When the weather permitted, Petronius or his colleagues liked to hear a case in the open air, from a tribune in the forum. But this was impossible to‐day, in the howling wind and lashing rain. The court itself was comparatively deserted. A very few had assembled to hear the trials. None who had a warmed home that day left it uncalled for. Some market women set their baskets in the doorway and stepped inside, but it was rather because they were wet and out of breath than because they were interested in the proceedings. Beside the magistrate sat the chief _pontifex_ who was also Augustal _flamen_. Of _pontifices_ there were three in the city, but one of these was a woman, the priestess of Nemausus. Throughout the south of Gaul the worship of Augustus had become predominant, and had displaced most of the ancestral cults. The temples dedicated to Augustus exceeded in richness all others, and were crowded when the rest were deserted. Jupiter was only not forgotten because he had borrowed some of the attributes of the Gallic solar deity, and he flourished the golden wheel in one hand and brandished the lightnings in the other. Juno had lent her name to a whole series of familiar spirits of the mountains and of the household, closely allied to the _Proxumes_, a set of domestic Brownies or Kobolds, who were chiefly adored and propitiated by the women, and who had no other temple than the hearth. At Tarasconum, the Phœnician goddess Britomartis reigned supreme, and her worship was stimulated by a grand annual procession and dramatic representation of her conquest over a dragon. At Nemausus the corresponding god of war was called Mars Britovius. But the Volcæ Arecomici were a peaceably‐disposed people, and paid little devotion to the god of battles. The cult of the founder Nemausus did not flag, but that of Augustus was in the ascendant. All the freedmen were united in one great sodality under his invocation, and this guild represented an important political factor in the land. It had its religious officers, its _flamines_ and _seviri_, attended by lictors, and the latter had charge of all the altars at the crossroads, and sat next to the civic functionaries in the courts, at banquets, in the theater. Rich citizens bequeathed large sums to the town and to the sodalities to be expended in public feasts, in largesses, and in gladiatorial shows. The charge of these bequests, as also their distribution, was in the hands of the _flamines_ and _seviri_. The priesthood was, therefore, provided with the most powerful of all means for gaining and moving the multitude, which desired nothing better than bread and games.