PROVENCE is an 'antique land'. Quite apart from the impressive geological antiquity of the Esterel and of the Corniche des Maures (about 500 million years, immensely older than the Mediterranean as now known), its place even in recorded history goes well back into pre-Christian times. In Ligurian days' Marseilles (Massilia) was settled by a Greek merchant community from Asia Minor: it was defended by the ubiquitous Roman legions against the Oxybii (154 B.C.) and the Salluvii (125 B~C.), and Marius' huge slaughter of the Teutones at Aix (Aquae Sextiae) came in 102 B.C. Under the Romans, however, Provence was merely part of Transalpine Gaul, a vast tract covering modem Languedoc, Dauphiny and Savoy, until the military genius of Julius Caesar made the whole of modem France a tributary of the Eternal City. Its main arterial road (N.7), the Via Aurelia, from Aix to Vintimille, is still styled in peasant speech lou camin aurelian. Arenas like those of Aries, Frejus (Forum Julii) and Orange, ruins of aqueducts and temples and even baths, in addition to the rich store of mosaics, amphoras, gravestones and statues offered up .by a historic soil to modern archaeologists, all bear testimony to a rich imperial past. When the Romans had gone, this long coastal way of access to Spain saw itself overrun by fresh invaders: Vandals, Burgundians, Goths and Franks despoiled its ancient heritage, and in the 9th and 10th centuries Mediterranean trade was paralysed by the Saracen pirates ensconced in the Corniche des Maures. When order was restored' by the Hohenstaufens, and Provence became part of the Holy Roman Empire, its destinies under various dynasties (especially the house of Barcelona) varied from obscurity to a brilliant civilization. Under the Angevin kings, it was for a time the seat of the Papacy, and its 15th century under King Rene was, for all its troubled history, an age that held the arts in high honour. Its final destiny was to become incorporated in the domains of the kingdom of France after 1481, and its beautiful language knew an eclipse until the mid-19th century. Provence has been favoured by nature with clearly drawn frontiers-the Rhone and the' Mediterranean in west and south, the huge 'wall of the Alps in the east, and it is only in the north that the boundary is less defined. Yet even here nature's vest-