Chapter 6

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.

[57] See Mommsen, _Gesamm. Schriften_ v. 203; Nissen, _Ital. Landeskunde_ ii. 27; Kornemann in Pauly-Wissowa, _Encycl._ iv. 520 foll.

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]

[58] Modern plans seem sometimes to imply that the 'insulae' which abutted on the walls were also abnormally large. That is because the corresponding modern blocks often include, with the original 'insula', the space between it and the wall, and also the wall itself which has been disused and built over.

[59] See on this point some remarks by W. Barthel, _Bonner Jahrbücher_, cxx. 101-108.

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.

[60] In western Europe the provincial Roman amphitheatre averaged 45 x 70 yds. for its arena.

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.

[61] For Florence and Turin see below; for Piacenza, the plans on the scale of 1:1000 and 1:5000 in L. Buroni's _Acque potabili di Piacenza_ (1895).

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.

[62] Silchester and Timgad are the only two sites which have been planned well enough to provide accurate measurements. The large modern town-plans (e.g. of Turin, p. 86) are useful, but inadequate to our purpose; for one thing, they often exaggerate the width of the streets. One really needs actual measurements made on the spot.

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.

[63] Schulten, _Bonner Jahrbücher_, ciii. 23, and references given there.

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.

[64] i. 5 (21), 6 (28, 29).

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.

[65] Perhaps about 180 B.C., Mommsen, _Roman Hist._ iii. 206.

[66] Aquileia was set up in 181 B.C. to guard the north-east gate of Italy, and was reinforced in 169. Its remains, so far as excavated, show a rectangular plan of oblong 'insulae'--some of 1-1/2 acres (74 by 94 yards), some larger--while, till its downfall, about A.D. 450, we hear no word of refoundation or wholesale rebuilding. But if its original area be the space of 70 acres which is usually assigned, that is not rectangular but a square somewhat askew, which fits very badly with the rectangular street-plan, and one would incline to ascribe the latter to a later date. See Maionica, _Fundkarte von Aquileia_.