets. These
officials first appear in inscriptions after 350, but are mentioned in
literature somewhat earlier. An account of the Athenian constitution, ascribed
formerly to Xenophon and written (as is now generally agreed) about 430-424
B.C., mentions briefly the prosecution of those who built on to the public land,
that is (apparently), who encroached upon the streets. But it is silent as to
specific officers, Astynomi or other. Plato, however, in his 'Laws', which must
date a little earlier than his death in 347, alludes on several occasions to
such officers. They were to look after the private houses 'in order that they
may all be built according to laws', and to police and clean the roads and
water-channels, both inside and outside of the city. A prohibition of balconies
leaning over the public streets, and of verandas projecting into them, is also
mentioned in two or three writers of the fourth century and is said to go back
to a much earlier date, though its antiquity was probably exaggerated.[22]
The municipal by-laws which these passages suggest clearly came into use
before, though perhaps not long before, the middle of the fourth century. They
do not directly concern town-planning; they involve building regulations only as
one among many subjects, and those regulations are such as might be, and in many
cases have been, adopted where town-planning was unknown. But they are natural
forerunners of an interest in town-planning. As in modern England, so in
fourth-century Greece, their appearance suggests the growth of a care for
well-ordered town life and for municipal well-being which leads directly to a
more elaborate and methodical oversight of the town as an organized combination
of houses and groups of houses.
As we part from this early Greek town-planning, we must admit that altogether
we know little of it. There was such a thing: among its main features was a care
for stately avenues: its chief architect was Hippodamus. Thus much is clear. But
save in so far as Milchhöfer's plans reproduce the Piraeus of B.C. 450 or 400,
we cannot discern either the shape or the size of the house-blocks, or the
grouping adopted for any of the ordinary buildings, or the scheme of the
ordinary roads. We may even wonder whether such things were of much account in
the town-planning of that period.
CHAPTER IV
GREEK TOWN-PLANNING: THE MACEDONIAN AGE, 330-130 B.C.
The Macedonian age brought with it, if not a new, at least a more systematic,
method of town-planning. That was the age when Alexander and his Macedonian army
conquered the East and his successors for several generations ruled over western
Asia, when Macedonians and Greeks alike flocked into the newly-opened world and
Graeco-Macedonian cities were planted in bewildering numbers throughout its
length and breadth. Most of these cities sprang up full-grown; not seldom their
first citizens were the discharged Macedonian soldiery of the armies of
Alexander and his successors. The map of Turkey in Asia is full of them. They
are easily recognized by their names, which were often taken from those of
Alexander and his generals and successors, their wives, daughters, and
relatives. Thus, one of Alexander's youngest generals, afterwards Seleucus I,
sometimes styled Nicator, founded several towns called Seleucia, at least three
called Apamea, and others named Laodicea and Antiochia, thereby recording
himself, his Iranian wife Apama, his mother Laodice and his father Antiochus,
and his successors seem to have added other towns bearing the same name. Indeed,
two-thirds of the town-names which are prominent in the later history of Asia
Minor and Syria, date from the age of Alexander and his Macedonians.
Many discoveries show that these towns were laid out with a regular
'chess-board' street-plan. That method of town-planning now made definite entry
into the European world. No architect or statesman is recorded to have invented
or systematically encouraged it. Alexander himself and his architect, one
Dinocrates of Rhodes or perhaps of Macedonia, seem to have employed it at
Alexandria in Egypt, and this may have set the fashion. Seven years after
Alexander's death it recurs at Nicaea in Bithynia, which was refounded by one of
Alexander's successors in 323 B.C. and was laid out on this fashion. But no
ancient writer credits either the founder or the architect of Alexandria or the
founder of Nicaea with any particular theory on the subject. If the chess-board
fashion becomes now, with seeming suddenness, the common—although not the
universal—rule, that is probably the outcome of the developments sketched in the
last chapter. Approximations to chess-board planning had been here and there
employed in the century before Alexander. When his conquests and their
complicated sequel led, amongst other results, to the foundation of many new
towns, it was natural that the most definite form of planning should be chosen
for general use.
We might, however, wonder whether its adoption was helped by the military
character of the generals who founded, and the discharged soldiers who formed
the first inhabitants of so many among these towns. Military men are seldom
averse to rigidity. It is worth noting, in this connexion, that when chess-board
planning came into common use in the Roman Empire, many—perhaps most—of the
towns to which it was applied were 'coloniae' manned by time-expired soldiers.
So, too, in the Middle Ages and even in comparatively modern times, the towns
laid out with rectangular street-plans in northern Italy, in Provence, in the
Rhine Valley, are for the most part due in some way or other to military needs.[23]
In our own days rectangular planning is a dominant feature of the largest
and newest industrial towns. They are adapting a military device to the purposes
of an industrial age.
Priene (figs. 6-8).
The best instance of the new system is not perhaps the most famous. Priene
was a little town on the east coast of the Aegean. The high ridge of Mycale
towered above it; Miletus faced it across an estuary; Samos stood out seawards
to the west. In its first dim days it had been perched on a crag that juts out
from the overhanging mountain; there its life began, we hardly know when, in the
dawn of Greek history. But it had been worn down in the fifth century between
the upper and the nether millstone of the rival powers of Samos and Miletus.
Early in the Macedonian age it was refounded. The old Acropolis was given up.
Instead, a broad sloping terrace, or more exactly a series of terraces, nearer
the foot of the hill, was laid out with public buildings—Agora, Theatre, Stoa,
Gymnasium, Temples, and so forth—and with private houses. The whole covered an
area of about 750 yds. in length and 500 yds. in width. Priene was, therefore,
about half the size of Pompeii (p. 63). It had, as its excavators calculate,
about 400 individual dwelling-houses and a population possibly to be reckoned at
4,000.
FIG. 6.
GENERAL OUTLINE OF PRIENE
A, B, C. Gates. D, E, F, H, M, P. Temples (see fig. 7). G. Agora, Market. I.
Council House, K. Prytaneion. L, Q. Gymnasium. N. Theatre, O. Water-reservoir,
R. Race-course.
FIG. 7.
PART OF PRIENE AS EXCAVATED 1895-8
(From the large plan by Wiegand and Schrader.)
FIG. 8.
PRIENE, PANORAMA OF THE TOWN
(As restored by Zippelius.)
