But in general no definite laws were framed.  Probably the municipalities were somewhat closely tied in the administration of municipal property and had to refer schemes for the employment even of the smallest bit of vacant space to the ‘patron’ or the curator of the town.  But, apart from the provisions mentioned above, they had no specific rights, that are recorded, against private owners or builders.  It was only once, after Rome itself had been burnt out, that an imperial order condemned landowners who ‘held up’ their ground instead of using it, to forfeit their ownership in favour of any one who offered to build at once.

CHAPTER XI

THE SEQUEL

What was the sequel to this long work of town-planning?  Two facts stand out distinct.  First, the Roman planning helped the towns of the Empire to take definite form, but when the Empire fell, it too met its end.  Only here and there its vestiges lingered on in the streets of scattered cities like things of a former age.  But, secondly, from this death it rose again, first in the thirteenth century, with ever-growing power to set the model for the city life of the modern world.

I. The value of town-planning to Roman civilization was twofold.  It increased the comfort of the common man; it made the towns stronger and more coherent units to resist the barbarian invasions.  When, after 250 years of conflict, the barbarians triumphed, its work was done.  In the next age of ceaseless orderless warfare it was less fit, with its straight broad streets, for defence and for fighting than the chaos of narrow tortuous lanes out of which it had grown and to which it now returned.  The cases are few in which survivals of Roman streets have conditioned the external form of mediaeval or modern towns.  We in England tend perhaps to overrate the likelihood of such survivals.  Our classical education has, until very lately, taught most of us more of ancient than of mediaeval history, and when our antiquaries find towns rectangular in outline and streets that cross in a Carfax, they give them a Roman origin.

Such a tendency is wrong.  Plentiful evidence shows that even in Italy and even in towns where men have dwelt without a break since Roman days, the Roman streets, and with them the Roman town-plans, have far oftener vanished than endured.  Rome herself, the Eternal City, uses hardly one street to-day which was used in the Roman Empire.  Some few Italian towns, described in detail above, have a better claim to be called ‘eternal’; half a dozen in northern Italy retain their ancient streets in singular perfection.  Yet even there cities like Padua and Mantua, Genoa and Pisa, have lost the signs of their older fashion.  So, too, in the provinces.  In the Danubian lands only one town can even be supposed to preserve a few of its Roman streets.  In all the once great cities of that region, Sirmium and