Augustus must have extended the Roman mile formally to Gaul and placed the itineraries and the imperial highways on that footing, but must have in reality left to the country the old road-measurement; and so it may have happened that the later administration found it less inconvenient to acquiesce in the double unit for postal traffic[54] than to continue to make use of a road-measure practically unknown in the country. [Sidenote: Religion of the country.] Of far greater significance is the attitude of the Roman government to the religion of the country; in this beyond doubt the Gallic nationality found its most solid support. Even in the south province the worship of non-Roman deities must have held its ground long, much longer than, for example, in Andalusia. The great commercial town of Arelate, indeed, has no other dedications to show than to gods worshipped also in Italy; but in Fréjus, Aix, Nîmes, and the whole coast region generally, the old Celtic divinities were in the imperial epoch not much less worshipped than in the interior of Gaul. In the Iberian part of Aquitania also we meet numerous traces of the indigenous worship altogether different from the Celtic. All the images of gods, however, that have come to light in the south of Gaul bear a stamp deviating less from the usual type than the monuments of the north; and, above all, it was easier to manage matters with the national gods than with the national priesthood, which meets us only in imperial Gaul and in the British Islands,--the Druids (iv. 236) {iv. 225.}. It would be vain labour to seek to give any conception of the internal character of the Druidic doctrine, strangely composed of speculation and imagination; only some examples may be allowed to illustrate its singular and fearful nature. The power of speech was symbolically represented in a bald-headed, wrinkled, sunburnt old man, who carries club and bow, and from whose perforated tongue fine golden chains run to the ears of the man that follows him--betokening the flying arrows and the crushing blows of the old man mighty in speech, to whom the hearts of the multitude willingly listen. This was the Ogmius of the Celts; to the Greeks he appeared as a Charon dressed up as Herakles. An altar found in Paris shows us three images of the gods with annexed inscription; in the middle Jovis, on his left Vulcan, on his right Esus "the horrid with his cruel altars," as a Roman poet terms him, and yet a god of commerce and of peaceful dealing;[55] he is girded for labour like Vulcan, and, as the latter carries hammer and tongs, so he hews a willow tree with the axe. A frequently recurring deity, probably named Cernunnos, is represented cowering with crossed legs; on its head it bears a stag's antlers, on which hangs a neck chain, and holds in its lap a money-bag; before it stand cattle and goats--apparently, as if it were meant to express the ground as the source of riches. The enormous difference of this Celtic Olympus--void