In the centre was the Agora or market-place, with a temple and other large
buildings facing on to it; round them were other public buildings and some
eighty blocks of private houses, each block measuring on an average 40 x 50 yds.
and containing four or five houses. The broader streets, rarely more than 23 ft.
wide, ran level along the terraces and parallel to one another. Other narrower
streets, generally about 10 ft. wide, ran at right angles up the slopes, with
steps like those of the older Scarborough or of Assisi.[24]
The whole area has not yet been explored and we do not know whether the
houses were smaller or larger, richer or poorer, in one quarter than in another,
but the regularity of the street-plan certainly extended over the whole site.
Despite this reasoned and systematic arrangement, no striking artistic
effects appear to have been attempted. No streets give vistas of stately
buildings. No squares, save that of the Agora—120 by 230 ft. within an
encircling colonnade—provide open spaces where larger buildings might be grouped
and properly seen. Open spaces, indeed, such as we meet, in mediaeval and
Renaissance Italy or in modern English towns of eighteenth century construction,
were very rare in Priene. Gardens, too, must have been almost entirely absent.
In the area as yet uncovered, scarcely a single dwelling-house possessed any
garden ground or yard.[25]
Miletus (fig. 9).
The skill of German archaeologists has revealed what town-planning meant in a
small town rebuilt in the Alexandrine period. No other even approximately
complete example has been as yet uncovered on any other site. But spade-work at
the neighbouring and more famous city of Miletus has uncovered similar
street-planning there. In one quarter, the only one yet fully excavated, the
streets crossed at right angles and enclosed regular blocks of dwelling-houses
measuring 32 x 60 yds. (according to the excavators) but sub-divided into blocks
of about 32 yds. square (fig. 9). These blocks differ somewhat in shape from
those of Priene, which are more nearly square; whether they differ in date is
more doubtful. They are certainly not earlier than the Macedonian era, and one
German archaeologist places the building or rebuilding of this quarter of
Miletus after that of Priene and in a 'late Hellenistic' and apparently Roman
period. There is unquestionably much Roman work in Miletus; there seems,
however, no sufficient reason for ascribing the house-blocks shown on fig. 7 to
any date but some part of the Macedonian period. Though differently shaped, they
do not differ very greatly in actual area from those of Priene. They are
somewhat smaller, but only by about 60 sq. yds. in each average-sized plot.[26]
FIG. 9.
MILETUS, AS EXCAVATED BY WIEGAND
(Archãologischer Anzeiger, 1911, p. 421.)
Alexandria.
A yet more famous town, founded by Alexander himself, is definitely recorded
by ancient writers to have been laid out in the same quasi-chess-board fashion,
with one long highway, the Canopic Street, running through it from end to end
for something like four miles.[27]
Unfortunately the details of the plan are not known with any certainty.
Excavations were conducted at the instigation of Napoleon III in 1866 by an Arab
archaeologist, Mahmud Bey el Fallaki, and, according to him, showed a regular
and rectangular scheme in which seven streets ran east and west while thirteen
ran north and south at right angles to them. The house-blocks divided by these
streets were thought to vary somewhat in size but to measure in general about
300 x 330 metres.[28]
More recent research, however, has not confirmed Mahmud's plans. The
excavations of Mr. Hogarth and M. Botti suggest that many of his lines are wrong
and that even his Canopic Street is incorrectly laid down. Mr. Hogarth, indeed,
concludes that 'it is hopeless now to sift his work; those who would treat the
site of Alexandria scientifically must ignore him and start de novo'.
More recent excavation, carried out by Dr. Noack in 1898-9, seemed to show that
the ancient streets which can now be traced beneath Alexandria belong to a Roman
age, though they may of course follow older lines, and that, if some items in
Mahmud's plans are possibly right, the errors and omissions are serious. We may
accept as certain the statement that Alexandria was laid out with a rectangular
town-plan; we cannot safely assume that Mahmud has given a faithful picture of
it.[29]
Nicaea.
Priene, Miletus, and Alexandria supply more or less well-known instances of
Macedonian town-planning. They can be reinforced by a crowd of less famous
examples, attested by literature or by actual remains. One of the most
characteristic is known to us from literature, Nicaea in Bithynia, founded by
one of the Macedonians in 316 B.C. and renamed by another some years later in
honour of his wife Nicaea. Strabo, writing about A.D. 15, describes it and his
description no doubt refers to arrangements older than the Romans. It formed, he
says, a perfect square in which each side measured four stades, a little over
800 yds. In each side—apparently in the middle of each side—there was one gate,
and the streets within the walls were laid out at right angles to one another. A
man who stood at a certain spot in the middle of the Gymnasium could see
straight to all the four gates.[30]
Here is the chess-board pattern in definite form, though the central portion
of the city may have been laid out under the influence of spectacular effect
rather than of geometry.
Sicyon, Thebes, &c.
Another Macedonian town-plan may be found at Sicyon, a little west of
Corinth. This old Greek city was rebuilt by Demetrius Poliorcetes about 300
B.C., and is described by a Greek writer of the first century B.C. as possessing
a regular plan and roads crossing at right angles. The actual remains of the
site, explored in part by English and French archaeologists early in the
nineteenth century, show some streets which run with mathematical straightness
from north-east to south-west and others which run from north-west to
south-east.[31]
These streets might, indeed, date from the period when Sicyon was the chief
town of the Roman province of Achaia, the period (that is) between the overthrow
of Corinth in 146 B.C. and its restoration just a century later. But that was
not an epoch when such rebuilding is likely to have been carried through.
Friendly as the Republican government of Rome showed itself in other ways to
Hellas, there is no reason to think that it spent money on town-planning in
Hellenic cities. It is far more probable that the town-plan of Sicyon dates from
the Macedonians.
To the same Macedonian epoch we may perhaps ascribe the building or rather
the rebuilding of Boeotian Thebes, which one who passes for a contemporary
writer under the name of Dicaearchus, describes as 'recently divided up into
straight streets'.[32]
To the same period Strabo definitely assigns the newer town of Smyrna, lying
in the plain close to the harbour. It was due, he says, to the labours of the
Macedonians, Antigonus, and Lysimachus.[33]
We may perhaps assign to the same period the town-planning of Mitylene in
Lesbos, which Vitruvius mentions as so splendid and so unhealthy, were it not
that his explanation of its unhealthiness suggests rather a fan-shaped outline
than a square. It was, he says, intolerable, whatever wind might blow. With a
south wind, the wind of damp and rain, every one was ill. With a north-west
wind, every one coughed. With a north wind, no one could stand out of doors for
the chilliness of its blasts.[34]
Streets that lay open to the north and the north-west and the south, equally
and alike, could only be found in a town-plan fashioned like a fan. But perhaps
Vitruvius only selected three of the plagues of Lesbos.
