[50] Livy ii. 34, contradicted,
however, by xxvii. 10 and by
Dionysius Halic. vii. 13 ad
fin.
[51] Notizie degli Scavi, 191, p. 558, 1903, p. 261; Frothingham, Roman Cities, plate ix. I am indebted to Dr. T. Ashby, Director of the British School at Rome, for information as to the site. Excavations made in 1823 at the Roman Falerii (founded 241 B.C.) show streets crossing at right angles, but the piece unearthed was small and the date uncertain (Canina, Etruria Maritima i, plate ix).
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]
[52] Fig. 14 is taken from
Zuccagni-Orlandini (1844). Kornemann
suggests that Mutina was refounded
about 40-20 B.C., but there
seems to be no evidence of
this break in its continuity.
[Illustration: 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