area.  The paths and passages by which men once moved across that area have vanished beneath the waves and cannot be recovered from any survey of these visible fragments.  There is hardly one modern town in all the European and African provinces of the Roman Empire which still uses any considerable part of its ancient street-plan.  In our own country there is no single case.  In Gaul and Germany, two or three streets in Cologne and one or two in Trier are the sole survivals.[87] In Illyricum there is no example unless possibly at Belgrade.  In the Spanish peninsula the town of Braga in northern Portugal seems to stand alone.  In Roman Africa—­Tunis, Algiers and Morocco—­no instance has survived the Arab conquest.[88]

    [87] For Orange see p. 107.  Nimes may possibly retain one or two
    streets of the Roman Nemausus, but it is very doubtful; see
    Menard’s map of 1752.  See further in general p. 142.

    [88] Though, curiously enough, the chess-board pattern of field
    divisions has survived in the neighbourhood of Carthage.

If, however, survivals of ancient streets are as rare in the provinces as they are common in Italy, the provinces yield other evidence unknown to Italy.  In these lands, and above all in Africa, the sites of many Roman towns have lain desolate and untouched since Roman days, waiting for the excavator to recover the unspoilt pattern of their streets.  If the Roman Empire brought to certain provinces, as it unquestionably did to Africa, the happiest period in their history till almost the present day, that only makes their remains the more noteworthy and instructive.  Here the new art of excavation has already achieved many and varied successes.  In the western Empire one town, Silchester in Britain, has been wholly uncovered within the circuit of its walls.  Others, like Caerwent in Britain or Timgad and Carthage in Africa, have been methodically examined, though the inquiries have not yet touched or perhaps can never touch their whole areas.  In others again, some of which lie in the east, occasional search or even chance discoveries have shed welcome light.  Our knowledge is more than enough already for the purposes of this chapter.

We can already see that the town-plan described in the foregoing pages was widely used in the provinces of the Empire.  We find it in Africa, in Central and Western Europe, and indeed wherever Rorrran remains have been carefully excavated; we find it even in remote Britain amidst conditions which make its use seem premature.  Where excavation has as yet yielded no proofs, other evidence fills the gap.  In southern Gaul, as it happens, archaeological remains are unhelpful.  But just there an inscription has come to light, the only one of its kind in the Roman world, which proves that one at least of the ‘coloniae’ of Gallia Narbonensis was laid out in rectangular oblong plots.  It is clear enough that this town-plan was one of the forms through which the Italian civilization diffused itself over the western provinces.