In other cases the same planning was probably adopted, although the evidence
as yet known shows only a rectangular plan of main streets, such as we have met
in Pre-Macedonian Greece. In Macedonia itself, Thessalonika, laid out perhaps
about 315 B.C., had at least one main street running southwards to the sea and
two more running east and west at right angles to that.[35]
In Asia two Syrian towns, which occupy sites closed to Hellenic culture
before Alexander, may serve as examples. Apamea on the Orontes was built by the
Macedonians, rose forthwith to importance, and retained its vigorous prosperity
through the Roman Empire; in A.D. 6 it was 'numbered' by Sulpicius Quirinius,
then the governor of Syria, and the census showed as many as 117,000 citizens
settled in the city and its adjacent 'territory'. Its ruins seem to be mainly
earlier than the Romans, and its streets may well date from its Macedonian
founders. In outline it is an irregular oblong, nearly an English mile in length
and varying in width from half to two-thirds of a mile. A broad and straight
street, lined throughout with colonnades, runs from end to end of its length and
passes at least five great buildings, which seem to be the temples and palaces
of the Seleucid kings. Two other streets cross this main street at right angles.
Whether the smaller thoroughfares took the same lines can be determined only by
excavation. It would be a gentle guess to think so.[36]
Further south, on the edge of the Haurân, stood the town of Gerasa. This too,
like Apamea, was built by the Macedonians and flourished not only in their days
but during the following Roman age. Its general outline was ovoid, its greatest
diameter three quarters of a mile, its area some 235 acres—nearly the same with
Roman Cologne and Roman Cirencester. Its streets resembled those of Apamea. A
colonnaded highway ran straight through from north to south; two other streets
crossed at right angles, and its chief public buildings, the Temple of the Sun
and three other temples, two theatres and two public baths, stood near these
three streets (fig. 10). Again the evidence proves rectangular town-planning in
broad outline; excavation alone can tell the rest.[37]
FIG. 10.
GERASA
In the towns just described a distinctive feature is the 'chess-board'
pattern of streets and rectangular house-blocks. That, of course, is the feature
which most concerns us here. It may not have looked so predominant to their
builders and inhabitants. The towns which the Macedonians founded were not
seldom rich and large; several were the capitals of powerful and despotic
rulers. In such towns we expect great public buildings, temples, palaces. It is
not surprising if sometimes those who reared them cared solely for the
spectacular grouping of magnificent structures and forgot the private houses and
the general plan of the town.
Pergamum.
One such instance from the Macedonian age, perhaps the most instructive which
we could ever hope to get,[38]
is Pergamum, in the north-west of Asia Minor. This has been thoroughly
explored by German science; its remains are superb; its chief buildings date
from an age when town-planning had grown familiar to the Greek world. About 300
B.C. it was a hill-town where a Macedonian chief could bestow a war-chest. It
grew both populous and splendid in the third and second centuries B.C. under the
Attalid kings; later builders, Augustus or Trajan or other, added little either
to its general design or to its architectural glory. The dominant idea was that
of a semi-circle of great edifices, crowning the crest and inner slopes of a
high crescent-shaped ridge. Near the northern and highest end of this ridge
stood the palace of the Attalid princes, afterwards buried beneath a temple in
honour of Trajan. Next, to the south, was the Library—with stores of papyri
worth more perhaps to the world than all the architecture of Pergamon. The
middle of the crescent held the shrine of Athena, goddess of Pergamon, and
beside it the Altar of Zeus the Saviour, gigantic in size, splendid with
sculpture, itself the equal of an Acropolis. Lastly, the southern or lower end
of the ridge bore a temple of Dionysus and an Agora for Assemblies.
These buildings ringed the hill-top in stately semi-circle; below them, a
theatre was hewn out of the slopes and a terrace 250 yds. long was held up by
buttresses against precipitous cliffs. Lower yet, beneath the Agora, the town of
common men covered the lower hill-side in such order or disorder as its
steepness allowed. Here was no conventional town-planning. Only a yet lower and
later city, built in Roman days on more or less level spaces beside the stream
Selinus, seems perhaps to have been laid out in chess-board fashion.[39]
The Attalid kings, the founders of Pergamon, cared only for splendid
buildings splendidly adorned. If their abrupt hill-side forbade the straight and
broad processional avenues of some other Greek cities, they crowned their
summits instead with a crescent of temples and palaces which had not its like on
the shores of the Aegean.
Yet even Pergamon had its building-laws and by-laws for the protection of
common life. A Pergamene inscription contains part of a 'Royal Law' which
apparently dates from one of the Attalid rulers. It is imperfect. But we can
recognize some of the items for which it provided. Houses which fell or
threatened to fall on to the public street, or which otherwise became ruinous,
could be dealt with by the Astynomi; if their owners failed to repair them,
these magistrates were to make good the defects themselves and to recover the
cost, and a fine over and above it, from the owners; if the Astynomi neglected
their duty, the higher magistrates, the Strategi, were to take up the matter.
Streets were to be cleaned and scavenged by the same Astynomi. Brick-fields were
expressly forbidden within the city. The widths of roads outside the town were
fixed and owners of adjacent land were held liable for their repair, and there
was possibly some similar rule, not preserved on the inscription, for roads
inside the walls; at Priene, it seems, these latter were in the care of the
municipality. There were provisions, too, for the repair of common walls which
divided houses belonging to two owners, and also for the prevention of damp
where two houses stood side by side on a slope and the wall of the lower house
stood against the soil beneath the upper house.[40]
These rules are very like those which were coming into use before 330 B.C.
(p. 37). Only, they are more elaborate, and it is significant that the
inscriptions begin in Macedonian and later days to give more and fuller details
as to the character of these laws and as to the existence in many cities of
officials to execute them. It is not surprising to find that Roman legislation
of the time of Caesar and the early Empire applies these or very similar rules
to the local government of the Roman municipalities of the Empire (p. 137).
