In the spring of 53 B.C. Cæsar summoned delegates from all the tribes of Gaul to meet at Lutetia, but the rebellion of the year 52 in which the Parisii joined determined the Roman general to destroy the town and crush the tribe. He sent Labienus with four legions to carry out his plans. The Gauls chose as their leader Camulogenus of the tribe of the Aulerci, an old man, but skilled in warfare. He took advantage of the marsh on the right bank of the river and so stationed his troops as to prevent the approach of the Romans to the little town. Labienus first tried to make a road across the bog by laying down hurdles plastered with clay. This proved too much of an undertaking, so he slipped away “at the third watch” and retraced his steps to Melodunum. There he seized fifty ships which he filled with Roman soldiers and with them threatened the town so effectually that it yielded to him. Then he repaired the bridge, crossed to the left bank, and once more began his march toward Lutetia. When the Lutetians heard of this move from refugees, they burned their town and destroyed its bridges. Labienus put a Roman knight in command of each of the fifty ships which he had captured and ordered them to slip silently down the river for about four miles under cover of darkness. Five steady cohorts he left to guard the camp, and another five he despatched up the river after midnight with instructions to carry their baggage with no attempt at quiet. In the same direction he sent certain small boats whose oars were to meet the water right noisily. He himself led a body of soldiers in the direction which the ships had taken. When the Gauls were informed by their scouts of the seeming division into three bands of the Roman army they, naturally but unwisely, made a like division of their own men. In the battle that ensued--probably near the Ivry of to-day--the Gauls resisted with such courage that very few took refuge in flight, preferring to fall with the valiant Camulogenus. The Gauls left to watch Labienus’s camp tried to aid their fellows when they heard of the battle in progress, but they could not withstand the attack of the victorious Romans, whose cavalry cut down all but the few who managed to escape to the wooded hills. So it happens, rather humorously, that the earliest written account of Paris is that telling of the destruction which left its site a clean slate upon which the Romans might begin to write its story. For five hundred years they wrote, until the Frankish invasion swept its destructive might across Romanized Gaul.