‘Thou, O mightiest of emperors, thou, I proclaim, hast rekindled the dead fires of literature; thou hast not only freed philosophy from prosecution, suspected as she was until recently, but hast clothed her in purple and bound on her head gold and gems, and seated her on a regal throne.’[8] If the subjugation of the Franks thus supplies a sort of starting-point, their rise under Chlodowig gives us a terminus. The Roman connexion with Gaul officially ceased when Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476, and Gaul was no longer Roman when Euric captured Arles and Marseilles in 480. But the culmination of Germanic influence in Gaul was the coming of the Franks in 486, when Chlodowig drove Syagrius, ‘the last of the Romans’,[9] from his kingdom of Soissons and moved southward. The Roman schools, which had flourished under Theodoric of Toulouse, disappeared when the Franks came.[10] Not that the Franks swamped the Gallo-Romans or proved the predominant element. Their invasion was in some ways like the Norman invasion of England:[11] the conqueror was captured by the conquered, and Gallo-Roman influence, especially in education, prevailed. Yet the fact remains that the Frankish invasion brought factors to bear on Gaul which modified its national life and coloured its civilization more deeply than had previously been the case, and that it represents the high-water mark of the Germanic tide which had been steadily rising during the two previous centuries. 2. GREEK INFLUENCE Nothing struck the imagination of ancient writers on early Gallic culture more than the part played by Massilia. Daughter of the Greeks, and friend of the Romans long before Gaul became part of the Empire, she stood forth as a light of civilization in the midst of barbaric darkness. With such a tradition and such a friendship it is no wonder that we find so much said in her praise. Ammianus,[12] following the Greek Timagenes, gives the traditional account of the coming of the Phocaeans to Massilia in the sixth century B.C. Whether they really fled from the persecution of the Persian Harpalus—a motive unknown to Herodotus—or whether, as Athenaeus quoting Aristotle says, their object was merely trade,[13] need not be discussed here. Nor need we go into the confusion in ancient writers between Phocaea and Phocis[14] in regard to the origin of Massilia; the point is that it was of Greek origin, as all the authorities agree.[15] From Greece culture came to Gaul, and once more (as Norden remarks in another connexion) ‘it is the East that gives and the West that receives’.