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Updated: June 4, 2025
The centurions and other officers may have formed the first municipal aristocracy of Timgad, as retired officers did in many Roman towns, but there can have been no definite element of poor among the common soldiers. Ballu detects a 'quartier industriel' in the outer town, but the evidence does not seem to warrant so grand a term.
Indeed, I believed him, for it was of a large and terrible sort, as though it had roamed the hills and towered above all goats and sheep. I thought of lions, but remembered that their value would forbid their being killed for the table. I again attempted the meal, and he again began: "Timgad is a place " At this moment a god inspired me, and I shouted, "Camel!" He did not turn a hair.
But she could not sit still, and she took it down with her into the garden. There she paced up and down, reading it aloud, reciting the strongest passages in it without looking at the words. She nearly knew the whole of it by heart. When the day came on which the Timgad was due she was in a fever of excitement.
The town of Thamugadi, now Timgad, lay on the northern skirts of Mount Aurès, 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 peopled it with time-expired soldiers from the Third Legion which garrisoned the neighbouring fortress of Lambaesis. The town grew.
When its walls were built and its famous north gate, the Porta Nigra, was erected, probably towards the end of the third century, they included a space of 704 acres, twenty-five times as much as the original Timgad, though, it must be added, this area may not have been wholly covered with houses. But it was then an old city. Of this first beginning we possess vestiges which concern us here.
But, after all, perhaps one ought not to wonder too much that material things should thus capriciously vanish. Time, which has secured Timgad so that it looks like an unroofed city of yesterday, has swept and razed Laimboesis. The two towns were neighbours one was taken and the other left and there is no sort of reason any man can give for it.
There was not probably at Aosta, there certainly was not at Timgad, any provision of open squares, of handsome facades, of temples seen down the vista of stately avenues; there were not even private gardens. The one large unroofed space in Timgad was the half-acre shut within the Forum cloister.
"I have prepared you a meal," he went on. Then, after a little hesitation, "It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold." ... He brought me their very rough African wine and a loaf, and sat down opposite me, looking at me fixedly under the candle. Then he said: "To-morrow you will see Timgad, which is the most wonderful town in the world."
Anzeiger, 1911, p. 270, fig. 17. The plan has been thought to imply 'insulae' twice as large as those of Timgad. To me it suggests nothing so regular.
Others were four or five times as spacious; they were twice or nearly twice as large as mediaeval Oxford, no mean city in thirteenth-century England. Most of them, doubtless, grew beyond their first limits; a few spread as far as a square mile, twice the extent of mediaeval London. Similarly the 'insulae' varied from town to town. In one, Timgad, they were only 70 to 80 ft. square.
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