The exact measure of its popularity is, however, hard to determine.  In the east it found little entrance.  There, the very similar Macedonian and Greek methods of town-planning were rooted firmly, long before Rome conquered Greece or Asia Minor or Syria or Egypt.  The few town-plans which have been noted in these lands, and which may be assigned more or less conjecturally to the Roman era, seem to be Hellenic or Hellenistic rather than Italian.  They show broad stately streets, colonnades, vistas, which belong to the east and not to Italy.  Even in the west, the rule of the chess-board was sometimes broken.  Aquincum, near Budapest, became a ‘municipium’ under Hadrian; its ruins, so far as hitherto planned, exhibit no true street-planning.  But that may be due to its history, for it seems not to have been founded full-grown, but to have slowly developed as best it could, and to have won municipal status at the end.

Roman Africa is here, as so often, our best source of knowledge.  At Timgad (p. 109), a town laid out in Roman fashion with a rigid ‘chess-board’ of streets was subsequently enlarged on irregular and almost chaotic lines.  At Gigthi, in the south-east of Tunis, the streets around the Forum, itself rectangular enough, do not run parallel or at right angles to it or to one another.[89] At Thibilis, on the border of Tunis and Algeria, the streets, so far as they have yet been uncovered, diverge widely from the chess-board pattern.[90] One French archaeologist has even declared that most of the towns in Roman Africa lacked this pattern.[91] Our evidence is perhaps still too slight to prove or disprove that conclusion.  Few African towns have been sufficiently uncovered to show the street-plan.[92] But town-life was well developed in Roman Africa.  It is hardly credible that the Africans learnt all the rest of Roman city civilization and city government, and left out the planning.  The individual cases of such planning which will be quoted in the following pages tell their own tale—­that, while the strict rule was often broken, it was the rule.

    [89] Archives nouvelles des Missions scientifiques, xv. 1907,
    fasc. 4.

    [90] Plan by Joly, Arch.  Anzeiger, 1911, p. 270, fig. 17.  The
    plan has been thought to imply ‘insulae’ twice as large as those
    of Timgad.  To me it suggests nothing so regular.

[91] Toutain, Cites romaines de la Tunisie, p. 79 note:  ’Ce qui toutefois est incontestable, c’est que cette disposition d’une regularite artificielle, autour de deux grandes voies exactement orientees et se coupant a angle droit, est tres rare dans l’Afrique romaine.  Les villes de ce pays n’out pas ete toutes construites sur le meme plan:  chacune d’elles a, pour ainsi dire, epouse la forme de son emplacement.’

[92] There are many in which it could be traced with some ease, apparently.  Thelepte, Cillium, Ammaedara, Sufetula, Archives des Missions,