as Prof.  Cagnat has justly observed, a quasi-fortress watching the slopes of Mount Aures south of it, just as Aosta watched its Alpine valley.  As Machiavelli thought it worth while to observe, the shorter the line of a town’s defence, the fewer the men who can hold it.  The town-planning of Timgad was designed on other than purely architectural or municipal principles.  For this reason, too, we should probably seek in vain any marked distinction between richer and poorer quarters and larger or smaller houses.[95] The centurions and other officers may have formed the first municipal aristocracy of Timgad, as retired officers did in many Roman towns, but there can have been no definite element of poor among the common soldiers.

    [95] Ballu detects a ‘quartier industriel’ in the outer town, but
    the evidence does not seem to warrant so grand a term.

Such was Trajan’s Timgad, as revealed by excavations now about two-thirds complete.  The town soon burst its narrow bounds.  A Capitol, Baths, a large Meat-market, and much else sprang up outside the walls.  Soon the walls themselves, like those of many mediaeval towns—­for example, the north and west town-walls of Oxford—­were built over and hidden by later structures.  The town grew from one of 360 to a breadth of over 800 yds.  And as it expanded, it broke loose from the chess-board pattern.  The builders of later Timgad did not resemble those of later Turin.  Even the decumanus, the main ‘east and west’ street, wandered away north-west in an uncertain curve, and all that has been discovered of streets outside the walls of Trajan is irregular and complicated.  A town-plan, it seems, was binding on the first builders of the ‘colonia’.  It lost its power within a very few years.[96]

    [96] Boeswillwald, Cagnat and Ballu, Timgad (Paris, 1891-1905);
    see especially Appendix, pp. 339-349; Ballu, Ruines de Timgad
    (Paris, 1897-1911); Barthel, Bonner Jahrbuecher, cxx. 101.

Carthage (fig. 24).

It remains to note another example of town-planning in a Roman municipality of the western Empire, which is as important as it is abnormal.  Carthage, first founded—­though only in an abortive fashion—­as a Roman ‘colonia’ in 123 B.C. and re-established with the same rank by Julius Caesar or Augustus, shows a rectangular town-plan in a city which speedily became one among the three or four largest and wealthiest cities in the Empire.  The regularity of its planning was noted in ancient times by a topographical writer.[97] But the plan, though rectangular, is not normal.  According to the French archaeologists who have worked it out, it comprised a large number of streets—­perhaps as many as forty—­running parallel to the coast, a smaller number running at right angles to these down the hillside towards the shore, and many oblong ‘insulae’, measuring each about 130 x 500 ft., roughly two Roman iugera.