the eighteenth century and now long suspended, have thrown light on its ground-plan.[83] This was a rectangular pattern of oblong house-blocks, measuring 54 x 89 yds., or in some cases a little more, and divided by streets varying from 15 to 30 ft. in width which ran at right angles or parallel to one another.  Only a part of the town has been as yet unearthed.  In that a broad colonnaded main street ran from north-west to south-east; on the north-east side of this street stood a row of house-blocks with a structure taken to be a Basilica, and on the south-west of it were ten house-blocks, one of which includes some public baths.  At the north end of this area are a theatre and temple, at the south end two large structures which have been called temples but are more like large private houses; on the east (according to the eighteenth-century searchers) are graves.

[83] M. Ruggiero, Scavi di Ercolano (Naples, 1885), plates ii and xii; Beloch. Campanien, pp. 215 foll.; Nissen, Ital.  Landeskunde, ii. 759; Waldstein and Shoobridge, Herculaneum (London, 1908), pp. 60 foil.; E.R.  Barker, Buried Herculaneum (1908); Gall in Pauly-Wissowa, viii. (1912) 532-48.

[Illustration:  FIG. 19.  HERCULANEUM]

How much of the town has been uncovered, how much still lies hidden beneath the lava which overflowed it in A.D. 79, is disputed.  Of its town-walls and gates no trace has yet been found.  But nearly all its public buildings seem to be known; the graves on the east side, if correctly mapped by their discoverers and if coeval with the streets and houses, leave no room for further ‘insulae’ in that direction, while the great country-house called the ‘Casa dei Papiri’ plainly stood outside the town on the north-west.  From these facts one modern writer has calculated that Herculaneum was less than a quarter of a mile long, less than 350 yds. broad, and less than 26 acres in extent—­in short, not a sixth part of Pompeii.  These measures are probably too small.  The ‘Basilica’ on the north side of the main street cannot have stood on the extreme edge of the town.  There must have been not three but four rows of house-blocks from south-west to north-east; the graves once noted in this quarter must be older than our Herculaneum or otherwise unconnected with it.  The whole town must have been 40 or 45 rather than 25 acres in area.  Even so it is a little town.  The unenthusiastic references to it in ancient literature are, after all, truthful.  Apart from the great villa outside it—­possibly an imperial residence—­it hardly deserved, or to-day deserves, to be excavated at the extraordinary cost which its excavation would involve.