These Alpine wars first assumed a more serious character, when Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, the faithful ally of Gaius Gracchus, took the chief command in this quarter as consul in 629. He was the first to enter on the career of Transalpine conquest. In the much-divided Celtic nation at this period the canton of the Bituriges had lost its real hegemony and retained merely an honorary presidency, and the actually leading canton in the region from the Pyrenees to the Rhine and from the Mediterranean to the Western Ocean was that of the Arverni;(2) so that the statement seems not quite an exaggeration, that it could bring into the field as many as 180,000 men. With them the Haedui (about Autun) carried on an unequal rivalry for the hegemony; while in north-eastern Gaul the kings of the Suessiones (about Soissons) united under their protectorate the league of the Belgic tribes extending as far as Britain. Greek travellers of that period had much to tell of the magnificent state maintained by Luerius, king of the Arvernians--how, surrounded by his brilliant train of clansmen, his huntsmen with their pack of hounds in leash and his band of wandering minstrels, he travelled in a silver-mounted chariot through the towns of his kingdom, scattering the gold with a full hand among the multitude, and gladdening above all the heart of the minstrel with the glittering shower. The descriptions of the open table which he kept in an enclosure of 1500 double paces square, and to which every one who came in the way was invited, vividly remind us of the marriage table of Camacho. In fact, the numerous Arvernian gold coins of this period still extant show that the canton of the Arvernians had attained to extraordinary wealth and a comparatively high standard of civilization. War with Allobroges and Arverni