Lastly, the town-planning of the Macedonian era combined, as I
believe, with other and Italian elements and formed the town system of
the later Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. As in art and
architecture, so also in city-planning, the civilization of Greece and
of Italy merged almost inextricably into a result which, with all its
Greek affinities, is in the end Roman. The student now meets a
rigidity of street-plan and a conception of public buildings which are
neither Greek nor Oriental. The Roman town was usually a rectangle
broken up into four more or less equal and rectangular parts by two
main streets which crossed at right angles at or near its centre. To
these two streets all the other streets ran parallel or at right
angles, and there resulted a definite 'chess-board' pattern of
rectangular house-blocks (_insulae_), square or oblong in shape, more
or less uniform in size. The streets themselves were moderate in
width; even the main thoroughfares were little wider than the rest,
and the public buildings within the walls were now merged in the
general mass of houses. The chief structure, the Forum, was an
enclosed court, decorated indeed by statues and girt with colonnades,
but devoid of facades which could dominate a town. The town councils
of the Roman world were no more free than those of Greece or modern
England from the municipal vice of over-building. But they had not the
same openings for error. On the other hand, there was in most of them
a good municipal supply of water, and sewers were laid beneath their
streets.

The reason for all this is plain. These Roman towns, even more than
the Greek cities of the Macedonian world, were parts of a greater
whole. They were items in the Roman Empire; their citizens were
citizens of Rome. They had neither the wealth nor the wish to build