The nearest approach to building-laws which occurs is a clause which seems to be a standing provision in many municipal charters and similar documents from the age of Cicero onwards, to the effect that no man might destroy, unroof, or dismantle an urban building unless he was ready to replace it by a building at least as good or had received special permission from his local town council.  The earliest example of this provision occurs in the charter of the municipality of Tarentum, which was drawn up in the time of Cicero.[117] It is repeated in practically the same words in the charter of the ’colonia Genetiva’ in southern Spain, which was founded in 44 B.C.; it recurs in the charter granted to the municipality of Malaga, also in southern Spain, about A.D. 82.[118] Somewhat similar prohibitions of the removal of even old and worthless houses without special leave are implied in decrees of the Roman Senate passed in A.D. 44 and A.D. 56, though these seem really to relate to rural rather than to urban buildings and were perhaps more agrarian than municipal in their object.[119] Hadrian, in a dispatch written in A.D. 127 to an eastern town which had lately obtained something like municipal status, includes a provision that a house in the town belonging to one Claudius Socrates must either be repaired by him or handed over to some other citizen.[120] Similar legislation occurs in A.D. 224 and in the time of Diocletian and later.[121]

[117] Mommsen, Eph.  Epigr. ix, p. 9; Dessau, Inscr. sel. 6086; ’nei quis in oppido quod eius municipi erit aedificium detegito neive demolito neive disturbato nisei quod non deterius restiturus erit nisei de senatus sententia. sei quis adversus ea faxit, quanti id aedificium fuerit, tantam pequniam municipio dare damnas esto eiusque pequniae quei volet petitio est.’  (English translation in E.G.  Hardy’s Roman Laws and Charters, p. 101.)

    [118] Dessau, 6087, 6089; Hardy, Roman Laws, part 2, pp. 34,
    108.

    [119] For these decrees, which are practically equivalent at this
    date to laws, see CIL. x. 1401 = Dessau 6043, and de Pachtere
    in Melanges Cagnat, p. 169.

    [120] For the letter of Hadrian see Bulletin de Corresp.  Hell.
    x. 111; it is quoted by Bruns, Fontes, 1909, p. 200.  Compare
    the Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian, ch. 18.

    [121] Mommsen, Eph.  Epigr. iii, p. 111 and Ges.  Schiften, i.
    158, 263, 371; Liebenam, Staedteverwaltung, 393.

Rules were also laid down occasionally to forbid balconies and similar structures which might impede the light and air in narrow streets, and it was a common rule that cemeteries and brickyards must lie outside the area of inhabitation.  At Rome too, efforts were made by various emperors to limit the height of the large tenement houses which there formed the ‘insulae’.  These limits were, however, fixed haphazard without due reference to the width of the streets; they do not seem to occur outside of Rome, and even in Rome they were very scantily observed.