MR. BELLOC AND THE HOLY LAND may be said to
close with the Fall of Jerusalem—roughly 120 years. They were the very years in which Gaul began to affect the whole of the Roman world with its new wealth, its military recruitment and its commerce. At the beginning you have the Ganz cavalry with Caesar at Hadrumetum, at the end of it you have the 3rd Gallic Legion permanently garrisoning Syria. Gallic textiles and ceramics are every- where. Agrippa, in order to persuade his countrymen that they may safely submit to Rome, point; to the vast new Gallic influence, telling them that Gaul was deluging the world with her girads. Now what all antiquity particularly noticed about ,the Gauls was their specially vivid appreciation of immortality. There had been vague popular ideas on survival and philo- sophical speculations and various statements of it in various religious systems, but everybody noticed the peculiar strength of the idea among the Gauls. It is this, combined with the sudden. spread of. Gallic influence, which constitutes the eVidence demanded. [To the Editor of Tan SPECTATOR.] was travelling when your issue of March 6th appeared, containing a review of my book, The Battleground : hence the delay of this letter.
In that notice your reviewer expresses astonishment at my statement that the new vivid impression of personal immortality, spreading through the Greco-Roman world in the critical years which saw the founding both of the Roman Empire and the Church, had Gallic influence for its main factor. He adds that there is no evidence whatever for this. I confess I am astonished in my turn That critical period opens with Caesar's conquest and
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