THE GALLIC PROVINCES.

Like Spain, southern Gaul had already in the time of the republic become a part of the Roman empire, yet neither so early nor so completely as the former country. The two Spanish provinces were instituted in the age of Hannibal, the province Narbo in that of the Gracchi; and, while in the former case Rome took to itself the whole Peninsula, in the latter it was not merely content, down to the last age of the republic, with the possession of the coast, but even of this it directly took only the smaller and the more remote half. The republic was not wrong in designating what it so possessed as the town–domain of Narbo (Narbonne); the greater part of the coast, nearly from Montpellier to Nice, belonged to the city of Massilia. This Greek community was more a state than a city, and through its powerful position the equal alliance subsisting from of old with Rome obtained a real significance, such as had no parallel in any second allied city. It is true, nevertheless, that the Romans were for these neighbouring Greeks, still more than for the more remote Greeks of the East, shield as well as sword. The Massaliots had probably the lower Rhone as far up as Avignon in their possession; but the Ligurian and the Celtic cantons of the interior were by no means subject to them, and the Roman standing camp at Aquae Sextiae (Aix) a day’s march to the north of Massilia, was, quite in the true and proper sense, instituted for the permanent protection of the wealthy Greek mercantile city. It was one of the most momentous consequences of the Roman civil war, that along with the legitimate republic its most faithful ally, the city of Massilia, was politically annihilated, was converted from a state sharing rule into a community which continued free of the empire and Greek, but preserved its independence and its Hellenism in the modest proportions of a provincial middle–sized town. In a political aspect there is nothing more to be said of Massilia after its capture in the civil war; the town was thenceforth for Gaul only what Neapolis was for Italy—the centre of Greek culture and Greek learning. Inasmuch as the greater part of the later province of Narbo only at that time came under direct Roman administration, it is to this epoch in particular that the erection of it in a certain measure belongs.

Last conflicts in the three Gauls.How the rest of Gaul came into the power of Rome has been already narrated (iv.240 ff.)iv.230f. Before Caesar’s Gallic war the rule of the Romans extended approximately as far as Toulouse, Vienne, and Geneva; after it, as far as the Rhine throughout its course, and the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean on the north as on the west. This subjugation, it is true, was probably not complete, in the north–west perhaps not much less superficial than that of Britain (iv.296)iv.283.. Yet we are informed of supplemental wars, in the main, merely as regards the districts of Iberian nationality. To the Iberians belonged not merely the southern but also the northern slope of the Pyrenees, with the country lying in front, Bearn, Gascony, and western Languedoc38; and it has already been mentioned (p.63) that when north–western Spain was sustaining the last conflicts with the Romans, there was also on the north side of the Pyrenees, and beyond doubt in connection therewith, serious fighting, at first on the part of Agrippa in the year 71638., then on the part of Marcus Valerius Messalla, the well–known patron of the Roman poets, who in the year 726 or 72728or27., and thus nearly at the same time with the Cantabrian war, vanquished the Aquitanians in a pitched battle in the old Roman territory not far from Narbonne. In respect of the Celts nothing further is mentioned than that, shortly before the battle of Actium, the Morini in Picardy were overthrown; and, although during the twenty years of almost uninterrupted civil war our reporters may have lost sight of the comparatively insignificant affairs of Gaul, the silence of the list of triumphs—here complete—shows at any rate that no further military undertakings of importance took place in the land of the Celts during this period.

Insurrections.Subsequently, during the long reign of Augustus, and amidst all the crises—some of them very hazardous—of the Germanic wars, the Gallic provinces remained obedient. No doubt the Roman government, as well as the Germanic patriot party, as we have seen, constantly had it in view that a decisive success of the Germans and their advance into Gaul would be followed by a rising of the Gauls against Rome; the foreign rule cannot therefore at that time have stood by any means secure. Matters came to a real insurrection in the year 21 under Tiberius. There was formed among the Celtic nobility a widely–ramified conspiracy to overthrow the Roman government.Under Tiberius.It broke out prematurely in the far from important cantons of the Turones and the Andecavi on the lower Loire, and not merely the small garrison of Lyons, but also a part of the army of the Rhine at once took the field against the insurgents. Nevertheless the most noted districts joined; the Treveri, under the guidance of Julius Florus, threw themselves in masses into the Ardennes; in the immediate neighbourhood of Lyons the Haedui and Sequani rose under the leadership of Julius Sacrovir. The compact legions, it is true, gained the mastery over the rebels without much trouble; but the rising, in which the Germans in no way took part, shows at any rate the hatred towards the foreign rulers, which still at that time prevailed in the land and particularly among the nobility—a hatred which was certainly strengthened, but was not at first produced, by the pressure of taxes and the financial distress that are designated as causes of the insurrection.

