AUTUN.
After H.de Fontenay, 1889.] Autun stands on the site and contains the stately ruins of the Roman Augustodunum, built by Augustus about 12 B.C.He, as it seems, brought down the Gaulish dwellers in the old native hill-fortress of Bibracte, on Mont-Beuvray, and planted them twelve miles away on an unoccupied site beside the river Arroux.

The new town covered an area of something like 490 acres--that is, if the now traceable walls and gates are, as is generally thought, the work of Augustus.

The town within the walls must have been laid out all at once.

Quite a large part of it, perhaps has much as three-quarters, have revealed to the careful inquiries of French archaeologists a regular system of quadrangular street-planning, which may very likely have extended even through the unexplored quarter.

The Roman street which ran through the town from south to north, from the Porte de Rome to the Porte d'Arroux, was fronted by at least thirteen 'insulae', and one of the streets which crossed it at right angles was fronted by eleven such blocks.