So common in the Macedonian world was the town-planning which has been
described above, that the literature of the period, even in its casual phrases
and incidental similes, speaks of towns as being normally planned in this
fashion. Two examples from two very different authors will suffice as
illustration. Polybius, writing somewhere about B.C. 150, described in
well-known chapters the scheme of the Roman camp, and he concludes much as
follows: 'This being so, the whole outline of the camp may be summed up as
right-angled and four-sided and equal-sided, while the details of its
street-planning and its general arrangement are precisely parallel to those of a
city' (VI. 31, 10). He was comparing the Greek town, as he knew it in his own
country, with the encampment of the Roman army; he found in the town the aptest
and simplest parallel which he could put before his readers. A much later
writer, living in a very different environment and concerned with a very
different subject, fell nevertheless under the influence of the same ideas.
Despite his 'sombre scorn' for things Greek and Roman, St. John, when he wished
to figure the Holy City Jerusalem, centre of the New Heaven and New Earth,
pictured it as a city lying foursquare, the length as large as the breadth, and
entered by twelve gates, 'on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on
the south three gates, and on the west three gates.'[41]
The instances and items cited in the preceding paragraphs lie within the
limits of the Greek world and of the Roman Empire. We might perhaps wish to
pursue our speculations and ask whether this vigorous system influenced foreign
lands, and whether the Macedonian army carried the town-plan of their age, in
more or less perfect form, as far as their conquests reached. Alexander settled
many soldiers in lands which were to form his eastern and north-eastern
frontiers, as if against the central-asiatic nomads. Merv and Herat, Khokand and
Kandahar,[42]
have been thought—and, it seems, thought with some reason—to date from the
Macedonian age and in their first period to have borne the name Alexandria. But
no Aurel Stein has as yet uncovered their ruins, and speculation about them is
mere speculation.
CHAPTER V
ITALIAN TOWN-PLANNING. THE ORIGINS
If Greek and Macedonian town-planning are fairly well known, the Roman Empire
offers a yet larger mass of certain facts, both in Italy and in the provinces.
The beginnings, naturally, are veiled in obscurity. We can trace the system in
full work at the outset of the Empire; we cannot trace the steps by which it
grew. Evidences of something that resembles town-planning on a rectangular
scheme can be noted in two or three corners of early Italian history—first in
the prehistoric Bronze Age, then in a very much later Etruscan town, and thirdly
on one or two sites of middle Italy connected with the third or fourth century
B.C. These evidences are scanty and in part uncertain, and their bearing on our
problem is not always clear, but they claim a place in an account of Italian
town-planning. To them must be added, fourthly, the important evidence which
points to the use of a system closely akin to town-planning in early Rome
itself.
The Terremare (fig. 11).
(i) We begin in the Bronze Age, somewhere between 1400 and 800 B.C., amidst
the so-called Terremare. More than a hundred of these strange settlements have
been examined by Pigorini, Chierici, and other competent Italians. Most of them
occur in a well-defined district between the Po and the Apennines, with Piacenza
at its west end and Bologna at its east end. Some have also been noted on the
north bank of the Po near Mantua, both east and west of the Mincio, and two or
three elsewhere in Italy. Archaeologically, they all belong to the Bronze Age;
they seem, further, to be the work of a race distinct from any previous dwellers
in North Italy, which had probably just moved south from the Danubian plains. At
some time or other this race had dwelt in lake-villages. They were now settled
on dry ground and far away from lakes—one of their hamlets is high in the
Apennines, nearly 1,900 ft. above the sea. But they still kept in the Terremare
the lacustrine fashion of their former homes.
The nature of these strange villages can best be explained by an account of
the best-known and the largest example of them (fig. 11). At Castellazzo di
Fontanellato, a little west of Parma, are the vestiges of a settlement which,
with its defences, covered an area of about forty-three acres. In outline it was
four-sided; its east and west sides were parallel to one another, and the whole
resembled a rectangle which had been pulled a trifle askew. Round it ran a solid
earthen rampart, 50 ft. broad at the base and strengthened with woodwork (plan,
B). In front of the rampart was a wet ditch (A), 100 ft. wide, fed with fresh
water from a neighbouring brook by an inlet at the south-western corner (C) and
emptied by an outfall on the east (D). One wooden bridge gave access to this
artificial island at its southern end (E). The area within the rampart, a little
less than thirty acres in extent, was divided into four parts by two main
streets, which would have intersected at right angles had the place been
strictly rectangular; other narrower streets ran parallel to these main
thoroughfares. On the east side (F) was a small 'citadel'—arx or
templum—with ditch, rampart and bridge of its own (G, H); in this were a
trench and some pits (K) which seemed by their contents to be connected with
ritual and religion. Outside the whole (L, M) were two cemeteries, platforms of
urns set curiously like the village itself, and also a little burning ghat.[43]
The population of the village is necessarily doubtful. A German writer,
Nissen, has reckoned it at four or five thousand, men, women and children
together, crowded into small huts. But this estimate may be too high. In any
case, many of the Terremare are much smaller.
FIG. 11.
TERRAMARA OF CASTELLAZZO DI FONTANELLATO
These Terremare bear a strong likeness to the later Italian town-planning,
and they are usually taken to be the oldest discoverable traces of that system.
This means that the Italian town-planning was derived from other sources besides
Greece or the East, since the Terremare are far older than Hippodamus or even
Nebuchadnezzar and Sennacherib (pp. 23, 29). It must be added that our present
knowledge does not allow us to follow the actual development of the Terremare
into historic times, and to link them closely with the later civilization of
Central Italy. When some modern scholars call the men of the Terremare by the
name 'Italici', they express a hope rather than a proven fact. It may be safer,
for the moment, to avoid that name and to refrain from theories as to the exact
relation between prehistoric and historic. But we shall see below that the
existence of a relation between the two is highly probable.
Marzabotto (fig. 12).
FIG. 12.
MARZABOTTO
(AB, FG, CD, main streets. The shading represents excavated houses.)
