The glorious climate, akin to that of Italy, the favourable nature of the soil, the large and rich region lying behind so advantageous for commerce with its mercantile routes reaching as far as Britain, the easy intercourse by land and sea with the mother country, rapidly gave to southern Gaul an economic importance for Italy, which much older possessions, such as those in Spain, had not acquired in the course of centuries; and as the Romans who had suffered political shipwreck at this period sought an asylum especially in Massilia, and there found once more Italian culture and Italian luxury, voluntary emigrants from Italy also were attracted more and more to the Rhone and the Garonne.
"The province of Gaul," it was said in a sketch drawn ten years before Caesar's arrival, "is full of merchants; it swarms with Roman burgesses.

No native of Gaul transacts a piece of business without the intervention of a Roman; every penny, that passes from one hand to another in Gaul, goes through the account books of the Roman burgesses." From the same description it appears that in addition to the colonists of Narbo there were Romans cultivating land and rearing cattle, resident in great numbers in Gaul; as to which, however, it must not be overlooked that most of the provincial land possessed by Romans, just like the greater part of the English possessions in the earliest times in America, was in the hands of the high nobility living in Italy, and those farmers and graziers consisted for the most part of their stewards--slaves or freedmen.
Incipient Romanizing It is easy to understand how under such circumstances civilization and Romanizing rapidly spread among the natives.

These Celts were not fond of agriculture; but their new masters compelled them to exchange the sword for the plough, and it is very credible that the embittered resistance of the Allobroges was provoked in part by some such injunctions.

In earlier times Hellenism had also to a certain degree dominated those regions; the elements of a higher culture, the stimulus to the cultivation of the vine and the olive,( 8) to the use of writing( 9) and to the coining of money, came to them from Massilia.

The Hellenic culture was in this case far from being set aside by the Romans; Massilia gained through them more influence than it lost; and even in the Roman period Greek physicians and rhetoricians were publicly employed in the Gallic cantons.