Ancient Town-Planning Part 7

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 pa.s.sages 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 Illyric.u.m there is no example unless possibly at Belgrade. In the Spanish peninsula the town of Braga in northern Portugal seems to stand alone. In Roman Africa--Tunis, Algiers and Morocco--no instance has survived the Arab conquest.[88]

[87] For Orange see p. 107. Nimes may possibly retain one or two streets of the Roman Nemausus, but it is very doubtful; see Menard's map of 1752. See further in general p. 142.

[88] Though, curiously enough, the chess-board pattern of field divisions has survived in the neighbourhood of Carthage.

If, however, survivals of ancient streets are as rare in the provinces as they are common in Italy, the provinces yield other evidence unknown to Italy. In these lands, and above all in Africa, the sites of many Roman towns have lain desolate and untouched since Roman days, waiting for the excavator to recover the unspoilt pattern of their streets. If the Roman Empire brought to certain provinces, as it unquestionably did to Africa, the happiest period in their history till almost the present day, that only makes their remains the more noteworthy and instructive. Here the new art of excavation has already achieved many and varied successes. In the western Empire one town, Silchester in Britain, has been wholly uncovered within the circuit of its walls. Others, like Caerwent in Britain or Timgad and Carthage in Africa, have been methodically examined, though the inquiries have not yet touched or perhaps can never touch their whole areas. In others again, some of which lie in the east, occasional search or even chance discoveries have shed welcome light. Our knowledge is more than enough already for the purposes of this chapter.

We can already see that the town-plan described in the foregoing pages was widely used in the provinces of the Empire. We find it in Africa, in Central and Western Europe, and indeed wherever Rorrran remains have been carefully excavated; we find it even in remote Britain amidst conditions which make its use seem premature. Where excavation has as yet yielded no proofs, other evidence fills the gap. In southern Gaul, as it happens, archaeological remains are unhelpful.

But just there an inscription has come to light, the only one of its kind in the Roman world, which proves that one at least of the 'coloniae' of Gallia Narbonensis was laid out in rectangular oblong plots. It is clear enough that this town-plan was one of the forms through which the Italian civilization diffused itself over the western provinces.

The exact measure of its popularity is, however, hard to determine. In the east it found little entrance. There, the very similar Macedonian and Greek methods of town-planning were rooted firmly, long before Rome conquered Greece or Asia Minor or Syria or Egypt. The few town-plans which have been noted in these lands, and which may be a.s.signed more or less conjecturally to the Roman era, seem to be h.e.l.lenic or h.e.l.lenistic 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. Aquinc.u.m, near Budapest, became a 'municipium' under Hadrian; its ruins, so far as. .h.i.therto 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 munic.i.p.al status at the end.

Roman Africa is here, as so often, our best source of knowledge. At Timgad (p. 109), a town laid out in Roman fashion with a rigid 'chess-board' of streets was subsequently enlarged on irregular and almost chaotic lines. At Gigthi, in the south-east of Tunis, the streets around the Forum, itself rectangular enough, do not run parallel or at right angles to it or to one another.[89] At Thibilis, on the border of Tunis and Algeria, the streets, so far as they have yet been uncovered, diverge widely from the chess-board pattern.[90]

One French archaeologist has even declared that most of the towns in Roman Africa lacked this pattern.[91] Our evidence is perhaps still too slight to prove or disprove that conclusion. Few African towns have been sufficiently uncovered to show the street-plan.[92] But town-life was well developed in Roman Africa. It is hardly credible that the Africans learnt all the rest of Roman city civilization and city government, and left out the planning. The individual cases of such planning which will be quoted in the following pages tell their own tale--that, while the strict rule was often broken, it was the rule.

[89] _Archives nouvelles des Missions scientifiques_, xv. 1907, fasc. 4.

[90] Plan by Joly, _Arch. Anzeiger_, 1911, p. 270, fig. 17. The plan has been thought to imply 'insulae' twice as large as those of Timgad. To me it suggests nothing so regular.

[91] Toutain, _Cites romaines de la Tunisie_, p. 79 note: 'Ce qui toutefois est incontestable, c'est que cette disposition d'une regularite artificielle, autour de deux grandes voies exactement orientees et se coupant a angle droit, est tres rare dans l'Afrique romaine. Les villes de ce pays n'out pas ete toutes construites sur le meme plan: chacune d'elles a, pour ainsi dire, epouse la forme de son emplacement.'

[92] There are many in which it could be traced with some ease, apparently. Thelepte, Cillium, Ammaedara, Sufetula, _Archives des Missions_, 1887, pp. 68, 121, 161-171, Simitthu, _Memoires presentes par divers savants_, ser. I. x. 462, and Thuccabor, Tissot, _Geogr. d'Afrique_, ii. 292, seem to have visible streets, but no one has recorded them exactly. The plan of Utica, given by Tissot (_Atlas_, by Reinach, plate vi) on the authority of Daux, is open to doubt.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 21. INSCRIPTION OF ORANGE.

(From the _Comptes-rendus de l'Academie des Inscriptions_.)

Plot (_meris_) I (_lost_) ...

Plot II ... perpetual lessee (_manceps_) C. Naevius Rusticus: surety for him C. Vesidius Quadratus. Fronting the Kardo.

