g for the excavator to recover the unspoilt pattern of their
streets. If the Roman Empire brought to certain provinces, as it
unquestionably did to Africa, the happiest period in their history
till almost the present day, that only makes their remains the more
noteworthy and instructive. Here the new art of excavation has already
achieved many and varied successes. In the western Empire one town,
Silchester in Britain, has been wholly uncovered within the circuit of
its walls. Others, like Caerwent in Britain or Timgad and Carthage in
Africa, have been methodically examined, though the inquiries have not
yet touched or perhaps can never touch their whole areas. In others
again, some of which lie in the east, occasional search or even chance
discoveries have shed welcome light. Our knowledge is more than enough
already for the purposes of this chapter.

We can already see that the town-plan described in the foregoing pages
was widely used in the provinces of the Empire. We find it in Africa,
in Central and Western Europe, and indeed wherever Rorrran remains
have been carefully excavated; we find it even in remote Britain
amidst conditions which make its use seem premature. Where excavation
has as yet yielded no proofs, other evidence fills the gap. In
southern Gaul, as it happens, archaeological remains are unhelpful.
But just there an inscription has come to light, the only one of its
kind in the Roman world, which proves that one at least of the
'coloniae' of Gallia Narbonensis was laid out in rectangular oblong
plots. It is clear enough that this town-plan was one of the forms
through which the Italian civilization diffused itself over the
western provinces.

The exact measure of its popularity is, however, hard to determine. In
the east it found little entrance. There, the very similar Macedonian
and Greek methods of town-planning were rooted firmly, long before
Rome conquered Greece or Asia Minor or Syria or Egypt. The few
town-plans which have been noted in these lands, and which may be
assigned more or less conjecturally to the Roman era, seem to be
Hellenic or Hellenistic rather than Italian. They show broad stately
streets, colonnades, vistas, which belong to the east and not to
Italy. Even in the west, the rule of the chess-board was sometimes
broken. Aquincum, near Budapest, became a 'municipium' under Hadrian;
its ruins, so far as hitherto planned, exhibit no true street-planning.
But that may be due to its