For they embody a type of urban life which is distinct from any that occurs in Italy or in the better civilized districts of the Empire, and which illustrates strikingly one stratum of provincial culture.
_Autun_ (fig.

29).
Caesar won northern and central Gaul for the Roman Empire; it fell to Augustus to organize the conquered but as yet unromanized lands.

Among many steps to that end, he seems to have planted new native towns which should take the places of old native tribal capitals and should drive out local Celtic traditions by new Roman municipal interests.
These new towns did not, as a rule, enjoy the full Roman municipal status; northern Gaul was not quite ripe for that.

But they were plainly devised to help Romanization forward, and their object is declared by their half-Roman, half-Celtic names--Augustodunum (now Autun), Caesaromagus (Beauvais), Augusta Suessionum (Soissons), Augusta Treverorum (Trier), and the like.[103] Of two of these, Autun and Trier, we chance to know the town-plans.

The reader will notice a certain similarity between them.
[103] Hirschfeld, _Haeduer und Arverner_ (_Sitzungsber.