But the government did not confine itself to leaving with the Celts their cantonal organisation; it left, or rather gave, to them also a national constitution, so far as such a constitution was compatible with Roman supremacy. As on the Hellenic nation, so Augustus conferred on the Gallic an organised collective representation, such as they in the epoch of freedom and of disorganisation had striven after, but had never attained. Under the hill crowned by the capital of Gaul, where the Saone mingles its waters with those of the Rhone, on the 1st August of the year 742 {12.}, the imperial prince Drusus, as representative of the government in Gaul, consecrated to Roma and to the Genius of the ruler the altar, at which thenceforth every year on this day the festival of these gods was to be celebrated by the joint action of the Gauls. The representatives of all the cantons chose from their midst year by year the "priest of the three Gauls," who on the emperor's day presented sacrifice to the emperor and conducted the festal games in connection with it. This representative council had not only a power of administering its own property by means of officials, who belonged to the chief circles of the provincial nobility, but also a certain share in the general affairs of the country. Of its immediate interference in politics there is, it is true, no other trace than that, in the serious crisis of the year 70, the diet of the three Gauls dissuaded the Treveri from rising against Rome; but it had and used the right of bringing complaints as to the imperial and domestic officials acting in Gaul; and it co-operated, moreover, if not in the imposition, at any rate in the apportionment of the taxes,[46] especially seeing that these were laid on not according to the several provinces but for Gaul in general. The imperial government certainly called into existence similar institutions in all the provinces, and not merely introduced in each of them the centralisation of sacred rites, but also--what the republic had not done--conferred on each one an organ for bringing requests and complaints before the government. Yet Gaul had in this respect, as compared with all other parts of the empire, at least a privilege _de facto_, as indeed this institution is here alone found fully developed.[47] For one thing, the united diet of the three provinces necessarily had a more independent position in presence of the legates and procurators of each of them, than, for example, the diet of Thessalonica in presence of the governor of Macedonia. But then, in the case of institutions of this nature, far less depends on the measure of the rights conferred than on the weight of the bodies therein represented; and the strength of the individual Gallic communities was transferred to the diet of Lyons, just as the weakness of the individual Hellenic communities to that of Argos. In the development of Gaul under the emperors the diet of Lyons to all