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It differs from the shape of most other theatres, as its curved line occupies more than a semicircle, like the shape of a Saracenic horse-shoe arch. It seems that no signs of an amphitheatre had been found at Jublains; so M. Barbe is driven to the conclusion that the same building must have been used for both purposes.
This again illustrates the difference between the state of ownership in England and in France. Silchester is at the command of a single will, which happily is in the present generation wisely guided. Jublains must fare as may seem good to a multitude of separate wills, of which it is too much to expect that all will at any time be wisely guided.
That they did a great deal of mischief in Maine is certain; and is a likely enough time for the city to have been finally swept away as a city, and to have left only the insignificant modern village which has grown up amongst its ruins. Jublains then, Diablintes, Næodunum, whatever it is to be called, has a special place among fallen Roman cities.
We know not how far the name of Silchester may be known among Frenchmen, but we suspect that the name of Jublains is very little known among Englishmen. The two places certainly very nearly answer to one another in the two countries.
At the present moment most certainly several of the owners of Jublains are the opposite of foolish, and the most important monument of all is placed beyond the individual caprice of any man.
But it is of course impossible to dig up the whole place in the same way as Silchester has been dug up. The modern Diablintes must live somewhere; no power short of that of an Eastern despot can expel them all from the sites of their predecessors, even to make the ways and works of those predecessors more clearly known. But we have as yet hardly said what and where Jublains is.
The diggings at Jublains have brought to light a great number of Christian Frankish objects, which shows that the place kept on some measure of importance long after the Teutonic conquest of Gaul. It seems also to be looked upon as a kind of secondary seat of the Cenomannian bishopric. But it must either have died out bit by bit, or else have perished in some later convulsion.
The name is spelled several ways, of which Jublains is now the one in vogue; but another form, Jublent, better brings out its origin. As for the two places themselves, Jublains and Silchester, each of them has its points in which it surpasses the other. At Silchester there is the town-wall, nearly perfect throughout the whole of its circuit.
But it is worth while to remember on the other hand that a single foolish Duke may easily do more mischief than several wise Dukes can do good, and that out of the many owners of Jublains, if we cannot expect all at any time to be wise, there is a fair chance that at no moment will every one of them be foolish.
The old name of the town itself is forgotten, but the name of the tribe still lives. The case is not quite so clear as that of Paris; some unlucky etymologists have seen in the name Jublains traces of Jules and of bains; but a moment's thought will show that the name is a natural corruption of Diablintes.
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