an Euxenes, had gone to Rome, it was said,
and concluded a treaty with Tarquinius Priscus. She had gone into
mourning when Rome was burned by the Gauls; she had ordered a public levy
to aid towards the ransom of the Capitol. Rome did not dispute these
claims to remembrance. The friendship of Marseilles was of great use to
her. In the whole course of her struggle with Carthage, and but lately,
at the passage of Hannibal through Gaul, Rome had met with the best of
treatment there. She granted the Massilians a place amongst her senators
at the festivals of the Republic, and exemption from all duty in her
ports. Towards the middle of the second century B.C. Marseilles was at
war with certain Gallic tribes, her neighbors, whose territory she
coveted. Two of her colonies, Nice and Antibes, were threatened. She
called on Rome for help. A Roman deputation went to decide the quarrel;
but the Gauls refused to obey its summons, and treated it with insolence.
The deputation returned with an army, succeeded in beating the refractory
tribes, and gave their land to the Massilians. The same thing occurred
repeatedly with the same result. Within the space of thirty years nearly
all the tribes between the Rhone and the Var, in the country which was
afterwards Provence, were subdued and driven back amongst the mountains,
with notice not to approach within a mile of the coast in general, and a
mile and a half of the places of disembarkation. But the Romans did not
stop there. They did not mean to conquer for Marseilles alone. In the
year 123 B.C., at some leagues to the north of the Greek city, near a
little river, then called the Coenus and nowadays the Arc, the consul
C. Sextius Calvinus had noticed, during his campaign, an abundance of
thermal springs, agreeably situated amidst wood-covered hills. There he
constructed an enclosure, aqueducts, baths, houses, a town in fact, which
he called after himself, Aquae Sextice, the modern Aix, the first Roman
establishment in Transalpine Gaul. As in the case of Cisalpine Gaul,
with Roman colonies came Roman intrigue and dissensions got up and
fomented amongst the Gauls. And herein Marseilles was a powerful
seconder; for she kept up communications with all the neighboring tribes,
and fanned the spirit of faction. After his victories, the consul
C. Sextius, seated at his tribunal, was selling his prisoners by auction,
when one of them came up to him and said, "I have always liked and