His successor, Claudius, brother of the great Germanicus, and married to his own niece, the second Agrippina, was, as has been already stated, born at Lyons, at the very moment when his father, Drusus, was celebrating there the erection of an altar to Augustus. During his whole reign he showed to the city of his birth the most lively good-will, and the constant aim as well as principal result of this good-will was to render the city of Lyons more and more Roman by effacing all Gallic characteristics and memories. She was endowed with Roman rights, monuments, and names, the most important or the most ostentatious; she became the colony supereminently, the great municipal town of the Gauls, the Claudian town; but she lost what had remained of her old municipal government, that is of her administrative and commercial independence. Nor was she the only one in Gaul to experience the good-will of Claudius. This emperor, the mark of scorn from his infancy, whom his mother, Antonia, called “a shadow of a man, an unfinished sketch of nature’s drawing,” and of whom his grand-uncle, Augustus, used to say, “We shall be forever in doubt, without any certainty of knowing whether he be or be not equal to public duties,” Claudius, the most feeble indeed of the Caesars, in body, mind, and character, was nevertheless he who had intermittent glimpses of the most elevated ideas and the most righteous sentiments, and who strove the most sincerely to make them take the form of deeds. He undertook to assure to all free men of “long-haired” Gaul the same Roman privileges that were enjoyed by the inhabitants of Lyons; and amongst others, that of entering the senate of Rome and holding the great public offices. He made a formal proposal to that effect to the senate, and succeeded, not without difficulty, in getting it adopted. The speech that he delivered on this occasion has been to a great extent preserved to us, not only in the summary given by Tacitus, but also in an inscription on a bronze tablet, which split into many fragments at the time of the destruction of the building in which it was placed. The two principal fragments were discovered at Lyons, in 1528, and they are now deposited in the Museum of that city. They fully confirm the most equitable, and, it may be readily allowed, the most liberal act of policy that emanated from the earlier Roman emperors. “Claudius had taken it into his head,” says Seneca, “to see all Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards, and Britons clad in the toga.” But at the same time he took great care to spread everywhere the Latin tongue, and to make it take the place of the different national idioms. A Roman citizen, originally of Asia Minor, and sent on a deputation to Rome by his compatriots, could not answer in Latin the emperor’s questions. Claudius took away his privileges, saying, “He is no Roman citizen who is ignorant of the language of Rome.”