(ii) A greater puzzle, dating probably from the fifth century B.C., meets us
in the ruins of a nameless little Etruscan town which stood outside of Etruria
proper, on the north slopes of the Apennines. Its site is fifteen miles south of
Bologna, close to the modern Marzabotto, on the left bank of the little river
Reno. Only a tiny part has been uncovered. But the excavators have not hesitated
to complete their results conjecturally into a rectangular town-plan, with
streets crossing at right angles and oblong blocks of houses measuring from 158
to 176 yds. in length and 37 or 44 or 71 yds. in width (fig. 12). The whole must
have been laid out at once, and the smaller remains seem to show that this was
done by Etruscans. In the fourth century the place was sacked by the Gauls, and
though there was later occupation,[44]
its extent is doubtful.[45]
Further excavation is, however, needed to confirm this generally accepted
interpretation of the place. Nothing has been noted elsewhere in Etruria or its
confines to connect the Etruscans with any rectangular form of town-plan. At
Veii, for example, most of the Etruscan city has lain desolate and unoccupied
ever since the Romans destroyed it, but the site shows no vestige of streets
crossing at right angles or of oblong blocks of houses. At Vetulonia the
excavated fragment of an Etruscan city shows only curving and irregular streets.[46]
Nor is there real reason to believe that the 'Etruscan teaching' learnt by
Rome included an art of town-planning (p. 71) or that, as a recent French writer
has conjectured, the Etruscans brought any such art with them from the East and
communicated it to the West. We must conclude that at Marzabotto we have a piece
of evidence which we cannot set into its proper historical framework. We might
perhaps call it an early blend of Greek and Italian methods and compare it with
Naples (p. 100). It is odd that four out of seven house-blocks should measure
just under 120 Roman ft. in width and thus approximate to a figure which we meet
often elsewhere in the Roman world (p. 79). But it would be well to learn more
of the plan by further excavation.
Pompeii (fig. 13).
(iii) A third piece of evidence can be found on a site which historians and
novelists alike connect mainly with the Roman Empire, but which dates back to
the days of the early or middle Republic. Pompeii began in or before the sixth
century B.C. as an Oscan city. For a while, we hardly know when, it was ruled by
Etruscans. Later, about 420 B.C., it was occupied by Samnites. Finally, it
became Roman; it was refounded in 80 B.C. as a 'colonia' and repeopled by
soldiers discharged from the armies of Sulla. In A.D. 79 it reached its end in
the disaster to which it owes its fame. Its life, therefore, was long and full
of destruction, re-building, enlargement. Its architectural history is naturally
hard to follow. Many of its buildings, however, can be dated more or less
roughly by the style of their ornament or the character of their material, and
the lines of its streets suggest some conjectures as to its growth which deserve
to be stated even though they may conflict with the received opinions about
Pompeii. It will be understood, of course, that these conjectures, like all
speculations on Pompeii, are limited by the fact that barely half of its area
has been as yet uncovered, and that very little search has been made beneath the
floors and pavements of its latest period.[47]
FIG. 13.
POMPEII
(T = Temple. The area of the supposed original settlement is outlined in black.)
As we know it at present, Pompeii is an irregular oval area of about 160
acres, planted on a small natural hill and girt with a stone wall nearly two
miles in circumference (fig. 13). On the west there was originally access to the
sea, and on this side the walls have disappeared or have not been yet uncovered.
Near this end of the town is the Forum, with the principal temples and public
buildings round it. At the east end of the town, nearly 1200 yds. from the
western extremity, is the amphitheatre, and the town-walls appear to have been
drawn so as to include it. Two main streets, now called the Strada di Nola and
the Strada dell' Abbondanza, cross the town from SW. to NE. The main streets
from NW. to SE. are less distinct, but the Strada Stabiana certainly ran from
wall to wall. While there is some appearance of symmetry in the streets
generally, it does not go very far; there is hardly a right angle, or any close
approach to a right angle, at any street corner.
It is generally held, as Mau has argued, that the whole town was laid out at
once, perhaps during the Etruscan period, on one plan of streets crossing at
right angles. Two principal streets, those now styled the Strada di Mercurio and
the Strada di Nola, are considered to be the main streets of this earliest
town-plan, and to give it its general direction. A third main street, the Strada
Stabiana, which cuts obliquely across from the Vesuvian to the Stabian Gate and
mars the supposed symmetry of this town-plan, is ascribed to the influence of a
small natural depression along which it runs, while a small area east of the
Forum, which also breaks loose from the general scheme, is thought to have been
laid out abnormally in order to remedy the effect of this obliquity.[48]
This theory is open to objections. In the first place the streets (even apart
from those just east of the Forum) do not really form one symmetrical plan.
Region VI fits very ill with Regions I and III. Both indicate systematic
planning. But Region VI is laid out in oblong blocks 110 ft. wide and either 310
ft. or 480 ft. long, while Regions I and III are made up of approximately square
blocks about 200 ft. each way. Moreover, the orientation of the blocks is
different. Those in Region VI follow the lines of the Strada di Mercurio; those
of Regions I and II, and perhaps also of Region V, are dominated by the Strada
Stabiana. Yet there is no obvious reason why this difference should not have
been avoided; it results, indeed, in awkward corners and inconvenient spaces.
Nor, again, can we accept as in any degree adequate the cause assigned by Mau
for the odd orientation of the streets next to the east side of the Forum.
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.
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.
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]
FIG. 14.
MODENA
(See p. 69.)
(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.
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]
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
Of the interior buildings of the town little is known. The Forum perhaps
stood near the present Palazzo di Città, 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.
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.
FIG. 15.
TURIN
FROM A PLAN OF 1844.
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.
FIG. 16.
AOSTA
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. (5½ 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]
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.
FIG. 17A.
FLORENCE, SINCE THE REBUILDING OF THE CENTRAL PORTION
(Centro shaded.)
FIG. 17B.
FLORENCE ABOUT 1795, FROM L. BARDI
The chief streets which seem to have preserved Roman lines are marked in black.
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. Trinità. 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).
FIG. 18.
LUCCA
(The streets which preserve Roman lines are marked in black.)
Not Available
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]
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.
FIG. 19.
HERCULANEUM
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.
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.
FIG. 20.
NAPLES. ADAPTED FROM A PLAN OF 1865
(TH = Theatre, T = Temple.)
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.
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]
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.
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]
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 34½ feet and Plot IV, frontage of 35
feet; ground rent (?), 69½ denarii (in margin). Yearly rent II ... (?).
Lessee and surety, as above. Fronting the Kardo.
