ROMAN ARCHITECTURE—BAGGALLAY. 653 
behind his times and grossly ignorant of what was going on around 
him. Unless we believe this of Vitruvius it is impossible to suppose 
that walls faced with burnt brick were common, if they existed at all, 
in the earlier part of the reign of Augustus. It is true that in a pas- 
sage ¢ in which he is supposed to be quoting a law then just promul- 
gated he mentions burnt brick as one of the materials allowed to be 
used for ground-floor walls in Rome. (It is a passage that reads 
rather like a later insertion, but that need not be insisted upon.) But 
he nowhere mentions the triangular bricks used in all known remains 
of Roman brick facing, and in the long chapter in which he describes 
minutely the various kinds of walls he not only does not mention 
brick facing at all, but says that opus reticulatum—a facing of smal! 
blocks of stone—was what everyone was then using—‘ quo nune 
omnes utuntur.” ” 
There is one piece of Roman brickwork, the basilica at Pompeii, 
which Overbeck in his great work on the town put down to 93 B. C.° 
and which others, on the strength of a date said to be scratched on 
the building, have attributed to the consulship of Lepidus and Catu- 
lus—that is, 76 B. C. But such dates are most improbable. The 
work is beautifully executed with molded bricks (pl. 1, fig. 2), in a style 
which one can not suppose to have been possible at such dates, but 
would be quite natural if the basilica had been rebuilt after the earth- 
quake of A. D. 68, which, according to the contemporary evidence of 
Seneca, threw down a great part of the town.? 
Without admitting that because one doubts whether the Romans 
used brick-faced concrete quite so early as has been supposed, one is 
therefore obliged to point out when they did begin to use it, it may 
be suggested that the upper part of the ruins of Caligula’s palace, and 
the original part of the wall of the pretorian camp in Rome, which 
Doctor Middleton succeeded in distinguishing from later additions, 
are the earliest works of the kind of which considerable remains exist. 
From Middleton’s description ¢ the latter wall must have been a very 
fine piece of work—better even than that executed under the Flavian 
emperors, and he attributed it to the time of Tiberius, when the 
camp was first established by Sejanus in A. D. 23. Dean Merivale 
says the wall was not built until two centuries later, but he was prob- 
ably thinking of the work of Aurelian, who, as Doctor Middleton 
shows, merely raised it. The latter’s supposition that the wall was 
built at once upon the establishment of the camp is not, however, 
@Vit., II, 8,17. The text by Rose and Miiller-Striibing, Leipsic, 1877, is used 
throughout. 
Davart PTS Shai, 
© Overbeck, Pomp., 121. 
@ Sen. Quaest. Nat., VI, 1. See also Tac. Annales, XV, 22 and 34. 
€ Remains, II, 233 et seq. 
