ur quarters; in them he sought for his signs. The Roman general who
encamped his troops, laid out their tents on a rectangular pattern
governed by the same idea. The commissioners who assigned
farming-plots on the public domains to emigrant citizens of Rome,
planned these plots on the same rectangular scheme--as the map of
rural Italy is witness to this day.

These Roman customs are very ancient. Later Romans deemed them as
ancient as Rome itself, and, though such patriotic traditions belong
rather to politics than to history, we find the actual customs well
established when our knowledge first becomes full, about 200 B.C.[53]
The Roman camp, for example, had reached its complex form long before
the middle of the second century, when Polybius described it in words.
Here, one can hardly doubt, are things older even than Rome. Scholars
have talked, indeed, of a Greek origin or of an Etruscan origin, and
the technical term for the Roman surveying instrument, _groma_, has
been explained as the Greek word 'gnomon', borrowed through an
Etruscan medium. But the name of a single instrument would not carry
with it the origin of a whole art, even if this etymology were more
certain than it actually is. Save for the riddle of Marzabotto (p.
61), we have no reason to connect the Etruscans with town-planning or
with the Roman system of surveying. When the Roman antiquary Varro
alleged that 'the Romans founded towns with Etruscan ritual', he set
the fashion for many later assertions by Roman and modern writers.[54]
But he did not prove his allegation, and it is not so clear as is
generally assumed, that he meant 'Etruscan ritual' to include
architectural town-planning as well as religious ceremonial.

[53] The prologue to the Poenulus of Plautus (verse 49) which
mentions 'limites' and a 'finitor', may well be as old as Plautus
himself. But the 'centuriation' still visible in north Italy
around colonies planted about 180 B.C. is no full proof of
rectangular surveying at that date. These towns were re-founded
at a much later date, and their lands, and even their streets,
_may_ have been laid out anew.

[54] Varro _ling. lat_. 5. 143 _oppida condebant Etrusco ritu, id
est, iunctis bobus_, cf. Frontinus _de limit_. (grom. i. p. 27).

These are Italian customs, far older than the beginnings of Greek
influence on Rome, older than the systematic town-planning of the
Greek lands, and older also than th