period the canton of the Bituriges had lost its
real hegemony and retained merely an honorary presidency, and the
actually leading canton in the region from the Pyrenees to the Rhine
and from the Mediterranean to the Western Ocean was that of the
Arverni;(2) so that the statement seems not quite an exaggeration,
that it could bring into the field as many as 180,000 men. With
them the Haedui (about Autun) carried on an unequal rivalry for the
hegemony; while in north-eastern Gaul the kings of the Suessiones
(about Soissons) united under their protectorate the league of the
Belgic tribes extending as far as Britain. Greek travellers of
that period had much to tell of the magnificent state maintained by
Luerius, king of the Arvernians--how, surrounded by his brilliant train
of clansmen, his huntsmen with their pack of hounds in leash and his
band of wandering minstrels, he travelled in a silver-mounted chariot
through the towns of his kingdom, scattering the gold with a full
hand among the multitude, and gladdening above all the heart of the
minstrel with the glittering shower. The descriptions of the open
table which he kept in an enclosure of 1500 double paces square, and
to which every one who came in the way was invited, vividly remind us
of the marriage table of Camacho. In fact, the numerous Arvernian
gold coins of this period still extant show that the canton of the
Arvernians had attained to extraordinary wealth and a comparatively
high standard of civilization.

War with Allobroges and Arverni

The attack of Flaccus, however, fell in the first instance not on
the Arverni, but on the smaller tribes in the district between the Alps
and the Rhone, where the original Ligurian inhabitants had become mixed
with subsequent arrivals of Celtic bands, and there had arisen a
Celto-Ligurian population that may in this respect be compared to the
Celtiberian. He fought (629, 630) with success against the Salyes
or Salluvii in the region of Aix and in the valley of the Durance,
and against their northern neighbours the Vocontii (in the departments
of Vaucluse and Drome); and so did his successor Gaius Sextius Calvinus
(631, 632) against the Allobroges, a powerful Celtic clan in the rich
valley of the Isere, which had come at the request of the fugitive
king of the Salyes, Tutomotulus, to help him to reconquer his land, but
was defeated in the district of Aix. When the Allobroges nevertheless
refused to surrender the king