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At Selinus the Italian archaeologists discovered some years ago, in the so-called Acropolis, a town of irregular, rudely pear-shaped outline with a distinct though not yet fully excavated town-plan. Unfortunately, it cannot be dated. Selinus was founded in 648 B.C., was destroyed in 409, then reoccupied and rebuilt, and finally destroyed for ever in 249.
We may accept as certain the statement that Alexandria was laid out with a rectangular town-plan; we cannot safely assume that Mahmud has given a faithful picture of it. Strabo, xvii. 793. D.G. Hogarth, Archaeological Report of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1894-5, p. 28, and Hellenic Journal, xix. 326; F. Noack, Athen. Mitteil. xxv. , pp. 232, 237. Dr.
But there seems to be no evidence for the statement sometimes made, that he had any particular liking for either a circular or a semicircular, fan-shaped town-plan. Three cities are named as laid out by Hippodamus. Aristotle tells us that he planned the Piraeus, the port of Athens, with broad straight streets. He does not add the precise relation of these streets to one another.
Further excavation is, however, needed to confirm this generally accepted interpretation of the place. Nothing has been noted elsewhere in Etruria or its confines to connect the Etruscans with any rectangular form of town-plan.
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, were laid out under definite augural and semi-religious provision. We should expect to find more.
A town-plan, it seems, was binding on the first builders of the 'colonia'. It lost its power within a very few years. It remains to note another example of town-planning in a Roman municipality of the western Empire, which is as important as it is abnormal.
Not all these towns survive to-day; not all of the survivors retain clear traces of their Roman town-plan; in nine cases, at least, the streets seem unmistakably to follow Roman lines. In addition, Verona, Pavia, and Como won municipal status in or before this later date, though when or how they came to be laid out symmetrically is not certain. And there are other less certain examples.
The existence of a town-plan was first noticed by J. de Fontenay, Bulletin monumental, 1852, p. 365, but his map appears to be incorrect and his views generally are based too much on a priori assumptions. It was in its later days a large city, perhaps the largest Roman city in western Europe.
Early forms of it appear in Greece during the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.; the origin of these forms is obscure. But the settlement is very small, covering less than 20 acres; it is not in itself a real town and its plan has not the scheme or symmetry of a town-plan. For that we must turn to western Asia, to Babylonia and Assyria. Here we find clearer evidence.
Another example of an Italian town-plan, from the same date and district as Turin, is supplied by Augusta Praetoria, now Aosta, some fifty miles north of Turin in the Dora Baltea Valley, not far from the foot of Mont Blanc. Aosta was founded by Augustus in 25 B.C. on a hitherto empty spot, to provide homes for time-expired soldiers and to serve as a quasi-fortress in an important Alpine valley.
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