116 ROMAN WAREHAM AND THE CLAUDIAN INVASION. 



the original garrison, and succeeded in tracing its entire lines, 

 which the Ordnance surveyors have since laid down on our city 

 map, and that within the past three years we have been further 

 able to identify the subordinate lanes and alleys of the camp and 

 to recover some of the original measurements of width, &c., with 

 the net result that at this moment in the city that was imagined to 

 have only the tail of its name to its credit as a Eoman town we find 

 a smaller amount of alteration since the year 43 of the Christian era 

 than in any other town in Britain, or, I believe, in Europe. We 

 have, inside the Roman boundary, one new street (the "Commercial- 

 road "), but with that exception every street and lane we can set 

 foot on can be traced in the plan of a Roman camp. This will be 

 more readily understood by a reference to the little map of 

 Gloucester annexed, and comparing it with the plan in Viollet de 

 Due's lectures on Architecture, of the Castra Pretoriana, at Rome. 

 This plan is purely a theoretical one ; but it was the theory of a 

 man who knew perfectly what he was about ; and the way in which 

 it answers in minute details to the lines of our existing town is the 

 best proof of its soundness. This Pretorian Camp was begun, it 

 will be remembered, by Tiberius, and finished by Claudius within a 

 few years of the invasion of Britain ; so that the arrangements in 

 both the Pretorian and earliest Roman camps in Britain belong to 

 the same epoch. When we speak of a camp as Roman it must not 

 be forgotten that Roman camps which belong to late periods are not 

 of the same form as the earlier ones ; and the same may be said 

 of Roman roads. The popular idea is that these were straight ; and 

 for a long time the main roads were made in very straight lines ; 

 but Camden reminds us that in the time of Trajan this system 

 began to be modified, and the Roman engineers made curves 

 instead of straight lines where better gradients could be obtained by 

 doing so. The original city of Rome was a square camp Rome 

 Quadrata. At the period of the invasion of Britain the square 

 camp had become a little, but only a little, elongated. In all its 

 main features, however, it was like that of Polybius ; but if we 

 come to the period of the Constantines this no longer holds good. 



