I beg the pardon of the reader for this digression. I have made it because I think, should my reader be a father, this experience of mine may be of profit to him.
To return to the monuments of the Elysian Fields. A considerable number have been found here, also at Nimes, S. Gabriel, and Cavaillon, which are the memorials of _utriculares_. [1] There were guilds of these men. They appointed noble Romans as their patrons, and these patrons on their tombstones made mention of the fact. But what were these _utriculares_? They were raftsmen who carried on trade over the lagoons, sustaining their flat vessels upon distended skins. The lagoons were so shallow that no vessel of deep draught could travel over them, and all the merchandise of central Gaul for the Mediterranean--the tin from Britain for instance--and all the goods of the Mediterranean for Gaul, had to be transhipped at Arles from the river boats, unable to cross the bar, on to these barges sustained on inflated skins that conveyed them to Fos, at the mouth of the lagoons, where they were again shipped for the sea voyage. After Marius had cut a canal, matters were better. Ships could come up through the lagoons to Arles, but none at any time of deep draught, and the raftsmen, the _utriculares_, carried on their trade till the Middle Ages, when the mouths of the lagoons became choked, and the lagoons themselves turned into noxious morasses. Here is one of their monuments, in the museum of Arles:--
"To the manes. To Marcus Junius Messianus, of the guild of the utriculares of Arles, four times president of this corpora Junia Valeria raised this monument to him, her son, who died aged twenty-eight years, five months, and ten days."
"To the manes and eternal repose of Caius Victorinus ... urix, also called Quiguro, citizen of Lyons, one of the corporation of utriculares there, who lived twenty-eight years,... months and five days, without giving offence to anyone. His mother, Castorina, raised this to the memory of her sole and very dear boy."
The navigation on distended skins is now everywhere extinct except on the Euphrates. On some of the Nineveh sculptures may be seen men swimming across rivers sustained on these primitive air-vessels.