On the other side of the basilica, excavation of what had been called Building C brought further surprises. When the workmen had stripped the surface humus off the area of the forecourt, the excavators found themselves looking at a perfect circle of dark earth enclosed by a sandy yellow fill. Further digging established this as a circular, theater-like structure, big enough to hold 600 people. There was an altar in the middle. This must have been the Comitium, the colony’s assembly-place (Fig. 4.7). Building C, behind it, must have been the Curia, or Senate House. The undisturbed fill under the Curia floor proved completely sterile; hence the curia must have been built at a date near the foundation of the colony. At this stage both Curia and Comitium were apparently of wood, replaced in a second phase, before the end of the third century B.C., with purple tufa from nearby Vulci. [Illustration: FIG. 4.7 Cosa, Comitium. (L. Richardson, Jr., _Archaeology_ 10 [1957], p. 50)] A healthy site, an orderly plan, a water supply, strong walls, housing, provision for political and religious needs: the basic necessities are all here, at Cosa, and all as early as the founding of the colony. By hard work, painstaking accuracy, and intelligent inference, Brown and Richardson, the excavators of Cosa, have given us the clearest possible picture of the physical structure of a Roman colony well on in the first intense period of history in the planting of advanced bases. Cosa is clearly the fruit of long practice and Etrusco-Italic tradition, untouched by Hellenism (no Greek architectural language in sculptural or ornamental marble) or by new-fangled techniques (no brick or concrete in the early phases). When we carry down Cosa’s architectural history to the early Empire, we infer the death of freedom of speech from the remodelling of the basilica into a theater. And when freedom of speech and public life died, the colony lost its sense of community. Its thirty-three acres would have held 3000 to 3500 settlers comfortably. But the first draft of settlers numbered probably 2500 families. (We infer families, not soldiers only, from the discovery of loomweights, hardly appropriate for Roman legionaries.) 2500 families make a population of at least 7500, and probably more, given Italian philoprogenitiveness. Some of these must have lived well outside the colony; only those whose centuriated allotments, explained below, lay nearest the walls would have lived in the colony proper. The holders of more distant plots would come to town only for market, worship, litigation (as long as the basilica lasted), or refuge from raiding parties of Gauls or other enemies. And so, under despotism, the community disintegrated. The temples held on longest. “Only the gods, in the end,” writes Professor Brown, “held steadfastly to their ancient seats.” * * * * *