The date of its planning is as doubtful as the extent of its area.  One recent writer, Nissen, has suggested that it was reconstructed after an earthquake in A.D. 63 and was hardly completed before the eruption of 79.  The earthquake is well attested.  But it cannot possibly have wrecked the town so utterly as to cause wholesale rebuilding on new lines, and an inscription points rather to the time of Augustus.  One Marcus Nonius Balbus (the text runs) built ’a basilica, gates and a wall at his own cost’, and this builder Balbus was probably a contemporary of Augustus.[84] Others have preferred to think that the town-planning reveals Greek influences; they point to the Greek city of Naples, 7 miles west of Herculaneum, and the Doric temple at Pompeii, much the same distance east of it.  However, neither the town-planning of Naples, to be discussed in the next paragraphs, nor that of Pompeii (p. 68), seems to be necessarily Greek, and Herculaneum itself contains nothing which cannot be explained as Italian.  It is possible, though there is no record of the fact, that it received a settlement of discharged soldiers somewhere about 30 B.C. and was then laid out afresh.  But here, as throughout this inquiry, more light is needed if the inquirer is to pass from guesswork to proven fact.

[84] CIL. x. 1425; compare Dessau, 896.  It is, no doubt, possible that this Nonius Balbus is the M. Nonius ... who built something in honour of Titus in A.D. 72, but the identification is not likely.

Naples (fig. 20).

One more example, from the neighbourhood of Herculaneum, may complete the list of Italian street-plans.  Naples, the Greek and Roman Neapolis, was a Greek city, the most prosperous of the Greek towns in Campania.[85] After 90 B.C. it appears to have become a Roman ‘municipium’.  But it retained much of its Greek civilization.  A writer of the early first century after Christ, Strabo, states that abundant traces of Greek life survived there, ’gymnasia, and athletic schools, and tribal divisions, and Greek names even for Roman things.’  Even later Tacitus calls it a ‘Greek city’, and Greek was still used for official inscriptions there in the third century.

[85] Beloch, Campanien (Berlin, 1879), p. 26; Capasso, Napoli Greco-Romana (Napoli, 1905).  The Forum, Market, and some other buildings marked by Capasso seem to me (and even to him or his editors) very dubious (p. 63).  Two theatres (p. 82) and a Temple of the Dioscuri are better established.  For plans see Piante topogr. dei quartieri di Napoli 1861-5 (1:3,888) and Pianta della citta di N. (Off. della Guerra, 1865), from which latter fig. 20 is adapted.

[Illustration:  FIG. 20.  NAPLES.  ADAPTED FROM A PLAN OF 1865.  (TH = Theatre, T = Temple.)]