Passing westwards, and leaving out of account the many cities of Egypt, we shall find that what has been so far said holds good of the Roman province of Africa. This province eventually became one of the most highly cultured as well as populous, mainly owing to its numerous towns. Of many of these the remains still astonish the traveller. A photograph lies before me of one of them which still stands almost in the desert, silent and abandoned, with temples, streets, and all the belongings of a great city as perfect as at the excavated Pompeii, which was overwhelmed in this period by the great eruption of Vesuvius. An inscription tells us that Thamugadi was founded in the year A.D. 100, and built with the help of a legion of Roman soldiers to guard civilisation against the marauders of the desert. Another of these towns is a good example of the way in which the army contributed to the policy of creating town-centres; Lambæsis, now called Djebel-Aures, was the permanent station of a military force, round which there grew up a civil population of traders and camp-followers. Great roads, here as everywhere in the Empire, connected these towns with each other and with the capital of the province, in this case Carthage. If we cross the sea from Africa to Gaul or Spain we shall find the same process going on. Spain we must pass by; but in Gaul we land at the ancient Greek city of Massilia, which, as Marseilles, is still the great port of southern France. A little to the north, Nismes (Nemausus) was formed into a city by Augustus out of a rural population; its vast Roman amphitheatre and an exquisitely beautiful temple belong to the second century, and still stand in the middle of the modern city. Lyons was also founded by Augustus, as we saw in the last chapter, with a special purpose. Farther north the cities on the great roads were gradually formed, out of tribal populations living in villages, and many of them still bear the names of those tribes: Paris is the town-centre of the Parisii, Rheims of the Remisii, Soissons of the Suessiones, Trier of the Treveri. This last city, on the Moselle, now a German one, can boast of more imposing Roman work than any north of Italy, and is within comparatively easy reach of visitors from our shores.