t
have been 40 or 45 rather than 25 acres in area. Even so it is a
little town. The unenthusiastic references to it in ancient literature
are, after all, truthful. Apart from the great villa outside
it--possibly an imperial residence--it hardly deserved, or to-day
deserves, to be excavated at the extraordinary cost which its
excavation would involve.

The date of its planning is as doubtful as the extent of its area. One
recent writer, Nissen, has suggested that it was reconstructed after
an earthquake in A.D. 63 and was hardly completed before the eruption
of 79. The earthquake is well attested. But it cannot possibly have
wrecked the town so utterly as to cause wholesale rebuilding on new
lines, and an inscription points rather to the time of Augustus. One
Marcus Nonius Balbus (the text runs) built 'a basilica, gates and a
wall at his own cost', and this builder Balbus was probably a
contemporary of Augustus.[84] Others have preferred to think that the
town-planning reveals Greek influences; they point to the Greek city
of Naples, 7 miles west of Herculaneum, and the Doric temple at
Pompeii, much the same distance east of it. However, neither the
town-planning of Naples, to be discussed in the next paragraphs, nor
that of Pompeii (p. 68), seems to be necessarily Greek, and
Herculaneum itself contains nothing which cannot be explained as
Italian. It is possible, though there is no record of the fact, that
it received a settlement of discharged soldiers somewhere about 30
B.C. and was then laid out afresh. But here, as throughout this
inquiry, more light is needed if the inquirer is to pass from
guesswork to proven fact.

[84] _CIL_. x. 1425; compare Dessau, 896. It is, no doubt,
possible that this Nonius Balbus is the M. Nonius ... who built
something in honour of Titus in A.D. 72, but the identification
is not likely.

_Naples_ (fig. 20).

One more example, from the neighbourhood of Herculaneum, may complete
the list of Italian street-plans. Naples, the Greek and Roman
Neapolis, was a Greek city, the most prosperous of the Greek towns in
Campania.[85] After 90 B.C. it appears to have become a Roman
'municipium'. But it retained much of its Greek civilization. A writer
of the early first century after Christ, Strabo, states that abundant
traces of Greek life survived there, 'gymnasia, and athletic schools,
and tribal divisions, and Greek names even for Roman things.' Even
later Tacitus calls it