534.
The nearest approach to building-laws which occurs is a clause which seems to be a standing provision in many municipal charters and similar documents from the age of Cicero onwards, to the effect that no man might destroy, unroof, or dismantle an urban building unless he was ready to replace it by a building at least as good or had received special permission from his local town council.

The earliest example of this provision occurs in the charter of the municipality of Tarentum, which was drawn up in the time of Cicero.[117] It is repeated in practically the same words in the charter of the 'colonia Genetiva' in southern Spain, which was founded in 44 B.C.; it recurs in the charter granted to the municipality of Malaga, also in southern Spain, about A.D.

82.[118] Somewhat similar prohibitions of the removal of even old and worthless houses without special leave are implied in decrees of the Roman Senate passed in A.D.44 and A.D.

56, though these seem really to relate to rural rather than to urban buildings and were perhaps more agrarian than municipal in their object.[119] Hadrian, in a dispatch written in A.D.127 to an eastern town which had lately obtained something like municipal status, includes a provision that a house in the town belonging to one Claudius Socrates must either be repaired by him or handed over to some other citizen.[120] Similar legislation occurs in A.D.224 and in the time of Diocletian and later.[121] [117] Mommsen, _Eph.

Epigr._ ix, p.