Thirza Vallois, "Ancient Paris: Looking for Lutetia"

http://www.francetoday.com/articles/2014/09/29/looking-for-lutetia.html

Gallo-Roman Lutetia was an average-size provincial town in Gaul, stretching over some 115 hectares (284 acres) on its main left bank section, with a population of

some 5,000 inhabitants. For the sake of comparison, Reims and Amiens boasted an area of 250 hectares(618 acres) each, and big Roman cities like Lyon (Lugdunum) or Narbonne (Narbo Martius) had populations of more than 50,000. What's left of Lutetia can easily be covered on foot in an hour or so. As you walk towards the Cluny Museum, heading for the baths like the Gallo-Romans did, take time to enter the little square Paul Painlevé on the corner of rue des Ecoles, where you'll find a  statue of the she-wolf suckling the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. It's a replica of the one in Rome's Capitol, a gift from modern-day Rome to Paris in homage to Gallo-Roman Lutetia. . . .

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. . .

More important was the discovery of the Pillar of the Nautes in 1710, during the construction of a burial vault for the archbishops of Paris beneath the chancel of Notre Dame, on the Ile de la Cité. Made of four superimposed square blocks of stone, the monument measures 5.24m (17 ft) in height and is carved with figures representing both Roman and Celtic deities. The inscription of a double dedication to Emperor Tiberius and Jupiter dates the pillar to between 14 and 37 AD, making it the oldest sculpture dated by an inscription ever found in France. The inscription specifies that the monument was financed by the Nautes, the powerful corporation of boatmen, confirming their leading position in the city's hierarchy. The dedication to Jupiter led to the conjecture that an earlier pagan temple once stood on the site of Notre Dame. It is now more commonly believed that the pillar was initially erected on the Left Bank and was recycled on the island in the 3rd century, when the city's center of gravity shifted there in the wake of barbarian assaults. That theory is supported by the fact that other recycled stone from the left bank of Lutetia was found in several places on the island, including the new ramparts, the royal palace (now the site of the Palais de Justice), and the basilica (on the site of today's Marché aux Fleurs), an administrative and commercial tribunal. (Early Christians later borrowed the term basilica for their churches, which used a similar architectural plan.) The recycling of stone has always been common practice, as exemplified closer to our time by the Pont de la Concorde, a bridge built entirely from the stones of the demolished Bastille fortress-prison.

An even more significant breakthrough in tracing the history of Roman Paris was made in the 19th century by Théodore Vacquer, after Baron Haussmann had torn up the medieval streets for his grand redesign of the city. Vacquer's studies revealed that Lutetia did not evolve as an extension of the earlier Gallic oppidum but was a carefully planned new town built on the left bank, in the position best suited for the crossing of the Seine via its main island. The choice of a small hill—known as the Montagne Sainte Geneviève since the Middle Ages—spared the inhabitants the capricious floodings of the Seine. As in all Roman towns, the streets of Lutetia were laid out in a grid, with a central north-south axis, the cardo maximus, a street that is still in place today, known as the rue Saint Jacques since the Middle Ages, when it was the route for pilgrims going to St. Jacques de Compostelle (Santiago de Compostela). The cardo spanned the river over a bridge (now le Petit Pont), crossed the island along the present rue de la Cité and joined the trading and communication routes toward the north via the present rue Saint Martin.

To the west, the Boulevard Saint Michel and, further north, the rue de la Harpe have replaced a secondary cardo which continued on the right bank along the rue Saint-Denis. Today's rue de la Sorbonne was also part of the Roman grid, connecting the north gate of the Forum and the public baths that are now part of the Cluny Museum—the national museum of the Middle Ages, which is housed in a superb 15th-century mansion built atop the baths. East of the rue Saint Jacques, today's rue Valette is crossed at right angles by the rue des Ecoles and rue Cujas, two of Lutetia's rare surviving east-west decumani, running parallel to the Seine. Not unlike modern cities, Lutetia also had a diagonal artery, the transversus, an important road that led to Italy via Lyon. You can follow a section of its route along the present rue des Fossés Saint Jacques and rue Lhomond.