pears as a 'municipium'; of its history
from that date till its destruction (A.D. 79) we know next to nothing.
But excavations, commenced in the eighteenth century and now long
suspended, have thrown light on its ground-plan.[83] This was a
rectangular pattern of oblong house-blocks, measuring 54 x 89 yds., or
in some cases a little more, and divided by streets varying from 15 to
30 ft. in width which ran at right angles or parallel to one another.
Only a part of the town has been as yet unearthed. In that a broad
colonnaded main street ran from north-west to south-east; on the
north-east side of this street stood a row of house-blocks with a
structure taken to be a Basilica, and on the south-west of it were ten
house-blocks, one of which includes some public baths. At the north
end of this area are a theatre and temple, at the south end two large
structures which have been called temples but are more like large
private houses; on the east (according to the eighteenth-century
searchers) are graves.

[83] M. Ruggiero, _Scavi di Ercolano_ (Naples, 1885), plates ii
and xii; Beloch. _Campanien_, pp. 215 foll.; Nissen, _Ital.
Landeskunde_, ii. 759; Waldstein and Shoobridge, _Herculaneum_
(London, 1908), pp. 60 foil.; E.R. Barker, _Buried Herculaneum_
(1908); Gall in Pauly-Wissowa, viii. (1912) 532-48.

[Illustration: FIG. 19. HERCULANEUM]

How much of the town has been uncovered, how much still lies hidden
beneath the lava which overflowed it in A.D. 79, is disputed. Of its
town-walls and gates no trace has yet been found. But nearly all its
public buildings seem to be known; the graves on the east side, if
correctly mapped by their discoverers and if coeval with the streets
and houses, leave no room for further 'insulae' in that direction,
while the great country-house called the 'Casa dei Papiri' plainly
stood outside the town on the north-west. From these facts one modern
writer has calculated that Herculaneum was less than a quarter of a
mile long, less than 350 yds. broad, and less than 26 acres in
extent--in short, not a sixth part of Pompeii. These measures are
probably too small. The 'Basilica' on the north side of the main
street cannot have stood on the extreme edge of the town. There must
have been not three but four rows of house-blocks from south-west to
north-east; the graves once noted in this quarter must be older than
our Herculaneum or otherwise unconnected with it. The whole town mus