The motive of various military camps may perhaps be found rather in a wish to secure the same area as that of an orthodox rectangle, even though the ground forbade the strict execution of the orthodox figure.

Whatever the reason, the trapezoidal house-blocks of Pompeii exhibit a feature which is not alien to the earlier town-planning of Italy, though it is strange to the cities of Greece.
_Norba_.
Not only do we need to know more of Pompeii itself.

We need evidence also from other Italian towns of similar age.

Here our ignorance is deep.

Only one site which can help has been even tentatively explored.
Norba, which once crowned a spur of the Monti Lepini above the Pontine marshes, was founded as a Roman town, according to the orthodox chronology, in 492 B.C.[50] But the received chronology of the earlier Republic, minute as it looks, probably deserves no more credence than the equally minute but mainly fictitious dates assigned by the Saxon Chronicle to the beginnings of English History.