The water is there excellent and pure to look at and to drink; the inhabitants have a pretty mild winter, and good wine is grown among them; in fact, some even rear figs, covering them up in winter with wheaten straw as with a cloth." And not much later the poet of Bordeaux, in his pleasing description of the Moselle, depicts the vineyards as bordering that river on both banks, "just as my own vines wreathe for me the yellow Garonne." [Sidenote: Network of highways.] The internal intercourse, as well as that with the neighbouring lands, especially with Italy, must have been very active, and the network of roads must have been much developed and fostered. The great imperial highway from Rome to the mouth of the Baetis, which has been mentioned, under Spain (p. 74), was the main artery for the land traffic of the south province; the whole stretch, kept in repair in republican times from the Alps to the Rhone by the Massaliots, from thence to the Pyrenees by the Romans, was laid anew by Augustus. In the north the imperial highways led mainly to the Gallic capital or to the great camps on the Rhine; yet sufficient provision seems to have been made for other requisite communication. [Sidenote: Hellenism in south Gaul.] If the southern province in the olden time belonged intellectually to the Hellenic type, the decline of Massilia and the mighty progress of Romanism in southern Gaul produced, no doubt, an alteration in that respect; nevertheless this portion of Gaul remained always, like Campania, a seat of Hellenism. The fact that Nemausus, one of the towns sharing the heritage of Massilia, shows on its coins of the Augustan period Alexandrian numbering of the years and the arms of Egypt, has been not without probability referred to the settlement by Augustus himself of veterans from Alexandria in this city, which presented no attitude of opposition to Hellenism. It may, doubtless, also be brought into connection with the influence of Massilia, that to this province, at least as regards descent, belonged that historian, who--apparently in intentional contrast to the national-Roman type of history, and occasionally with sharp sallies against its most noted representatives, Sallust and Livy--upheld the Hellenic type, the Vocontian Pompeius Trogus, author of a history of the world beginning with Alexander and the kingdoms of the Diadochi, in which Roman affairs are set forth only within this framework, or by way of appendix. Beyond doubt in this he was only retaliating, which was strictly within the province of the literary opposition of Hellenism; still it remains remarkable that this tendency should find its Latin representative, and an adroit and fluent one, here in the Augustan age. From a later period Favorinus deserves mention, of an esteemed burgess-family in Arles, one of the chief pillars of polymathy in Hadrian's time; a philosopher with an Aristotelian and sceptical tendency, at the same time a philologue and