Comptes rendus_, 1904, p. 497; Cagnat, _Annee Epigr._, 1905, 12;
and especially Schulten, _Hermes_, 1906, 1; a convenient English
account is given by H.S. Jones, _Companion to Roman Hist._, p.
22. It has been suggested by Schulten that the blocks were at
first divided into plots of 35 ft. frontage, and that the
boundaries had become changed in the ordinary course of things
before the survey was made. But this seems to carry conjecture
rather far.

Here, in short, is the record of an oblong 'insula' in the Roman town
of Orange. It is doubtless part of a longer record, a register of
house-property in the whole town. Orange, Colonia Iulia Secundanorum
Arausio, was a 'colonia' founded about 45 B.C. with discharged
soldiers of Caesar's Second Legion. Possibly the register was drawn up
at this date; more probably it is rather later and may be connected
with a _census_ of Gaul begun about 27 B.C. Certainly it was preserved
with much care, as if one of the 'muniments' of the citizens. The spot
where it was dug up is in the heart of the ancient as well as of the
modern town, close to the probable site of the Forum, and the
inscription may have been fastened up in all its length on the walls
of some public building. If, as is likely, the town owned the soil of
the town, the connexion of the inscription with the Forum becomes even
clearer. In any case, the town was plainly laid out in a rectangular
street-plan. To-day its lanes are as tortuous as those of any other
Provencal town.[94] A strange chance reveals what it and many other of
these towns must once have been.

[94] It has been said to show marks of streets laid out
rectangularly, but neither the look of the town itself nor the
plans of it seem to me to confirm this idea; compare Lentheric,
_Le Rhone_, ii. 110.

[Illustration: FIG. 22. AFTER CAGNAT AND BALLU (1911).
(The six 'insulae' marked A are shown in detail in fig. 23. Unshaded
'insulae' are as yet unexcavated.)]

_Timgad_ (figs. 22, 23).

From this piece of half-literary evidence we pass to purely
archaeological remains, and first to the province of Numidia in Roman
Africa and to the town of Timgad. The town of Thamugadi, now Timgad,
lay on the northern skirts of Mount Aures, halfway between Constantine
and Biskra and about a hundred miles from the Mediterranean coast.
Here the emperor Trajan founded in A.D. 100 a 'colonia' on ground then
wholly uninhabited, and