ven in the Roman period
Greek physicians and rhetoricians were publicly employed
in the Gallic cantons. But, as may readily be conceived, Hellenism
in southern Gaul acquired through the agency of the Romans the same
character as in Italy; the distinctively Hellenic civilization
gave place to the Latino-Greek mixed culture, which soon made
proselytes here in great numbers. The "Gauls in the breeches,"
as the inhabitants of southern Gaul were called by way of contrast
to the "Gauls in the toga" of northern Italy, were not indeed
like the latter already completely Romanized, but they were even now
very perceptibly distinguished from the "longhaired Gauls"
of the northern regions still unsubdued. The semiculture becoming
naturalized among them furnished, doubtless, materials enough
for ridicule of their barbarous Latin, and people did not fail
to suggest to any one suspected of Celtic descent his "relationship
with the breeches"; but this bad Latin was yet sufficient
to enable even the remote Allobroges to transact business
with the Roman authorities, and even to give testimony in the Roman
courts without an interpreter.

While the Celtic and Ligurian population of these regions
was thus in the course of losing its nationality, and was languishing
and pining withal under a political and economic oppression,
the intolerable nature of which is sufficiently attested by their
hopeless insurrections, the decline of the native population here
went hand in hand with the naturalizing of the same higher culture
which we find at this period in Italy. Aquae Sextiae and still
more Narbo were considerable townships, which might probably be
named by the side of Beneventum and Capua; and Massilia, the best
organized, most free, most capable of self-defence, and most
powerful of all the Greek cities dependent on Rome, under its
rigorous aristocratic government to which the Roman conservatives
probably pointed as the model of a good urban constitution,
in possession of an important territory which had been considerably
enlarged by the Romans and of an extensive trade, stood by the side
of those Latin towns as Rhegium and Neapolis stood in Italy
by the side of Beneventum and Capua.

Free Gaul

Matters wore a different aspect, when one crossed the Roman frontier.
The great Celtic nation, which in the southern districts already
began to be crushed by the Italian immigration, still moved
to the north of the Cevennes in its time-hallow