The Gallo-Roman town of Lutetia was the chief settlement of the Parisii (Gallic tribe). It stretched along the left bank of the River Seine, on what is now Sainte-Geneviève hill and the Île de la Cité (natural island in the Seine). A network of orthogonal roads divided the town into blocks (insulae) containing public spaces and dwellings. This street plan was organized around a major north-south thoroughfare, the present-day rue Saint-Jacques.
At its apogee in the late 2nd century AD, Lutetia was home to almost 10 000 people, a modest population among the towns of Gaul. Lutetia boasted a forum with its basilica and probably a temple, places of entertainment (a theater and above all the amphitheater), and public baths, in the south, the east, and the north (those called Cluny). Its craftsmen and tradespeople generated the town’s wealth and its influential guild of boatmen controlled navigation on the River Seine and its tributaries. These boatmen, the nautae parisiaci, played a major role in town life, and in the early days of the Roman Empire even erected a monument to Emperor Tiberius, the famed Pillar of the Boatmen.
In the 4th century, barbarian incursions, rural malcontents, and political upheaval prompted the inhabitants of Lutetia to abandon the left bank and withdraw to the Île de la Cité, around which they erected ramparts. Paradoxically, as the town’s fortunes waned, its military importance grew, and by the year 360 when Julian’s soldiers proclaimed him Emperor there, his beloved Lutetia was well on the way to becoming Paris.
Greek geographer Strabo, in the 1st century BC, wrote “On the banks of the river Sequanas (Seine) lived the Parisii who occupied an island in the river and had for a city Lucotocia (Lutetia).” Later the town grew and its people erected public monuments, but it was never more than a modest town of Roman Gaul. In short, its origins are commonplace, like many urban centers in Antiquity. Yet the town that was to emerge as the capital of France needed to take pride in glorious beginnings, so from the Middle Ages onwards all manner of legendary origins were dreamed up. One such outlandish story linked it to the fall of Troy, after which displaced Trojans were said to have settled on the banks of the Seine in a place that was “beautiful and delectable, plentiful and fertile and well placed for living.”*
As for the Parisii, it was claimed that their name came from Paris himself, the son of Priamand lover of Helen of Troy. Such a filiation, fanciful as it was, conferred on Lutetia a mythical origin comparable to that of Rome, which in one tradition was founded by the Trojan Aeneas. And to further extol its beginnings, it was even professed that Lutetia was founded well before the Eternal City, a view completely at odds with current archaeological opinion, which holds that the oldest traces of a Roman presence in the soil of Paris go no further back than 30 BC.
Lutetia: from Gallic to Roman
In his Commentaries on the Gallic War (Book VII, 57), Julius Caesar mentions Lutetia “town of the Parisii, situated on an island in the Seine,” but archaeological excavations have never uncovered significant Gallic remains on the Île de la Cité. To the point that researchers are beginning to wonder whether Lutetia was located elsewhere, at Nanterre, where a site has recently yielded substantial traces of Celtic occupation. All the more so since the Nanterre site was abandoned early in the reign of Emperor Augustus, just at the time of the first signs of a Roman presence in Paris. According to this hypothesis, Lutetia was transferred to the Sainte-Geneviève hill, where the Gallo-Roman town was founded and then grew during the 1st century AD.
Without falling prey to simplistic determinism, it is legitimate to underscore the advantages of the location of Paris. First there is the Seine, a major waterway extended by a whole series of navigable tributaries. Situated at the nexus of several complementary regions, the site was also favorable for water- land transfers. Swampy, dotted with small islands and channels, the alluvial plain is surrounded by heights and hills conducive to human settlement. Roman city planners little by little mastered this environment and laid out the pattern of the town.
