numerous smaller cantons attached by clientship to a larger one did not in the imperial period become independent, but disappeared.[45] If subsequently the Celtic land appears divided into a moderate number of considerable, and some of them even very large, canton-districts, within which dependent cantons nowhere make their appearance, this arrangement had the way no doubt paved for it by the pre-Roman system of clientship, but was completely carried out only under the Roman reorganisation. [Sidenote: Influence of the cantonal constitution.] This continued subsistence and this enlargement of the cantonal constitution must have been above all influential in determining the further political development of Gaul. While the Tarraconensian province was split up into two hundred and ninety-three independent communities (p. 72), the three Gauls numbered together, as we shall see, not more than sixty-four of them. Their unity and their recollections remained unbroken; the zealous adoration, which throughout the imperial period was paid among the Volcae to the fountain-god Nemausus, shows how even here, in the south of the land and in a canton transformed into a town, there was still a vivid sense of the traditional tie that bound them together. Communities with wide bounds, firmly knit in this way by inward ties, were a power. Such as Caesar found the Gallic communities, with the mass of the people held in entire political as well as economic dependence, and an overpowerful nobility, they substantially remained under Roman rule; exactly as in pre-Roman times the great nobles, with their train of dependents and bondsmen to be counted by thousands, played the part of masters each in his own home, so Tacitus describes the state of things in Tiberius's time among the Treveri. The Roman government gave to the community comprehensive rights, even a certain military power, so that they under certain circumstances were entitled to erect fortresses and keep them garrisoned, as was the case among the Helvetii; the magistrates could call out the militia, and had in that case the rights and the rank of officers. This prerogative was not the same in the hands of the president of a small town of Andalusia, and of the president of a district on the Loire or the Moselle of the size of a small province. The large-hearted policy of Caesar the elder, to whom the outlines of this system must necessarily be traced back, here presents itself in all its grand extent. [Sidenote: Diet of the three Gauls.]