Britain, which was invaded and made a province in the reign of Claudius, was never so fully Romanised as other provinces, partly owing to the wild and stubborn nature of its inhabitants; but even in our midst the Roman has left obvious traces of his belief in town life. London was a trading centre before the coming of the Romans, and they maintained it as such; but nearly all their other towns had a more directly military origin and object. The oldest of them is Colchester, a military colony, which still has its Roman walls. Then came St. Albans (Verulamium), Gloucester, Chester, Lincoln and York, strategical points of importance, where populous cities still stand. In a few cases towns have disappeared, and have only been recovered by excavation, _e.g._ Calleva (Silchester, near Basingstoke), the town-centre of the Atrebates; but many of our country towns, besides those just mentioned, still stand on ancient Roman sites, and even without much excavation have yielded traces of their Roman inhabitants. One, and one only, Dorchester, still boasts of a complete little amphitheatre, which stands just outside the town between the Great Western and South Western railways, and has been used by Mr. Thomas Hardy for a scene in one of his novels. All our towns and villages of which the names contain the word _chester_ or _cester_ are Roman in origin, though they may not have been large cities like Gloucester (Glevum); for _chester_ is only our English form of _castra_, the Latin for a military encampment. If it is now quite clear that the town is the unit of civilisation in the Empire, what was the social and political life of the town? Of this we know now much more than we used to do, for it is mirrored in the many thousands of inscriptions from every Roman province, which have now at last been collected and correctly published under the direction of the famous Theodor Mommsen, whose name cannot be omitted entirely, even in such an unpretending book about Rome as this. In records on stone there is, indeed, something lacking that can only be supplied by literature, which reports more elaborately and earnestly the thoughts and feelings of men; and in the Empire, apart from Italy and Rome, there is but little literature to help us out. But the inscriptions supply us with the necessary facts.