Gradual pacification of Gaul.It was a greater feat of Roman policy than that which enabled it to become master of Gaul, that it knew how to retain the mastery, and that Vercingetorix found no successor, although, as we see, there were not entirely wanting men who would gladly have walked in the same path. This result was attained by a shrewd combination of terrifying and of winning—we may add, of sharing. The strength and the proximity of the Rhine army was beyond question the first and the most effective means of preserving the Gauls in the fear of their master. If this army was maintained throughout the century at the same level, as will be set forth in the following section, it was so probably quite as much on account of their own subjects, as on account of neighbours who afterwards were by no means specially formidable. That even the temporary withdrawal of these troops imperilled the continuance of the Roman rule, not because the Germans might then cross the Rhine, but because the Gauls might renounce allegiance to the Romans, is shown by the rising after Nero’s death, in spite of all its weakness; after the troops had marched off to Italy to make their general emperor, an independent Gallic empire was proclaimed in Treves, and those soldiers who were left were made bound to allegiance towards it. But although this foreign rule, like every such rule, rested primarily and mainly on superior power—on the ascendancy of compact and trained troops over the multitude—it by no means rested on this exclusively. The art of partition was here successfully applied. Gaul did not belong to the Celts alone; not merely were the Iberians strongly represented in the south, but Germanic tribes were settled in considerable numbers on the Rhine, and were of importance still more by their conspicuous aptitude for war, than by their number. Skilfully the government knew how to foster and to turn to useful account the antagonism between the Celts and the Germans on the left of the Rhine. But the policy of amalgamation and of reconciliation operated still more powerfully.

Policy of amalgamation.What measures were taken with this view we shall explain in the sequel. Seeing that the cantonal constitution was spared, and even a sort of national representation was conceded, and the measures directed against the national priesthood were taken gradually, while the Latin language was from the beginning obligatory, and with that national representation there was associated the new worship of the emperor; seeing that, on the whole, the Romanising was not undertaken in an abrupt way, but was cautiously and patiently pursued, the Roman foreign rule in the Celtic land ceased to be such, because the Celts themselves became, and desired to be, Romans. The extent to which the work had already advanced after the expiry of the first century of the Roman rule in Gaul is shown by the just mentioned occurrences after Nero’s death, which, in their course as a whole, belong partly to the history of the Roman commonwealth, partly to its relations with the Germans, but must also be mentioned, at least by way of slight glance, in this connection. The overthrow of the Julio–Claudian dynasty emanated from a Celtic noble and began with a Celtic insurrection; but this was not a revolt against the foreign rule like that of Vercingetorix or even of Sacrovir; its aim was not the setting aside, but the transforming, of the Roman government. The fact that its leader reckoned descent from a bastard of Caesar one of the patents of nobility of his house, clearly expresses the half–national, half–Roman character of this movement. Some months later certainly, after the revolted Roman troops of Germanic descent and the free Germans had for the moment overpowered the Roman army, some Celtic tribes proclaimed the independence of their nation; but this attempt proved a sad failure, not through the eventual interference of the government, but from the very opposition of the great majority of the Celtic cantons themselves, which could not, and did not, desire to fall away from Rome.

