the city of Lyons more and more Roman by effacing all Gallic
characteristics and memories. She was endowed with Roman rights,
monuments, and names, the most important or the most ostentatious; she
became the colony supereminently, the great municipal town of the Gauls,
the Claudian town; but she lost what had remained of her old municipal
government, that is of her administrative and commercial independence.
Nor was she the only one in Gaul to experience the good-will of Claudius.
This emperor, the mark of scorn from his infancy, whom his mother,
Antonia, called "a shadow of a man, an unfinished sketch of nature's
drawing," and of whom his grand-uncle, Augustus, used to say, "We shall
be forever in doubt, without any certainty of knowing whether he be or be
not equal to public duties," Claudius, the most feeble indeed of the
Caesars, in body, mind, and character, was nevertheless he who had
intermittent glimpses of the most elevated ideas and the most righteous
sentiments, and who strove the most sincerely to make them take the form
of deeds. He undertook to assure to all free men of "long-haired" Gaul
the same Roman privileges that were enjoyed by the inhabitants of Lyons;
and amongst others, that of entering the senate of Rome and holding the
great public offices. He made a formal proposal to that effect to the
senate, and succeeded, not without difficulty, in getting it adopted.
The speech that he delivered on this occasion has been to a great extent
preserved to us, not only in the summary given by Tacitus, but also in an
inscription on a bronze tablet, which split into many fragments at the
time of the destruction of the building in which it was placed. The two
principal fragments were discovered at Lyons, in 1528, and they are now
deposited in the Museum of that city. They fully confirm the most
equitable, and, it may be readily allowed, the most liberal act of policy
that emanated from the earlier Roman emperors. "Claudius had taken it
into his head," says Seneca, "to see all Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards, and
Britons clad in the toga." But at the same time he took great care to
spread everywhere the Latin tongue, and to make it take the place of the
different national idioms. A Roman citizen, originally of Asia Minor,
and sent on a deputation to Rome by his compatriots, could not answer in
Latin the emperor's questions. Claudius took away his privileges,
saying, "He is no Roman citizen who is ignorant of the l