What it is
Lugdunum was founded on Fourvière in 43 BC and became the capital of Roman Gaul. Its museum — long called the musée gallo-romain, officially Lugdunum Musée et théâtres romains since 2017 — sits inside the hillside next to the theatres, which it now manages.
What to see
The collections the city had been gathering since the early nineteenth century include two famous pieces: the Claudian Table, a bronze tablet carrying a speech of the emperor Claudius — who was born in Lugdunum — and the great mosaic of the circus games, a chariot race laid out in stone.
Around them are the tombs, altars and everyday objects of a Roman provincial capital, and windows that look straight out onto the theatres.
Getting it right
Do the museum and the theatres together, on the way down from Fourvière. The museum holds temporary exhibitions as well, so check what is on.
The Roman city it explains
The Roman colony was founded on the Fourvière plateau in 43 BC by Lucius Munatius Plancus, then governor of Gaul, in the troubles that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar; its first official name was Colonia Copia Felix Munatia Lugudunum. The name itself is Celtic: dunum means fortress or hill, while Lug may be the god Lug or the Gaulish word for bright. The city grew fast. It was a hub of Agrippa's road network, home to the second imperial mint, and from 12 BC the seat of the federal sanctuary where the peoples of the Three Gauls came each year to show loyalty to Rome.
In about a century it built one of the most complete sets of monuments in the Roman provinces: a theater, an odeon, an amphitheater, a circus, a city wall and four aqueducts. From the third century the aqueducts were no longer maintained, the plateau emptied, and the town moved down to the banks of the Saône; the submission to the Burgundians in the 460s marks the end of Roman Lyon.
Lugdunum also took part in the empire's upheavals, notably the battle of 197 between Septimius Severus and Albinus, and it was an early center of Christianity. A rare document preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, a letter from the churches of Lyon and Vienne to those of Asia and Phrygia, describes the persecution of the Lyon Christians in 177.
A collection two centuries in the making
Roman finds have been gathered in Lyon since the early nineteenth century. In 1802 the former abbey of Saint-Pierre became a museum, and its curator from 1806 to 1830, François Artaud, assembled ancient pieces under the cloister arcades, including the Claudian Table and the circus mosaic. When the theaters were dug out from the 1930s, the finds piled up in nearby buildings that became a cramped three-room museum, the Antiquarium, which received the Claudian Table and the Coligny calendar from the fine arts museum in 1957 and a bust of Caracalla, born in Lugdunum, from the Louvre.
A museum hidden in the hill
Several projects for a proper museum were abandoned, partly because a large building would have blocked the view of the theaters. In 1966 the architect Bernard Zehrfuss proposed the solution: a museum set to one side and buried in the hillside. Approved in 1969, it opened on November 15, 1975. Inside, a raw concrete ramp spirals downward, branching onto landings that hold the collections across 4,000 square meters, and windows open onto the theater and the odeon. Run by the city, then the Rhône department and, since 2015, the Lyon metropolis, it was renamed Lugdunum on November 8, 2017, when it also took over the management of the Roman theaters.
Building it turned up more of the Roman town. Trial digs before construction found four rooms, one with two kitchen blocks and hearths, another with damaged frescoes and a floor fragment showing a man treading grapes above two jars. Not every piece survived the move: while the collections were in storage, several remarkable mosaics, including the mosaic of Orpheus and the so-called hunchback bestiary, were destroyed in a fire at a restorer's workshop.
Three pieces not to miss
The Claudian Table is a bronze plaque carrying a speech in which the emperor Claudius proposed opening the Roman Senate to citizens of the Three Gauls. Grateful Gaulish representatives had it engraved and probably set it up in the federal sanctuary. Claudius himself was born in Lugdunum.
The circus games mosaic, found on Rue Jarente in 1806, shows a chariot race. Lyon's own circus has never been found, so this mosaic, with a relief of two-horse chariots discovered in 1874 and lamps decorated with races, is the main evidence of the city's passion for the races.
The Coligny calendar, found in pieces in 1887 in the Ain, near Lyon, and dating from the second century, is the most remarkable evidence that Celtic religious traditions survived under Roman rule.
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