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Updated: June 4, 2025
We have kept it for the last, both because of its special history and because it seems to be the only thing which is locally recognised as a place of pilgrimage. Tell your driver to take you to Jublains, and he will at once take you to "le camp de Jules César." He knows the other objects perfectly well; but, unless he is specially asked, he assumes that this one point is the object of the journey.
Jublains has no inscriptions to show, but its numismatic wealth is great. Among the many coins found, not many are earlier than the time of Nero, and those which there are are chiefly coins of Germanicus. From Nero to Constantine coins of all dates are common. It is M. Barbe's inference that it was in Nero's reign that the place began to be of importance, and that its great temple was built.
The land, without being strictly hilly, much less mountainous, is far from flat, and it contains some considerable heights, as the ranges culminating in the peak of Mont Aigu, which forms a prominent object from the theatre at Jublains, and the high ground at and near Le Mans itself, some points of which proved of great importance in the last warfare which Maine has seen.
Nor is this wonderful; for the camp, fortress, citadel, whatever it is to be called, though most assuredly not the work of the great Dictator, is after all the great object at Jublains, which gives Jublains its special place among Gaulish and Roman cities. More than this, it is the one object which stands out before all eyes, and which must fix on itself the notice of the most careless passer-by.
The position, sloping away to the south, is indeed a lovely one, and we may congratulate the man who has found at once his home and his work on such a spot. But the great sight of all at Jublains, that which gives its special character to the place, but which has also a history of its own distinct from the place, has yet to be spoken of.
Jublains fails here; but, on the other hand, Silchester has no one object to set against the magnificent remains of the fortress or citadel, the traditional camp of Cæsar. Silchester again has the great advantage of being systematically and skilfully dug out, while Jublains has been examined only piecemeal.
A line of trees follows the circular sweep of the foundations, and their trunks really make no bad representatives of the columns of the temple. In short, when the traveller is once put upon the scent, he finds scraps of ancient Næodunum at every step of his walk through Jublains and its fields. But the most important remains of all lie in the south-western part of the old enclosure.
To the student of the twelfth century Mayenne is full of memories; to the student of earlier times its chief attraction will be that it is the most natural point of the journey to Jublains.
Both alike are buried Roman towns whose sites had been forsaken, or occupied only by small villages; both have supplied modern inquirers with endless stores both of walls and foundations and of movable relics; and the two spots further agree in this, that both at Silchester and at Jublains the history of the place has to be made out from the place itself; all that we can do is to make out the Roman names; we have no record of the history of either.
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