ks are square; sometimes, perhaps more
often, they are oblong approximating to a square, like the blocks of
Priene. But in a few cases, as at Naples among the more ancient, and
at Carthage among the later foundations, they are oblong and the
oblongs are very long and narrow.

It is hard to detect any principle underlying the use of these various
forms. No doubt differences of historical origin are ultimately the
causes of the mixture. But our present knowledge does not reveal these
origins. The evidence is, indeed, contradictory at every point. If the
Graeco-Macedonian fashion be quoted as precedent for square or
squarish 'insulae', the Terremare show the same. If the theoretical
scheme of the earlier Roman camp seemed based on the long narrow
oblong, the actual remains of legionary encampments of the second
century B.C. at Numantia include many squares. If one part of Pompeii
exhibits oblongs, another part is made up of squares. If Piacenza,
first founded in north Italy about 183 B.C., and founded again a
hundred and fifty years later, is laid out in squares, its coeval
neighbour Modena prefers the oblong. If the old Greek city of Naples
embodies an extreme type of oblong, so does the later Augustan
Carthage (pp. 100, 113). In the historic period, it would seem, no
sharp line was drawn, or felt to exist, between the various types of
'insulae'. In the main, the square or squarish-oblong was preferred.
Local accidents, such as the convenience of the site at Carthage, led
to occasional adoption of the narrower oblong.

The Roman land-surveyors, it is true, distinguished the square and the
oblong in a very definite way. The square, they alleged, was proper to
the Italian land or to such provincial soil as enjoyed the privilege
of being taxed--or freed from taxation--on the Italian scale. The
oblong they connected with the ordinary tax-paying soil of the
provinces. This distinction, however, was not carried out even in the
agrarian surveys with which these writers were especially
concerned,[63] and it applies still less to the towns. No doubt it is
a fiction of the office. It would be only human nature if the
surveyors, finding both forms in use, should invent a theory to
account for them.

[63] Schulten, _Bonner Jahrbuecher_, ciii. 23, and references
given there.

The system sketched in the preceding paragraphs seems, as has been
said (p. 73), to have sprung from a fusion of Greek or Graeco-Macedonian
with It