Ancient Paris: Looking For Lutetia

[Aurelia]

Paris actually has quite a bit to offer the Romanophile visitor. I remember visiting the underground exhibition on the Ile de la Cité. I also attended a wonderful concert held at the Roman Baths (Thermes de Cluny). These and many other hidden treasures are often overlooked by the average tourist, but they are definitely worth a visit.

 

I'm including below an interesting article about Paris aka Lutetia as it was known in Roman times.

 

Had Georges Eugène Haussmann not undertaken to tear up chunks of old Paris, much of the city's very early history would have remained hermetically sealed beneath its medieval layer, forever lost. Only the odd clue or snippet of information about Roman-era Paris had trickled down prior to the 19th century—in Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars (52 BC) for a start, where the oppidum of the Parisii—a tribe of Celtic Gauls—on an island of the river Seine (Sequana) is first mentioned. Their settlement was known as Lutetia, or as the French now call it, Lutèce; the name Paris appears for the first time only in the 3rd century AD.

 

Another half a millennium elapsed before the famous chronicler of the History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours (circa 538-594), reported the discovery, in a Paris gutter, of an ancient bronze serpent and badger, which his contemporaries interpreted as a premonitory sign that the city would be destroyed by fire—an interesting sidelight but revealing little about Lutetia.

 

The first reference to an urban Roman monument was discovered only in the 12th century: an unsigned document mentions the "great circus" and "immense ruins" of the "arena", with specific reference to their location "by the church of Saint Victor". The famous medieval abbey of Saint Victor, a place of great erudition and beauty complete with cascading rivulets and fragrant orchards, was situated around the present Place Jussieu, now home to the ugly asbestos-ridden sprawl of the University of Paris VII. A section of the Roman aqueduct was unearthed in the Latin Quarter in the 16th century, and two ancient cemeteries, in the rues du Faubourg Saint Jacques and Faubourg Saint Marcel, were located in the 17th.

 

 

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