Here, there, and everywhere around the encircling avenues of the town are to be seen the remains of the old city walls, which in later years, even in the middle ages, sunk more and more into disuse, from the fact that the city has continually dwindled in size, until to-day it covers only about one-fifth of its former area.
The old aqueduct of Fréjus, a relic of Roman days and Roman ways, is the chief monumental wonder of the neighbourhood. It has long been in a ruinous state of disuse, though its decay is merely that incident to time, for it was marvellously well built of small stones without ornament of any kind.
At Fréjus there are also remains of a Roman theatre, now nothing more than a mass of débris, though one easily traces its diameter as having been something approaching two hundred feet.
The arena of Fréjus is in quite as dismantled a state as the theatre, one of the principal roadways now passing through its centre, so that to-day the monument is hardly more than a great open Place at the crossing of four roads. From the grandeur of the structure, as it must once have been, it is a monument comparable in many ways with those better preserved and more magnificent arenas at Arles and Nîmes.
Fréjus to Nice
From this résumé of some of the chief monuments of the Roman occupation one gathers that Fréjus was carefully planned as a great city of residence and pleasure; and so it really was, with the added importance which its position, both with regard to the routes by sea and land, gave to it in a commercial sense.
From Fréjus to St. Raphaël is a bare three kilometres. St. Raphaël boasts as many inhabitants as Fréjus, but it is mostly a city of pleasure, and has no monuments of a past age to suggest that even a reflected glory from Fréjus ever shone over its site. To-day the plain which lies between the two towns is dotted here and there with palatial residences: “C’est tout palais,” the native tells you, and he is not far wrong, but in a former day it was a broad bay, where floated the galleys of Cæsar and Augustus.