CHAPTER IX

ROMAN PROVINCIAL TOWN-PLANS.  II

In the preceding chapters Roman town-planning has been treated in connexion with towns of definite municipal rank, which bore the titles ‘colonia’ or ‘municipium’.  The system is, of course, closely akin to such foundation or refoundation as the establishment of a ‘colonia’ implied in the early Empire, while the no less Roman character of the ‘municipium’ made town-planning appropriate to this class of town also.

It was, however, not limited to these towns.  It appears not seldom in provincial towns of lower legal status, such as were not uncommon in Britain, in Gaul, and in some other districts.  Four instances may be quoted from the two provinces just named.  In the first, Autun, the town-planning is explained by the establishment of the town full-grown under Roman official influence.  Unfortunately, however, little is known of the buildings, and it is difficult to judge of the actual character of the place.  In the second case, Trier, we may conjecture a similar official origin.  At Silchester, official influence seems also to have been at work, and it is not impossible that the fourth case, Caerwent, may be explained by the same cause.  In these two latter, however, it is more important to observe the nature of the towns, which is better known than that of any others in western Europe.  For they embody a type of urban life which is distinct from any that occurs in Italy or in the better civilized districts of the Empire, and which illustrates strikingly one stratum of provincial culture.

Autun (fig. 29).

Caesar won northern and central Gaul for the Roman Empire; it fell to Augustus to organize the conquered but as yet unromanized lands.  Among many steps to that end, he seems to have planted new native towns which should take the places of old native tribal capitals and should drive out local Celtic traditions by new Roman municipal interests.  These new towns did not, as a rule, enjoy the full Roman municipal status; northern Gaul was not quite ripe for that.  But they were plainly devised to help Romanization forward, and their object is declared by their half-Roman, half-Celtic names—­Augustodunum (now Autun), Caesaromagus (Beauvais), Augusta Suessionum (Soissons), Augusta Treverorum (Trier), and the like.[103] Of two of these, Autun and Trier, we chance to know the town-plans.  The reader will notice a certain similarity between them.

[103] Hirschfeld, Haeduer und Arverner (Sitzungsber. der preuss.  Akademie, 1897, p. 1102).  Similar hybrid names have been created by the English in India, mostly on the North-west Frontier, where alone they have planted new inhabited sites—­Lyallpur, Abbotabad, Edwardesabad, Robertsganj, and the like.  But these are almost all small places or forts, and their names represent no policy of Anglicization.

[Illustration:  FIG. 29.  AUTUN.  After H. de Fontenay, 1889.]