ROMAN BUILDING-LAWS Archaeology tells us that the western half of the Roman Empire and many districts in its eastern half used a definite town-plan which may be named, for brevity, the chess-board pattern.

It remains to ask whether literature, or at least legal literature, provides any basis of theory or any ratification of the actual system which archaeology reveals.

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,[115] were laid out under definite augural and semi-religious provision.

We should expect to find more.