(5) Plot III, frontage of 34-1/2 feet and Plot IV, frontage of 35 feet; ground rent (?), 69-1/2 denarii (_in margin_). Yearly rent II ... (?).

Lessee and surety, as above. Fronting the Kardo.

(10) Plot V, frontage 55-1/2 feet, and Plot VI, next to the Ludus (gladiators' school), frontage 75 feet ...]

_Orange_ (fig. 21).

The case which deserves the first place stands by itself. It is the one piece of written evidence (as distinct from structural remains) which has survived from Roman town-planning. Curiously enough, it was found not in Italy but in a province, and a province which, for all its wealth of Roman buildings, has not yet revealed the smallest structural proof of Roman town-planning. In April 1904 a sc.r.a.p 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 doc.u.ment. 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 munic.i.p.ality on something like a perpetual lease.[93]

[93] For the inscription see Esperandieu, _Acad. des Inscriptions, Comptes rendus_, 1904, p. 497; Cagnat, _Annee epigr._, 1905, 12; and especially Schulten, _Hermes_, 1906, 1; a convenient English account is given by H.S. Jones, _Companion to Roman Hist._, p.

22. It has been suggested by Schulten that the blocks were at first divided into plots of 35 ft. frontage, and that the boundaries had become changed in the ordinary course of things before the survey was made. But this seems to carry conjecture rather far.

Here, in short, is the record of an oblong 'insula' in the Roman town of Orange. It is doubtless part of a longer record, a register of house-property in the whole town. Orange, Colonia Iulia Secundanorum Arausio, was a 'colonia' founded about 45 B.C. with discharged soldiers of Caesar's Second Legion. Possibly the register was drawn up at this date; more probably it is rather later and may be connected with a _census_ of Gaul begun about 27 B.C. Certainly it was preserved with much care, as if one of the 'muniments' of the citizens. The spot where it was dug up is in the heart of the ancient as well as of the modern town, close to the probable site of the Forum, and the inscription may have been fastened up in all its length on the walls of some public building. If, as is likely, the town owned the soil of the town, the connexion of the inscription with the Forum becomes even clearer. In any case, the town was plainly laid out in a rectangular street-plan. To-day its lanes are as tortuous as those of any other Provencal town.[94] A strange chance reveals what it and many other of these towns must once have been.

[94] It has been said to show marks of streets laid out rectangularly, but neither the look of the town itself nor the plans of it seem to me to confirm this idea; compare Lentheric, _Le Rhone_, ii. 110.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 22. AFTER CAGNAT AND BALLU (1911).

(The six 'insulae' marked A are shown in detail in fig. 23. Unshaded 'insulae' are as yet unexcavated.)]

_Timgad_ (figs. 22, 23).

From this piece of half-literary evidence we pa.s.s 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 Aures, 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 princ.i.p.al 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 s.p.a.ce needed for public buildings, though it is not easy to tell how great this s.p.a.ce 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 princ.i.p.al 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Aures 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 munic.i.p.al 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 munic.i.p.al aristocracy of Timgad, as retired officers did in many Roman towns, but there can have been no definite element of poor among the common soldiers.

[95] Ballu detects a 'quartier industriel' in the outer town, but the evidence does not seem to warrant so grand a term.

Such was Trajan's Timgad, as revealed by excavations now about two-thirds complete. The town soon burst its narrow bounds. A Capitol, Baths, a large Meat-market, and much else sprang up outside the walls.

Soon the walls themselves, like those of many mediaeval towns--for example, the north and west town-walls of Oxford--were built over and hidden by later structures. The town grew from one of 360 to a breadth of over 800 yds. And as it expanded, it broke loose from the chess-board pattern. The builders of later Timgad did not resemble those of later Turin. Even the _dec.u.ma.n.u.s_, the main 'east and west'

street, wandered away north-west in an uncertain curve, and all that has been discovered of streets outside the walls of Trajan is irregular and complicated. A town-plan, it seems, was binding on the first builders of the 'colonia'. It lost its power within a very few years.[96]

[96] Boeswillwald, Cagnat and Ballu, _Timgad_ (Paris, 1891-1905); see especially Appendix, pp. 339-349; Ballu, _Ruines de Timgad_ (Paris, 1897-1911); Barthel, _Bonner Jahrbucher_, cxx. 101.

_Carthage_ (fig. 24).

It remains to note another example of town-planning in a Roman munic.i.p.ality 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e, and encourages the use of streets which run level along the slopes, parallel to the sh.o.r.e, and not more or less steeply towards it.[98]

[97] _Totius...o...b..s descriptio_, 61 (Muller, _geogr. graeci min._ ii. 527); dispositione gloriosissima constat ... in directione vicorum et platearum aequalibus lineis currens' (written probably about A.D. 350).

[98] _Carte archeologique et topogr. des Ruines de Carthage_, by Gauckler and Delattre (1:5,000); Schulten, _Archaol. Anzeiger_, 1905, p. 77; 1909, p. 190; 1911, p. 246; Audollent, _Carthage romaine_ (Paris, 1901), pp. 309, 846. The older accounts of Daux and Tissot seem less trustworthy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 24. A PART OF CARTHAGE.

Plan based on the _Carte archeologique des ruines de Carthage_, by Gauckler and Delattre.]