which soon acquired importance for manufactures and for export; the Menapian hams (from Flanders) and the Atrebatian and Nervian cloth-mantles (near Arras and Tournay) went forth in later times to the whole empire. [Sidenote: Culture of the vine.] Of special interest was the development of the culture of the vine. Neither the climate nor the government was favourable to it. The "Gallic winter" remained long proverbial among the inhabitants of the southern lands; as, indeed, it was on this side that the Roman empire extended farthest towards the north. But narrower limits were drawn for the Gallic cultivation of the vine by Italian commercial competition. Certainly the god Dionysos accomplished his conquest of the world on the whole slowly, and only step by step did the drink prepared from grain give way to the juice of the vine; but it was a result of the prohibitive system that in Gaul beer maintained itself at least in the north as the usual spirituous drink throughout the whole period of the empire; and even the emperor Julian, on his abode in Gaul, came into conflict with this pseudo-Bacchus.[57] The imperial government did not indeed go so far as the republic, which placed under police prohibition the culture of the vine and olive on the south coast of Gaul (iii. 175; ii. 398) {iii. 177; ii. 375.}; but the Italians of their time were withal the true sons of their fathers. The flourishing condition of the two great emporia on the Rhine, Arles and Lyons, depended in no small degree on the market for Italian wine in Gaul; by which fact we may measure what importance the culture of the vine must at that time have had for Italy. If one of the most careful administrators who held the imperial office, Domitian, issued orders that in all the provinces at least the half of the vines should be destroyed[58]--which, it is true, were not so carried out--we may thence infer that the diffusion of the vine-culture was at all events subjected to serious restriction on the part of the government. In the Augustan age it was still unknown in the northern part of the Narbonese province (iv. 227, note) {iv. 217.}, and, though here too it was soon taken up, it yet appears to have remained through centuries restricted to the Narbonensis and southern Aquitania; of Gallic wines the better age knows only the Allobrogian and the Biturigian, according to our way of speaking, the Burgundian and the Bordeaux.[59] It was only when the reins of the empire fell from the hands of the Italians, in the course of the third century, that this was changed, and the emperor Probus (276-282) at length threw the culture of the vine open to the provincials. Probably it was only in consequence of this that the vine gained a firm footing on the Seine as on the Moselle. "I have," writes the emperor Julian, "spent a winter" (it was the winter of 357-358) "in dear Lutetia, for so the Gauls term the little town of the Parisii, a small island lying in the river and walled all round.