B.C. (Mau, _Führer_, p. 113), but this may not be _in situ_.

Another fact claims notice. The town-planning of Pompeii is in the
main trapezoidal, not rectangular. Neither its oblongs, nor its
squares, nor its street-crossings exhibit true right angles, though
many of the rooms and peristyles in the private houses are regular
enough. In this feature Pompeii resembles the trapezoidal outlines of
the Terremare (fig. 11). It resembles also much Roman military work,
both of Republican and of Imperial date, which disregards the strict
right angle and accepts squares and oblongs which are, so to say,
askew. The motive of the Terremare is supposed to have been, as I have
said above, that of providing an easy flow for the water in the
encircling moat. The motive of various military camps may perhaps be
found rather in a wish to secure the same area as that of an orthodox
rectangle, even though the ground forbade the strict execution of the
orthodox figure. Whatever the reason, the trapezoidal house-blocks of
Pompeii exhibit a feature which is not alien to the earlier
town-planning of Italy, though it is strange to the cities of Greece.


_Norba_.

Not only do we need to know more of Pompeii itself. We need evidence
also from other Italian towns of similar age. Here our ignorance is
deep. Only one site which can help has been even tentatively explored.
Norba, which once crowned a spur of the Monti Lepini above the Pontine
marshes, was founded as a Roman town, according to the orthodox
chronology, in 492 B.C.[50] But the received chronology of the earlier
Republic, minute as it looks, probably deserves no more credence than
the equally minute but mainly fictitious dates assigned by the Saxon