10
Plot V, frontage 55½ feet, and Plot VI, next to the Ludus
(gladiators' school), frontage 75 feet ...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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]
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]
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 ¾ 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]
FIG. 25.
A PART OF LAIBACH
(From W. Schmid.)
FIG. 26.
LINCOLN, OUTLINE OF ROMAN WALLS
(See p. 118.)
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]
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]
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]
FIG. 28.
LINCOLN. SEWER UNDER BAILGATE
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.
FIG. 29.
AUTUN
(After H. de Fontenay, 1889.)
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.
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]
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 3½ 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]
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.
FIG. 30.
TRIER
(From plan by the late Dr. Gräven.)
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.
FIG. 31.
SILCHESTER
(For detail see fig. 32.)
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 3½
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.
FIG. 32.
DETAILS OF FOUR INSULAE, THE FORUM AND THE CHURCH AT SILCHESTER
(From Archaeologia.)
But whatever the exact amount of Roman building and Roman street-plan given
to Silchester when it was first laid out, the place is not in effect a real
town. It is not merely that, as I have said, the houses do not form continuous
streets. A glance at the houses will show that they could not possibly be fitted
into streets. The types of house here visible are not town houses. They are the
types which appear among the 'villas', that is, the landlords' or the farmers'
dwellings, up and down the rural districts of Roman Britain and northern Gaul,
and the town which they constitute is a conglomeration of country houses. The
reverse has taken place of that which we often see to-day in England. Our modern
builders and architects had—until perhaps quite recently—only one idea of a
small house, the house, namely, which to-day characterizes the monotonous
streets in the poorer quarters of our new towns, with its front door and bow
window on one side, its offices behind, and its two other sides left blank for
other houses to stand against. This is a town house. Yet our modern builders use
it, all by itself, in the most desolate country districts. I came across one
such not long ago, when driving over a lonely valley in Exmoor. There it stood,
with no other house near it, yet with its two sides blankly waiting for the
street that ought to form itself to the right and left.
The opposite of this has occurred at Calleva; here the rural house has been
used, with scarcely a change, to form a town. We see the Roman street-plan
introduced in surroundings which are not properly urban. The outward expression
of the civilised municipal system jostles against a provincial and rural life.
Here was a premature attempt to municipalize the Briton, which outstripped the
readiness of the Briton to be municipalized. Silchester was probably a tribal
centre before the Roman came; for awhile it may have remained much the same
under Roman rule. But forty years after the Roman Conquest, in the reign of
Vespasian (about A.D. 70-85), the Romanization of the whole province appears to
have rapidly advanced. It was, indeed, encouraged by the Home Government.
Various details suggest that the laying out of Silchester belonged to this very
date. But to this the Callevan failed to rise. He learnt much from Rome; he
learnt even town-life; he did not learn town-life in its highest form. When his
town had been 'haussmannized' and fitted with Roman streets, and equipped with
Roman Forum and Basilica, and the rest, he yet continued to live—perhaps more
happily than the true townsman—in his irregularly grouped houses and cottages
amid an expanse of gardens. The area of Silchester differed little from that of
Aosta; its population, if we may judge by the number of dwelling-houses, was
hardly as large as that of Timgad.
Caerwent (fig. 33).
I turn lastly to another Romano-British town, Caerwent (Venta Silurum),
between Chepstow and Newport in Monmouthshire. It is a smaller town than
Silchester. Both towns perhaps began with the same area, 40 or 45 acres. But
Caerwent never expanded; it remained not much more than 45 acres within the
walls. Land was probably valuable within it; certainly its houses are packed
closer, and its garden ground is smaller than at Silchester. Its general type is,
however, the same. It has a very similar Forum and Basilica, Temples, an
Amphitheatre, and a large number of private houses which resemble closely those
of Silchester. It has, moreover, at least in the parts that have been so far
excavated, distinct traces of a rectangular street pattern, which, if it was
carried through the whole town, would provide (including the Forum) twenty 'insulae'.
The size of these blocks cannot be determined with any precision. Indeed, in
some cases the houses seem to have encroached on and distorted the street-plan.
Probably it would be true to say that the average block covered an acre and a
half or an acre and two-thirds.[110]
We do not know enough of the history of Caerwent to do more than guess how
this street-plan came to it. Very likely the same process of establishing a
Roman-looking town for a local capital was adopted here as at Silchester. Very
likely the step was taken in the same period as at Silchester, that is, in the
last thirty years of the first century. Its occurrence is significant. Caerwent
lay remote in the far west, with nothing but garrisons beyond it. It was the
outpost of Roman city life towards the Atlantic. It was the only town of Roman
municipal plan in Britain which was swept by Atlantic breezes.[111]
FIG. 33.
CAERWENT
(Reduced from plan by F. King.)
Silchester and Caerwent did not stand alone in Britain. At Wroxeter, the
ancient Viroconium, tribal centre of the Cornovii and a Romano-British
country-town much like Silchester, though somewhat larger, oblong 'insulae' have
recently been detected by Mr. J.P. Bushe-Fox which measure 103 x 126 yds. (2-2/3
acres). At Cirencester, the Romano-British centre for the canton of the Dobuni
and a still larger town than Wroxeter, the 'insulae' near the Basilica seem to
have measured as much as 120 yards in length, though full details have not yet
been obtained. Both these towns may be ascribed to the later years of the first
century and to the same civilizing process as Silchester and Caerwent. As
further Romano-British towns are uncovered, we may therefore hope for more
examples. However imperfectly the inner meaning of town-planning was understood,
it was plainly common in the south of Roman Britain.
NOTE. THE EASTERN PROVINCES.
To complete the survey of Roman provincial town-planning, we must glance
briefly at the East. Here towns of Roman origin were few, and of those few
scarcely any are well known. But they do not lack interest. For example, take
Antinoê, built by Hadrian in memory of his favourite Antinous, on the banks of
the Nile. It was a parallelogram more than 3 miles round, which covered an area
of 360 acres. Two main streets, each colonnaded, crossed at right angles and cut
it into four parts. Of the other streets, nothing certain seems to be known. But
references to the town in papyri denote four quarters of it by various letters,
Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and distinguish its house-blocks by the term
Plintheion with a numeral attached. Thus, a house is described as lying 'in the
letter Delta and the Plintheion 7'. Our documents show that there were in
Antinoê at least eleven of these Plintheia.[112]
It is fairly plain that they are rectangular 'insulae', of either Roman or
Hellenic type, while the general fashion of the town and of its monuments
suggest a Greek rather than an Italian city.
