It may be asked how all this applies to the planning of towns.  We possess certainly no such clear evidence with respect to towns as with respect to divisions agrarian or military.  But the town-plans which we shall meet in the following chapters show very much the same outlines as those of the camp or of the farm plots.  They are based on the same essential element of two straight lines crossing at right angles in the centre of a (usually) square or oblong plot.  This is an element which does not occur, at least in quite the same form, at Priene or in other Greek towns of which we know the plans, and it may well be called Italian.  We need not hesitate to put town and camp side by side, and to accept the statement that the Roman camp was a city in arms.  Nor need we hesitate to conjecture further that in the planning of the town, as in that of the camp, Greek influence may have added a more rigid use of rectangular ‘insulae’.  When that occurred, will be discussed in Chapter VI.

Whether the nomenclature of the augur, the soldier and the land-commissioner was adopted in the towns, is a more difficult, but fortunately a less important question.  Modern writers speak of the cardo and the decumanus of Roman towns, and even apply to them more highly technical terms such as striga and scamnum.  For the use of cardo in relation to towns there is some evidence (p. 107).  But it is very slight, and for the use of the other terms there is next to no evidence at all.[55] The silence alike of literature and of inscriptions shows that they were, at the best, theoretical expressions, confined to the surveyor’s office.[56]

[55] Whether the possessores ex vico Lucretio scamno primo of Cologne (Corpus XIII. 8254) had their property inside the ‘colonia’ of that place or in the country outside, may be doubted (Schulten, Bonner Jahrb. ciii. 28).

[56] The phrase Roma Quadrata ought, perhaps, to be mentioned in this chapter.  It does not seem, however, to be demonstrably older than the Ciceronian age.  The line et qui sextus erat Romae regnare quadratae, once attributed to Ennius (ed.  Vablen, 1854, 158), is clearly of much later date.  As a piece of historical evidence, the phrase merely sums up some archaeologist’s theory (very likely a correct theory, but still a theory) that the earliest Rome on the Palatine had a more or less rectangular outline.

CHAPTER VI

ITALIAN TOWN-PLANNING:  THE LATE REPUBLIC AND EARLY EMPIRE