Chapter 11

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'.

[115] See p. 73.

[116] Schulten, _Hermes_, 1898, p. 534.

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]

[117] Mommsen, _Eph. Epigr._ ix, p. 9; Dessau, _Inscr. sel._ 6086; 'nei quis in oppido quod eius municipi erit aedificium detegito neive demolito neive disturbato nisei quod non deterius restiturus erit nisei de senatus sententia. sei quis adversus ea faxit, quanti id aedificium fuerit, tantam pequniam municipio dare damnas esto eiusque pequniae quei volet petitio est.' (English translation in E.G. Hardy's _Roman Laws and Charters_, p. 101.)

[118] Dessau, 6087, 6089; Hardy, _Roman Laws_, part 2, pp. 34, 108.

[119] For these decrees, which are practically equivalent at this date to laws, see _CIL_. x. 1401 = Dessau 6043, and de Pachtère in _Mélanges Cagnat_, p. 169.

[120] For the letter of Hadrian see _Bulletin de Corresp. Hell._ x. 111; it is quoted by Bruns, _Fontes_, 1909, p. 200. Compare the _Historia Augusta_, Life of Hadrian, ch. 18.

[121] Mommsen, _Eph. Epigr._ iii, p. 111 and _Ges. Schiften_, i. 158, 263, 371; Liebenam, _Städteverwaltung_, 393.

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.