Another, a greater and more decisive opportunity offered itself.  Marseilles was an ally of the Romans.  As the rival of Carthage, and with the Gauls forever at her gates, she had need of Rome by sea and land.  She pretended, also, to the most eminent and intimate friendship with Rome.  Her founder, the Phocean Euxenes, had gone to Rome, it was said, and concluded a treaty with Tarquinius Priscus.  She had gone into mourning when Rome was burned by the Gauls; she had ordered a public levy to aid towards the ransom of the Capitol.  Rome did not dispute these claims to remembrance.  The friendship of Marseilles was of great use to her.  In the whole course of her struggle with Carthage, and but lately, at the passage of Hannibal through Gaul, Rome had met with the best of treatment there.  She granted the Massilians a place amongst her senators at the festivals of the Republic, and exemption from all duty in her ports.  Towards the middle of the second century B.C.  Marseilles was at war with certain Gallic tribes, her neighbors, whose territory she coveted.  Two of her colonies, Nice and Antibes, were threatened.  She called on Rome for help.  A Roman deputation went to decide the quarrel; but the Gauls refused to obey its summons, and treated it with insolence.  The deputation returned with an army, succeeded in beating the refractory tribes, and gave their land to the Massilians.  The same thing occurred repeatedly with the same result.  Within the space of thirty years nearly all the tribes between the Rhone and the Var, in the country which was afterwards Provence, were subdued and driven back amongst the mountains, with notice not to approach within a mile of the coast in general, and a mile and a half of the places of disembarkation.  But the Romans did not stop there.  They did not mean to conquer for Marseilles alone.  In the year 123 B.C., at some leagues to the north of the Greek city, near a little river, then called the Coenus and nowadays the Arc, the consul C. Sextius Calvinus had noticed, during his campaign, an abundance of thermal springs, agreeably situated amidst wood-covered hills.  There he constructed an enclosure, aqueducts, baths, houses, a town in fact, which he called after himself, Aquae Sextice, the modern Aix, the first Roman establishment in Transalpine Gaul.  As in the case of Cisalpine Gaul, with Roman colonies came Roman intrigue and dissensions got up and fomented amongst the Gauls.  And herein Marseilles was a powerful seconder; for she kept up communications with all the neighboring tribes, and fanned the spirit of faction.  After his victories, the consul C. Sextius, seated at his tribunal, was selling his prisoners by auction, when one of them came up to him and said, “I have always liked and served the Romans; and for that reason I have often incurred outrage and danger at the hands of my countrymen.”  The consul had him set free,—­him and his family,—­and even gave him leave to point out amongst the captives