Roman rule no longer felt as foreign.The Roman names of the leading nobles, the Latin legend on the coins of the insurrection, the travesty throughout of Roman arrangements, show most clearly as that the deliverance of the Celtic nation from the yoke of the foreigners in the year 70 was no longer possible, just because there was such a nation no longer; and the Roman rule might be felt, according to circumstances, as a yoke, but no longer as a foreign rule. Had such an opportunity been offered to the Celts at the time of the battle of Philippi, or even under Tiberius, the insurrection would have run its course, not perhaps to another issue, but in streams of blood; now it ran off into the sand. When, some decades after these severe crises, the Rhine army was considerably reduced, these crises had given the proof that the great majority of the Gauls were no longer thinking of separation from the Italians, and the four generations that had followed since the conquest had done their work. Subsequent occurrences here were crises within the Roman world. When that world threatened to fall asunder, the West as well as the East separated itself for some time from the centre of the empire; but the separate state of Postumus was the work of necessity, not of choice, and the separation was merely de facto; the emperors who bore sway over Gaul, Britain, and Spain, laid claim to the dominion of the whole empire quite as much as their Italian rival emperors. Certainly traces enough remained of the old Celtic habits and also of the old Celtic unruliness. As bishop Hilary of Poitiers, himself a Gaul, complains of the overbearing character of his countrymen, so the Gauls are, even in the biographies of the later Caesars, designated as stubborn and ungovernable and inclined to insubordination, so that in dealing with them tenacity and sternness of government appear specially requisite. But a separation from the Roman empire, or even a renouncing of the Roman nationality, so far as there was any such at the time, was in these later centuries nowhere less thought of than in Gaul; on the contrary, the development of the Romano–Gallic culture, of which Caesar and Augustus had laid the foundation, fills the later Roman period just as it fills the Middle Ages and more recent times.

Organisation of the three Gauls.The regulation of Gaul was the work of Augustus. In the adjustment of imperial affairs after the close of the civil wars the whole of Gaul, as it had been entrusted to Caesar or had been further acquired by him, came—with the exception merely of the region on the Roman side of the Alps, which had meanwhile been joined to Italy—under imperial administration. Immediately afterwards Augustus resorted to Gaul, and in the year 72727. completed in the capital Lugudunum the census of the Gallic province, whereby the portions of the country brought to the empire by Caesar first obtained an organised land–register, and the payment of tribute was regulated for them. He did not stay long at that time, for Spanish affairs demanded his presence. But the carrying out of the new arrangement encountered great difficulties and, in various cases, resistance. It was not mere military affairs that gave occasion to Agrippa’s stay in Gaul in the year 73519., and that of the emperor himself during the years 738–74116–13.; and the governors or commanders on the Rhine belonging to the imperial house, Tiberius, stepson of Augustus, in 73816., his brother Drusus, 742–74512–9,9–7, A.D.3–5, 9–11., Tiberius again, 745–747, 757–759, 763–765, his son Germanicus, 766–769, A.D.12–15. had all of them the task of carrying on the organisation of Gaul. The work of peace was certainly no less difficult and no less important than the passages of arms on the Rhine; we perceive this in the fact that the emperor took in hand personally the laying of the foundation, and entrusted the carrying it out to the men in the empire who were most closely related to him and highest in station. It was only in those years that the arrangements, established by Caesar amidst the pressure of the civil wars, received the shape which they thereafter in the main retained. They extended over the old as over the new province; but Augustus gave up the old Roman territory, along with that of Massilia, from the Mediterranean as far as the Cevennes, as early as the year 732,22. to the senatorial government, and retained only New Gaul in his own administration. This territory, still in itself very extensive, was then broken up into three administrative districts, over each of which was placed an independent imperial governor. This division attached itself to the threefold partition of the Celtic country—already found in existence by the dictator Caesar, and based on national distinctions—into Aquitania inhabited by Iberians, the purely Celtic Gaul, and the Celto–Germanic territory of the Belgae; doubtless too it was intended in this administrative partition to lay some measure of stress on these distinctions, which tended to favour the progress of the Roman rule. This, however, was only approximately carried out, and could not be practically realised otherwise. The purely Celtic region between the Garonne and Loire was attached to the too small Iberian Aquitania; the whole left bank of the Rhine, from the Lake of Geneva to the Moselle, was joined with Belgica, although most of these cantons were Celtic; in general the Celtic stock so preponderated that the united provinces could be called “the three Gauls.” Of the formation of the two so–called “Germanies,”—nominally the compensation for the loss or abeyance of a really Germanic province, in reality the military frontier of Gaul—we shall speak in the following section.

