When Lyon was Lugdunum

Lyon was the most important Provincial centre in the Roman Empire. Roman Lyon began up on Fourviere hill - the name comes from Forum Vetera, the Old Forum. Julius Caesar ran his campaign in Gaul from there. Here's the men who won Gaul for him.

And here's a Roman sword. 

It made me think straight away of R.A.K. Mason's poem:

This short straight sword

I got in Rome

when Gaul's new lord

came tramping home

It did that grim

old rake to a T

if it did him

well it does me

Leave the thing of pearls

with silken tassels

to priests and girls

and currish vassals

Here's no fine cluster

on the hilt, this drab

blade lacks lustre

but it can stab.

In the years after Caesar's assassination the Romans built a whole new city, Lugdunum, down on the flat where the Rhone and Saone rivers met. The Emperor Claudius of "I, Claudius" fame (Harvey loved the book and the series, but he'd also read all the serious history around them) was born in Lyon. The treasure of the Gallo-Roman museum is the Claudius Tablet, where he granted local Gallic dignitaries (but no freedman, slaves or women, of course) the higher status they wanted. The whole thing, made of black basalt, weighed hundreds of tons - only two pieces of it were found. Isn't the lettering beautiful.

And to redress th balance and bring in some women, here's a rare funerary portrait of a Lugdunum mother and daughter, around the 3rd century of our era - they can be dated by their hairstyles.