in rank and forced, so to say, to become more or less Roman; but they were not banished or in any way proscribed.[1]
To come to the monuments, I may say that they are to be found in the local museums of France, Switzerland, and portions of neighbouring lands formerly or still occupied by the Celts: they are moreover numerous, and the accounts of them are to be sought up and down the voluminous transactions of some scores of provincial societies, whose publications are not always easy to consult. So I find that, in the absence of a complete corpus of the ancient inscriptions of France, I cannot do better than set out from one district, the monuments of which, as far, at least, as concerns the subject of this lecture, have been laid before the public in a manageable form by competent archæologists. The district I have chosen is that which was occupied in Roman times by the Gaulish state of the Allobroges. It lay mostly on the eastern side of the Rhone, stretching from that river to the Alps, and from the Lake of Geneva to the Isère. To this must be added a certain tract on the other bank of the Rhone as also probably belonging to the Allobroges, and covering at least most of the present department of the Rhone.[2] The metropolis of the Allobroges was the city of Vienna, now called Vienne: their country consisted in part of some of the most fertile land in Gaul, and in part of very
- ↑ For the substance of these remarks I am indebted to an excellent article by M. Florian Vallentin, entitled, Les Dieux de la Cité des Allobroges, in the Revue Celtique, Vol. iv. 1—36, to which I shall have frequently to refer in this lecture.
- ↑ Vallentin, ibid. p. 1; see also Desjardins, Géographie historique et administrative de la Gaule romaine, ii. 351.