FIG. 34.
BOSTRA
(After Baedeker.)
Another instance may be found still further east, in the land beyond Jordan,
at the capital of the Haurân, Bosrâ, anciently Bostra. Little has been achieved
in the way of exploration of this site beyond studies of the stately ruins of
theatres, palaces, temples, triumphal arches, aqueducts. Little can therefore be
said as to the date of its ground-plan. But it was rectangular in outline, or
nearly so; and its streets crossed at right angles and enclosed rectangular
insulae.[113]
The place owes all its greatness to Rome. During the second century it was
the fortress of the Legio III Cyrenaica, which guarded this part of the eastern
Roman frontier. About A.D. 225 it became a 'colonia,' and perhaps we should date
from this the town-plan just described (fig. 34).
This rectangular planning remained long in use in the Eastern Empire. When in
A.D. 705 (as it seems) the town of Chersonnesus in the Crimea was rebuilt after
a total destruction, it was rebuilt on a symmetrical plan of oblong 'insulae'
(25-30 by 60-70 yds. area). Its streets were mean and narrow. But their plan at
least was apparently more regular than that of their predecessors.[114]
CHAPTER X
ROMAN BUILDING-LAWS
Archaeology tells us that the western half of the Roman Empire and many
districts in its eastern half used a definite town-plan which may be named, for
brevity, the chess-board pattern. It remains to ask whether literature, or at
least legal literature, provides any basis of theory or any ratification of the
actual system which archaeology reveals. Of augural lore we have indeed enough
and to spare. We know that the decumanus and the cardo, the two
main lines of the Roman land-survey and probably also the two main streets of
the Roman town-plan,[115]
were laid out under definite augural and semi-religious provision. We should
expect to find more. A system of town-planning that is so distinctive and so
widely used might reasonably have created a series of building-laws sanctioning
or modifying it. This did not occur. Neither the lawyers nor even the
land-surveyors, the so-called Gromatici, tell us of any legal rules relative to
town-planning as distinct from surveying in general. The surveyors, in
particular, are much more concerned with the soil of the province and its
'limitation' and 'centuriation', than with the arrangements of any individual
town, and, whatever their value for extramural boundaries,[116]
throw no light on streets and 'insulae'.
The nearest approach to building-laws which occurs is a clause which seems to
be a standing provision in many municipal charters and similar documents from
the age of Cicero onwards, to the effect that no man might destroy, unroof, or
dismantle an urban building unless he was ready to replace it by a building at
least as good or had received special permission from his local town council.
The earliest example of this provision occurs in the charter of the municipality
of Tarentum, which was drawn up in the time of Cicero.[117]
It is repeated in practically the same words in the charter of the 'colonia
Genetiva' in southern Spain, which was founded in 44 B.C.; it recurs in the
charter granted to the municipality of Malaga, also in southern Spain, about
A.D. 82.[118]
Somewhat similar prohibitions of the removal of even old and worthless
houses without special leave are implied in decrees of the Roman Senate passed
in A.D. 44 and A.D. 56, though these seem really to relate to rural rather than
to urban buildings and were perhaps more agrarian than municipal in their
object.[119]
Hadrian, in a dispatch written in A.D. 127 to an eastern town which had
lately obtained something like municipal status, includes a provision that a
house in the town belonging to one Claudius Socrates must either be repaired by
him or handed over to some other citizen.[120]
Similar legislation occurs in A.D. 224 and in the time of Diocletian and
later.[121]
Rules were also laid down occasionally to forbid balconies and similar
structures which might impede the light and air in narrow streets, and it was a
common rule that cemeteries and brickyards must lie outside the area of
inhabitation. At Rome too, efforts were made by various emperors to limit the
height of the large tenement houses which there formed the 'insulae'. These
limits were, however, fixed haphazard without due reference to the width of the
streets; they do not seem to occur outside of Rome, and even in Rome they were
very scantily observed.
But in general no definite laws were framed. Probably the municipalities were
somewhat closely tied in the administration of municipal property and had to
refer schemes for the employment even of the smallest bit of vacant space to the
'patron' or the curator of the town. But, apart from the provisions
mentioned above, they had no specific rights, that are recorded, against private
owners or builders. It was only once, after Rome itself had been burnt out, that
an imperial order condemned landowners who 'held up' their ground instead of
using it, to forfeit their ownership in favour of any one who offered to build
at once.
CHAPTER XI
THE SEQUEL
What was the sequel to this long work of town-planning? Two facts stand out
distinct. First, the Roman planning helped the towns of the Empire to take
definite form, but when the Empire fell, it too met its end. Only here and there
its vestiges lingered on in the streets of scattered cities like things of a
former age. But, secondly, from this death it rose again, first in the
thirteenth century, with ever-growing power to set the model for the city life
of the modern world.
I. The value of town-planning to Roman civilization was twofold. It increased
the comfort of the common man; it made the towns stronger and more coherent
units to resist the barbarian invasions. When, after 250 years of conflict, the
barbarians triumphed, its work was done. In the next age of ceaseless orderless
warfare it was less fit, with its straight broad streets, for defence and for
fighting than the chaos of narrow tortuous lanes out of which it had grown and
to which it now returned. The cases are few in which survivals of Roman streets
have conditioned the external form of mediaeval or modern towns. We in England
tend perhaps to overrate the likelihood of such survivals. Our classical
education has, until very lately, taught most of us more of ancient than of
mediaeval history, and when our antiquaries find towns rectangular in outline
and streets that cross in a Carfax, they give them a Roman origin.
Such a tendency is wrong. Plentiful evidence shows that even in Italy and
even in towns where men have dwelt without a break since Roman days, the Roman
streets, and with them the Roman town-plans, have far oftener vanished than
endured. Rome herself, the Eternal City, uses hardly one street to-day which was
used in the Roman Empire. Some few Italian towns, described in detail above,
have a better claim to be called 'eternal'; half a dozen in northern Italy
retain their ancient streets in singular perfection. Yet even there cities like
Padua and Mantua, Genoa and Pisa, have lost the signs of their older fashion.
