Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ROMAN GAUL. Social condition of Gaul on the accession of Clovia—Appollinaris Sidonius—A Gallo.Roman villa—A Visigothic king—A Frack chief—Burgundian society—Saxon pirates. A Survey of the social condition of the flourishing province of Gaul, before the beginning of the barbarian settlements in it, would have revealed the following general characteristics. ' In the cities of the south of Gaul, the refined civilization which the Greeks had planted there still pervaded the language, the dress, the habits of the people. In the north of Gaul the Roman type of civilization had formed its institutions, language, and habits, and had not yet in this northern province deteriorated to such a level of vicious enervation as in Italy itself. Aquitania was specially noted among the Gauls for its high degree of elegant refinement. In the last chapter we have seen how the Bur- gundians obtained settlements in the country east of the Rhone, the Visigoths in Aquitaine and thesouth, and how the Franks gradually spread from the Rhone to the Somme, leaving North-Central Gaul .still under the government of Syagrius. It happens that just at this period of the history—a period otherwise very obscure—we are so fortunate as to have one contemporary writer, who for the period embraced by his history, viz. the period of these barbarian settlements, and for the part of the country over which his personal knowledge extended, viz. the south and west of Gaul, Auvergne and Aquitaine, gives us a series of pictures of society so vivid as to place us in the very presence of the men and events among which he lived. His own personal history may first be sketched, as in itself a valuable illustration of the history of the time. Caius Sollius Appollinaris Sidonius was of one of the greatest of...