It remains to note another example of town-planning in a Roman municipality of the western Empire, which is as important as it is abnormal. Carthage, first founded--though only in an abortive fashion--as a Roman 'colonia' in 123 B.C. and re-established with the same rank by Julius Caesar or Augustus, shows a rectangular town-plan in a city which speedily became one among the three or four largest and wealthiest cities in the Empire. The regularity of its planning was noted in ancient times by a topographical writer.[97] But the plan, though rectangular, is not normal. According to the French archaeologists who have worked it out, it comprised a large number of streets--perhaps as many as forty--running parallel to the coast, a smaller number running at right angles to these down the hillside towards the shore, and many oblong 'insulae', measuring each about 130 x 500 ft., roughly two Roman _iugera_. The whole town stretched for some two miles parallel to the shore and for about a mile inland, and covered perhaps 1,200 acres. Its street-plan can hardly be older than Caesar or Augustus, but the shape of its 'insulae' appears to be without parallel in that age. It comes closest to the oblong blocks of Pompeii and of Naples (pp. 63, 100), and its two theatres also recall those towns. One reason for its plan may no doubt be found in the physical character of the site. The ground slopes down from hills towards the shore, and encourages the use of streets which run level along the slopes, parallel to the shore, and not more or less steeply towards it.[98] [97] _Totius orbis descriptio_, 61 (Müller, _geogr. graeci min._ ii. 527); dispositione gloriosissima constat ... in directione vicorum et platearum aequalibus lineis currens' (written probably about A.D. 350). [98] _Carte archéologique et topogr. des Ruines de Carthage_, by Gauckler and Delattre (1:5,000); Schulten, _Archäol. Anzeiger_, 1905, p. 77; 1909, p. 190; 1911, p. 246; Audollent, _Carthage romaine_ (Paris, 1901), pp. 309, 846. The older accounts of Daux and Tissot seem less trustworthy. [Illustration: FIG. 24. A PART OF CARTHAGE. Plan based on the _Carte archéologique des ruines de Carthage_, by Gauckler and Delattre.] _Laibach_ (fig. 25), _Numantia, Lincoln_ (fig. 26).