THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

IV. The Revolution

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter V - The Peoples of the North

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Page 9

Roman Settlements in the Region of the Rhone

As usual, the formation of new fortresses was combined with the construction of roads. In the eastern portion the Romans chose the spot where Gaius Sextius had defeated the Celts, and where the pleasantness and fertility of the region as well as the numerous hot and cold springs invited them to settlement; a Roman township sprang up there--the "baths of Sextius," Aquae Sextiae (Aix).

To the west of the Rhone the Romans settled in Narbo, an ancient Celtic town on the navigable river Atax (Aude) at a small distance from the sea, which is already mentioned by Hecataeus, and which even before its occupation by the Romans vied with Massilia as a place of stirring commerce, and as sharing the trade in British tin. Aquae did not obtain civic rights, but remained a standing camp;(4) whereas Narbo, although in like manner founded mainly as a watch and outpost against the Celts, became as "Mars' town," a Roman burgess-colony and the usual seat of the governor of the new Transalpine Celtic province or, as it was more frequently called, the province of Narbo.

4. Aquae was not a colony, as Livy says (Ep. 61), but a -castellum- (Strabo, iv. 180; Velleius, i. 15; Madvig, Opusc. i. 303). The same holds true of Italica (p. 214), and of many other places--Vindonissa, for instance, never was in law anything else than a Celtic village, but was withal a fortified Roman camp, and a township of very considerable importance.

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