When in A.D. 705 (as it seems) the town of Chersonnesus in the Crimea
was rebuilt after a total destruction, it was rebuilt on a symmetrical
plan of oblong 'insulae' (25-30 by 60-70 yds. area). Its streets were
mean and narrow. But their plan at least was apparently more regular
than that of their predecessors.[114]

[114] Minns, _Greeks and Scythians_, pp. 493, 508, and references
there given.

CHAPTER X

ROMAN BUILDING-LAWS

Archaeology tells us that the western half of the Roman Empire and
many districts in its eastern half used a definite town-plan which may
be named, for brevity, the chess-board pattern. It remains to ask
whether literature, or at least legal literature, provides any basis
of theory or any ratification of the actual system which archaeology
reveals. Of augural lore we have indeed enough and to spare. We know
that the _decumanus_ and the _cardo_, the two main lines of the Roman
land-survey and probably also the two main streets of the Roman
town-plan,[115] were laid out under definite augural and
semi-religious provision. We should expect to find more. A system of
town-planning that is so distinctive and so widely used might
reasonably have created a series of building-laws sanctioning or
modifying it. This did not occur. Neither the lawyers nor even the
land-surveyors, the so-called Gromatici, tell us of any legal rules
relative to town-planning as distinct from surveying in general. The
surveyors, in particular, are much more concerned with the soil of the
province and its 'limitation' and 'centuriation', than with the
arrangements of any individual town, and, whatever their value for
extramural boundaries,[116] throw no light on streets and 'insulae'.

[115] See p. 73.

[116] Schulten, _Hermes_, 1898, p. 534.

The nearest approach to building-laws which occurs is a clause which
seems to be a standing provision in many municipal charters and
similar documents from the age of Cicero onwards, to the effect that
no man might destroy, unroof, or dismantle an urban building unless he
was ready to replace it by a building at least as good or had received
special permission from his local town council. The earliest example
of this provision occurs in the charter of the municipality of
Tarentum, which was drawn up in the time of Cicero.[117] It is
repeated in practically the same words in the charter of the 'colonia
Genetiva' in southern Spain, which was founded in 44 B.C