Here, in short, is the record of an oblong 'insula' in the Roman town
of Orange. It is doubtless part of a longer record, a register of
house-property in the whole town. Orange, Colonia Iulia Secundanorum
Arausio, was a 'colonia' founded about 45 B.C. with discharged
soldiers of Caesar's Second Legion. Possibly the register was drawn up
at this date; more probably it is rather later and may be connected
with a _census_ of Gaul begun about 27 B.C. Certainly it was preserved
with much care, as if one of the 'muniments' of the citizens. The spot
where it was dug up is in the heart of the ancient as well as of the
modern town, close to the probable site of the Forum, and the
inscription may have been fastened up in all its length on the walls
of some public building. If, as is likely, the town owned the soil of
the town, the connexion of the inscription with the Forum becomes even
clearer. In any case, the town was plainly laid out in a rectangular
street-plan. To-day its lanes are as tortuous as those of any other
Provencal town.[94] A strange chance reveals what it and many other of
these towns must once have been.
[94] It has been said to show marks of streets laid out
rectangularly, but neither the look of the town itself nor the
plans of it seem to me to confirm this idea; compare Lentheric,
_Le Rhone_, ii. 110.
[Illustration: FIG. 22. AFTER CAGNAT AND BALLU (1911).
(The six 'insulae' marked A are shown in detail in fig. 23. Unshaded
'insulae' are as yet unexcavated.)]
_Timgad_ (figs. 22, 23).
From this piece of half-literary evidence we pass to purely
archaeological remains, and first to the province of Numidia in Roman
Africa and to the town of Timgad. The town of Thamugadi, now Timgad,
lay on the northern skirts of Mount Aurès, halfway between Constantine
and Biskra and about a hundred miles from the Mediterranean coast.
Here the emperor Trajan founded in A.D. 100 a 'colonia' on ground then
wholly uninhabited, and peopled it with time-expired soldiers from the
Third Legion which garrisoned the neighbouring fortress of Lambaesis.
The town grew. Soon after the middle of the second century it was more
than half a mile in width from east to west, and its extent from north
to south, though not definitely known, cannot have been much less. The
first settlement was smaller. So far as it has been uncovered by
French archaeologists--sufficiently for our purpose, though not
completely--the 'colonia' of Trajan appears to have been some 29 or 30
acres in extent within the walls and almost square in outline (360 x
390 yds.). It was entered by four principal gates, three of which can
still be traced quite clearly, and which stood in the middle of their
respective sides; the position of the south gate is doubtful.
According to Dr. Barthel, the street which joins the east and west
gates was laid out to point to the sunrise of September 18, the
birthday of Trajan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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