[93] For the inscription see Esperandieu, Acad. des Inscriptions, Comptes rendus, 1904, p. 497; Cagnat, Annee Epigr., 1905, 12; and especially Schulten, Hermes, 1906, 1; a convenient English account is given by H.S.  Jones, Companion to Roman Hist., p. 22.  It has been suggested by Schulten that the blocks were at first divided into plots of 35 ft. frontage, and that the boundaries had become changed in the ordinary course of things before the survey was made.  But this seems to carry conjecture rather far.

Here, in short, is the record of an oblong ‘insula’ in the Roman town of Orange.  It is doubtless part of a longer record, a register of house-property in the whole town.  Orange, Colonia Iulia Secundanorum Arausio, was a ‘colonia’ founded about 45 B.C. with discharged soldiers of Caesar’s Second Legion.  Possibly the register was drawn up at this date; more probably it is rather later and may be connected with a census of Gaul begun about 27 B.C.  Certainly it was preserved with much care, as if one of the ‘muniments’ of the citizens.  The spot where it was dug up is in the heart of the ancient as well as of the modern town, close to the probable site of the Forum, and the inscription may have been fastened up in all its length on the walls of some public building.  If, as is likely, the town owned the soil of the town, the connexion of the inscription with the Forum becomes even clearer.  In any case, the town was plainly laid out in a rectangular street-plan.  To-day its lanes are as tortuous as those of any other Provencal town.[94] A strange chance reveals what it and many other of these towns must once have been.

[94] It has been said to show marks of streets laid out rectangularly, but neither the look of the town itself nor the plans of it seem to me to confirm this idea; compare Lentheric, Le Rhone, ii. 110.

[Illustration:  FIG. 22.  AFTER CAGNAT AND BALLU (1911).  (The six ‘insulae’ marked A are shown in detail in fig. 23.  Unshaded ‘insulae’ are as yet unexcavated.)]

Timgad (figs. 22, 23).

From this piece of half-literary evidence we pass to purely archaeological remains, and first to the province of Numidia in Roman Africa and to the town of Timgad.  The town of Thamugadi, now Timgad, lay on the northern skirts of Mount Aures, halfway between Constantine and Biskra and about a hundred miles from the Mediterranean coast.  Here the emperor Trajan founded in A.D. 100 a ‘colonia’ on ground then wholly uninhabited, and peopled it with time-expired soldiers from the Third Legion which garrisoned the neighbouring fortress of Lambaesis.  The town grew.  Soon after the middle of the second century it was more than half a mile in width from east to west, and its extent from north to south, though not definitely known, cannot have been much less.  The first settlement was smaller.  So far as it has been uncovered by French archaeologists—­sufficiently