Michel de l’Hôpital, who lived in the sixteenth century, in one of his letters wrote:—
“We arrived at Fréjus, which is nothing more now but a poor little town. Here are grand ruins of an ancient theatre, foundered arcades, baths, aqueduct, and scattered remains of quays and basins. The port has disappeared under sand, and is now nothing but a field and a beach.”
If S. Raphael be devoid of antiquities and of history, at a little distance is Fréjus, that has both in abundance.
The ruins are many, but not beautiful; everything was built in a hurry, and badly built. The aqueduct was no sooner completed than it gave way and had to be patched up. The triumphal arch on the old quays is a shabby affair. The amphitheatre is half cut out of the natural rock. There was plenty of granite and porphyry accessible, but the builders did not trouble themselves to obtain large and solid blocks; they built of brick and small stones, without skill and impatiently. The work was probably executed by corvées of labourers impressed from the country round. There were two enormous citadels; one to the north, the other to the south of the port. The latter, the Butte S. Antoine, was, however, mainly a huge accumulation of store chambers, magazines for whatever was needed for the soldiers, and attached to it was the lighthouse. Beyond, some way on the ancient mole, is the most perfect monument of Roman times extant in Fréjus. It goes by the name of La Lantern; but it was not a lighthouse at all, but the lodge of a harbour-master, who gave directions with a flag to vessels how to enter the harbour and avoid the shoals.
The railway now runs close to it across the ancient basin, the port made by Agrippa. To the north of this, where stands now the chapel of S. Roch, was the Port of Cæsar. Poplars now stand where was formerly a forest of masts.
The amphitheatre is cut through its entire length by a road. The old wall of the town reached to it, included it, and then drew back to where is now the railway station. The remains of the theatre are to the north of the modern town, and those of the baths to the south-west; they may be reached by taking a road in that direction from the Butte S. Antoine.
Although Julius Cæsar has the credit of having made the place and called it after his own name, it is certainly more than a guess that there was a Græco-Phœnician settlement here before that time, occupying the bunch of high ground rising above the marshes of the Argens. Indeed, monuments have been found that imply as much, though later in date than the making of the place into a naval station by Cæsar. One of these is bi-lingual—Latin and Greek. It begins in Latin:—
“To Caius Vilius Ligur, this is dedicated by his mother Maxima.”
Then comes Greek:—