Chapter 9

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.

[103] Hirschfeld, _Haeduer und Arverner_ (_Sitzungsber. der preuss. Akademie_, 1897, p. 1102). Similar hybrid names have been created by the English in India, mostly on the North-west Frontier, where alone they have planted new inhabited sites--Lyallpur, Abbotabad, Edwardesabad, Robertsganj, and the like. But these are almost all small places or forts, and their names represent no policy of Anglicization.

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.

[104] H. de Fontenay, _Autun et ses monuments_ (Autun, 1889), pp. 49 foll. and map (1:6,250). The existence of a town-plan was first noticed by J. de Fontenay, _Bulletin monumental_, 1852, p. 365, but his map appears to be incorrect and his views generally are based too much on _a priori_ assumptions.

_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]

[105] Ademeit, _Siedelungsgeographie des Moselgebiets_, pp. 367, 431.

[106] H. Gräven, _Stadtplan des römischen Triers_ in _Die Denkmalpflege_, 14 Dec. 1904 (1:10,000); the plan has been often copied, as by Cramer, _Das röm. Trier_ (Gütersloh, 1911), and Von Behr, _Trierer Jahresberichte_, i. 1908. Compare Barthel, _Bonner Jahrbücher_, cxx. 106. Trier at some time or other became a 'colonia'. When this occurred, is hotly disputed; the evidence seems to me to suggest that it was founded without colonial status and became a 'colonia latina' in the course of the first century (see Domaszewski, _Abhandlungen_, p. 153). I have therefore inserted Trier in this chapter with Autun and not in