So, too, in the provinces. In the Danubian lands only one town can even be
supposed to preserve a few of its Roman streets. In all the once great cities of
that region, Sirmium and Siscia, Poetovio and Celeia and Emona, they have wholly
gone; you may walk across the sites to-day and seek them in vain in modern
street or hedgerow or lane. In Gaul there were many Roman municipalities in the
south; there were many towns of lesser rank but equal wealth in the centre and
west and north. But we owe our knowledge of their town-plans to an inscription
from Orange and to some excavations at Autun and Trier. Cologne and Trier alone,
or almost alone, keep Roman streets in modern use, and they are significant.
Both became Roman towns in the first century; both held colonial rank; both have
lived on continuously ever since and hardly changed their names. Yet both bear
to-day the stamp of the Middle Ages, and the Roman streets which they use are
small and nearly unrecognizable fragments.
There is, indeed, no law of survivals. Chance—that convenient ancient word to
denote the interaction of many imponderable forces—has ruled one way in one
place and otherwise in another. Sometimes monuments have alone survived,
sometimes only streets, and we can seldom give reasons for this contrast of
fates. At Pola, gates, temples, and amphitheatre still tell of the Roman past
and the modern town-square keeps so plainly the tradition of the Forum that you
cannot walk across it without a sense of what it was. Yet not a single street
agrees with those of the Roman 'colonia'. In the Lombard and Tuscan plains, at
Turin and Pavia and Piacenza, at Florence and Lucca, the Roman streets are still
in use, just as the old Roman field-ways still divide up the fertile plains
outside those towns. But, save in Turin, hardly one Roman stone has been left
upon another. In the no less fertile plain of the lower Rhone, at Nîmes and
Arles and Orange, the stately ruins wake the admiration of the busiest and least
learned traveller; of the Roman streets there is no sign.
Britain has enjoyed less continuity of civilization than any other western
province; in Britain the survivals are even fewer. In London, within the limits
of the Roman city, no street to-day follows the course of any Roman street,
though Roman roads that lead up to the gates are still in use. At Colchester the
Roman walls still stand; the places of the Roman gates are known; the masonry of
the west gate is still visible as the masonry of a gateway. But the modern and
ancient streets do not coincide, and the west gate, which has so well withstood
the blows of time, can hardly be reached by road from within the city. At York
the defences of the legionary fortress have still their place in the sun, but
the 'colonia' on the other bank of the Ouse has vanished wholly from the
surface, walls and streets together, and the houses of the citizens of Eburacum
are known solely by finds of mosaic floors. At Lincoln the Roman walls and gates
can easily be traced and one gate rears its arch intact, but the Bailgate alone
follows, and that erratically, the line of a Roman street. The road from the
Humber, thirty miles north of Lincoln, runs to-day, as it has run for eighteen
centuries, under the Newport arch and through the modern town and passes on
southwards. That long straight road has given a feature to Lincoln, but it is a
feature due to the Roman highway outside the town, not to the streets within it.
Lincoln itself is as English as Cologne and Trier are German.
II. But if Roman streets have seldom survived continuously to modern days, if
Roman town-planning perished with the western Empire, it has none the less
profoundly influenced the towns of mediaeval and modern Europe and America.
Early in the thirteenth century men began to revive, with certain modifications,
the rectangular planning which Rome had used. Perhaps copying Roman originals
seen in northern Italy, Frederic Stupor Mundi now built on a chess-board pattern
the Terra Nova which he founded in Sicily. Now, in 1231, Barcelonette was built
with twenty square 'insulae' in south-eastern France. Now, too, the 'Bastides'
and 'Villes Neuves' of southern France and towns like Aigues-Mortes (1240) were
built on similar plans.[122]
FIG. 35.
PLAN OF A BASTIDE TOWN, SAUVETERRE-DE-GUYENNE NEAR BORDEAUX (A.D. 1281)
(By Dr. A.E. Brinckmann.)
Soon after, the chess-board pattern came to England and was used in Edwardian
towns like Flint[123]
and Winchelsea; then, too, it was adopted at the other end of the civilized
world by German soldiers in Polish lands. Cracow, for example, owes to German
settlers in the mid-thirteenth century that curious chess-board pattern of its
innermost and oldest streets which so much puzzles the modern visitor.[124]
It is unnecessary here to follow further the renaissance of town-planning.
By intervals and revivals it continued to spread. In 1652 it reached Java, when
the Dutch built Batavia. In 1682 it reached America, when Penn founded
Philadelphia. In 1753, when Kandahar was refounded as a new town on a new site,
its Afghan builders laid out a roughly rectangular city, divided into four
quarters meeting at a central Carfax and divided further into many strangely
rectangular blocks of houses.[125]
But in growing, the old town-planning has passed into a new stage. The Romans
dealt with small areas, seldom more than three hundred acres and often very much
less. The town-plans of the Middle Ages and even of modern times affected areas
that were little larger. Only the last days have brought development. Till the
enormous changes of the nineteenth century—changes which have transferred the
termination of ancient history from A.D. 476 to near A.D. 1800—the older
fashions remained, in town-life as in most other forms of civilized society.
Towns were still, with few exceptions, small and their difficulties, if real,
were simple. Save in half a dozen abnormal capitals, they had, even in
relatively modern days, no vast populations to be fed and made into human and
orderly citizens. They had no chemical industries, no chimneys defiling the air,
or drains defiling the water. Now, builders have to face the many square miles
of Chicago or Buenos Ayres, to provide lungs for their cities, to fight with
polluted streams and smoke. Their problems are quite unlike those of the
ancients. When Cobbett, about 1800, called London the Great Wen, he contrasted
in two monosyllables the ancient ideal of a city with the ugly modern facts.
It is not, therefore, likely that modern architects or legislators will learn
many hints from plans of Timgad or of Silchester. There are lessons perhaps in
the growth of Turin from its little ancient chess-board to its modern
enlargement, but such developments are rare. The great benefit to modern workers
of such a survey as I have attempted is that it shows the slow and painful steps
by which mankind became at last able to plan towns as units, yet inhabited by
individual men and women, and that it emphasizes the need for definite rules and
principles. Nor is it perhaps quite superfluous to-day to point out how closely,
even after the great upheaval of the nineteenth century, the forms of modern
life depend on the Roman world.
Footnotes:
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