There is, indeed, no law of survivals. Chance--that convenient ancient
word to denote the interaction of many imponderable forces--has ruled
one way in one place and otherwise in another. Sometimes monuments
have alone survived, sometimes only streets, and we can seldom give
reasons for this contrast of fates. At Pola, gates, temples, and
amphitheatre still tell of the Roman past and the modern town-square
keeps so plainly the tradition of the Forum that you cannot walk
across it without a sense of what it was. Yet not a single street
agrees with those of the Roman 'colonia'. In the Lombard and Tuscan
plains, at Turin and Pavia and Piacenza, at Florence and Lucca, the
Roman streets are still in use, just as the old Roman field-ways still
divide up the fertile plains outside those towns. But, save in Turin,
hardly one Roman stone has been left upon another. In the no less
fertile plain of the lower Rhone, at Nîmes and Arles and Orange, the
stately ruins wake the admiration of the busiest and least learned
traveller; of the Roman streets there is no sign.
Britain has enjoyed less continuity of civilization than any other
western province; in Britain the survivals are even fewer. In London,
within the limits of the Roman city, no street to-day follows the
course of any Roman street, though Roman roads that lead up to the
gates are still in use. At Colchester the Roman walls still stand; the
places of the Roman gates are known; the masonry of the west gate is
still visible as the masonry of a gateway. But the modern and ancient
streets do not coincide, and the west gate, which has so well
withstood the blows of time, can hardly be reached by road from within
the city. At York the defences of the legionary fortress have still
their place in the sun, but the 'colonia' on the other bank of the
Ouse has vanished wholly from the surface, walls and streets together,
and the houses of the citizens of Eburacum are known solely by finds
of mosaic floors. At Lincoln the Roman walls and gates can easily be
traced and one gate rears its arch intact, but the Bailgate alone
follows, and that erratically, the line of a Roman street. The road
from the Humber, thirty miles north of Lincoln, runs to-day, as it has
run for eighteen centuries, under the Newport arch and through the
modern town and passes on southwards. That long straight road has
given a feature to Lincoln, but it is a feature due to the Roman
highway outside the town, not to the streets within it. Lincoln itself
is as English as Cologne and Trier are German.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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