alian customs. Roman town-planning, like Roman art, was recast
under Hellenistic influence and thus gained mathematical precision and
symmetry. When this happened is doubtful. Foreign scholars often
ascribe it to Augustus and find a special connexion between the first
emperor and the chess-board town-plan. But the architect Vitruvius,
who dedicated his book to Augustus and who gives some brief notice to
town-planning, urges strongly that towns should not be laid out on the
chess-board pattern, but rather on an eight-sided or (as we might call
it) star-shaped plan.[64] He would hardly have denounced a scheme
which had been specially taken up by his patron, nor indeed does his
criticism of the chess-board system sound as if he were denouncing a
novelty in Italian building.

[64] i. 5 (21), 6 (28, 29).

On the other hand there seems no great difficulty in the idea that
the regularization of the old Italian town-plan by Greek influence
took place spontaneously in the late Republic. We cannot, indeed,
date the change. It must remain doubtful whether it came by degrees
or all at once,[65] and whether the right-angled plans of towns like
Aquileia[66] or Piacenza belonged to their first foundation, i.e. to
about 180 B.C., or to later rearrangements. But it seems reasonable
to believe that a Graeco-Italian rectangular fashion of town-planning
did supersede an earlier, irregular, Italian style, and had become
supreme before the end of the Republic.

[65] Perhaps about 180 B.C., Mommsen, _Roman Hist._ iii. 206.

[66] Aquileia was set up in 181 B.C. to guard the north-east gate
of Italy, and was reinforced in 169. Its remains, so far as
excavated, show a rectangular plan of oblong 'insulae'--some of
1-1/2 acres (74 by 94 yards), some larger--while, till its
downfall, about A.D. 450, we hear no word of refoundation or
wholesale rebuilding. But if its original area be the space of 70
acres which is usually assigned, that is not rectangular but a
square somewhat askew, which fits very badly with the rectangular
street-plan, and one would incline to ascribe the latter to a
later date. See Maionica, _Fundkarte von Aquileia_.

CHAPTER VII

INSTANCES OF ITALIAN TOWN-PLANS

The preceding chapters have dealt with the origins and general
character of the Italian town-plan. We pass now to the remains which
it has left in its own home, in Italy. These are many. In one city
indeed