The Arvernians were beaten, as the Allobrogians had been.  The hounds of Bituitus were of little use to him against the elephants which the Romans had borrowed from Asiatic usage, and which spread consternation amongst the Gauls.  The Roman historians say that the Arvernian army was two hundred thousand strong, and that one hundred and twenty thousand were slain; but the figures are absurd, like most of those found in ancient chronicles.  We know nowadays, thanks to modern civilization, which shows everything in broad daylight, and measures everything with proper caution, that only the most populous and powerful nations, and that at great expenditure of trouble and time, can succeed in moving armies of two hundred thousand men, and that no battle, however murderous it may be, ever costs one hundred and twenty thousand lives.

Rome treated the Arvernians with consideration; but the Allobrogians lost their existence as a nation.  The Senate declared them subject to the Roman people; and all the country comprised between the Alps, the Rhone from its entry into the Lake of Geneva to its mouth, and the Mediterranean, was made a Roman consular province, which means that every year a consul must march thither with his army.  In the three following years, indeed, the consuls extended the boundaries of the new province, on the right bank of the Rhone, to the frontier of the Pyrenees southward.  In the year 115 B.C. a colony of Roman citizens was conducted to Narbonne, a town even then of importance, in spite of the objections made by certain senators who were unwilling, say the historians, so to expose Roman citizens “to the waves of barbarism.”  This was the second colony which went and established itself out of Italy; the first had been founded on the ruins of Carthage.

Having thus completed their conquest, the Senate, to render possession safe and sure, decreed the occupation of the passes of the Alps which opened Gaul to Italy.  There was up to that time no communication with Gaul save along the Mediterranean, by a narrow and difficult path, which has become in our time the beautiful route called the Corniche.  The mountain tribes defended their independence with desperation; when that of the Stumians, who occupied the pass of the maritime Alps, saw their inability to hold their own, they cut the throats of their wives and children, set fire to their houses, and threw themselves into the flames.  But the Senate pursued its course imperturbably.  All the chief defiles of the Alps fell into its hands.  The old Phoenician road, restored by the consul Domitius, bore thenceforth his name (Via Donaitia), and less than sixty years after Cisalpine Gaul had been reduced to a Roman province, Rome possessed, in Transalpine Gaul, a second province, whither she sent her armies, and where she established her citizens without obstruction.  But Providence seldom allows men, even in the midst of their successes, to forget for long how precarious