Law and justice.Matters of law and justice were arranged in an altogether different way for the old province of Gaul and for the three new ones; the former was Latinised at once and completely, in the latter the subsisting national state of things was in the first instance merely regulated. This contrast of administration, which reaches far deeper than the formal diversity of the senatorial and imperial administration, was doubtless the primary and main occasion of the diversity, still continuing at the present day in its effects, between the regions of the Langue d’oc and Provence and those of the Langue d’oui.

Romanising of the southern province.The Romanising of the south of Gaul had not in the republican period advanced so far as that of the south of Spain. The eighty years lying between the two conquests were not to be rapidly overtaken; the military camps in Spain were far stronger and more permanent than the Gallic; the towns of Latin type were more numerous in the former than in the latter. Here doubtless in the time of the Gracchi and under their influence Narbo had been founded, the first burgess–colony proper beyond the sea; but it remained isolated, and, though a rival of Massilia in commercial intercourse, to all appearance by no means equal to it in importance. But when Caesar began to guide the destinies of Rome, here above all—in this land of his choice and of his star—neglect was retrieved. The colony of Narbo was strengthened, and was under Tiberius the most populous city in all Gaul. Thereupon four new burgess–communities were laid out, chiefly in the domain ceded by Massilia (iv.572)iv.542., the most important among them being, from a military point of view, Forum Julii (FrÉjus), the chief station of the new imperial fleet, and for trade Arelate (Arles), at the mouth of the Rhone, which soon—when Lyons rose and trade was tending more and more towards the Rhone—outstripping Narbo, became the true heir of Massilia and the great emporium of Gallo–Italic commerce. What further he himself did, and what his son did in the same sense, cannot be definitely distinguished, and historically little depends on the distinction; here, if anywhere, Augustus was nothing but the executor of Caesar’s testament. Everywhere the Celtic cantonal constitution gave way before the Italian community. The canton of the Volcae in the coast region, formerly subject to the Massaliots, received through Caesar a Latin municipal constitution on such a footing, that the “praetors” of the Volcae presided over the whole district embracing twenty–four townships,39 until not long thereafter the old arrangement disappeared even in name, and instead of the canton of the Volcae came the Latin town of Nemausus (NÎmes). In a similar way the most considerable of all the cantons of this province, that of the Allobroges, who had possession of the country northward of the IsÉre and eastward of the middle Rhone, from Valence and Lyons to the mountains of Savoy and to the lake of Geneva, obtained, probably already through Caesar, a like urban organisation and Italian rights, till at length the emperor Gaius granted the Roman franchise to the town of Vienna. So in the province as a whole the larger centres were organised by Caesar, or in the first age of the empire, on the basis of Latin rights, such as Ruscino (Roussillon), Avennio (Avignon), Aquae Sextiae (Aix), Apta (Apt). Already at the close of the Augustan age the country along both banks of the lower Rhone was completely Romanised in language and manners; the cantonal constitution throughout the province was probably set aside with the exception of slight remnants. The burgesses of the communities on whom the imperial franchise was conferred, and no less the burgesses in those of Latin rights, who had acquired for themselves and for their descendants the imperial franchise by entering the imperial army or by the holding of offices in their native towns, stood in law on a footing of complete equality with the Italians, and, like them, attained to offices and honours in the imperial service.

Lugudunum.In the three Gauls, on the other hand, there were no towns of Roman and Latin rights, or rather there was only one such town40 there, which on that account belonged to none of the three provinces or belonged to all—the town of Lugudunum (Lyons). On the extreme southern verge of imperial Gaul, immediately on the border of the municipally–organised province, at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone, on a site equally well chosen from a military and from a commercial point of view, this settlement had arisen in the year 71143. during the civil wars, primarily in consequence of the expulsion of a number of Italians settled in Vienna.41 Not having originated out of a Celtic canton,42 and hence always with a territory of narrow limits, but from the outset composed of Italians and in possession of the full Roman franchise, it stood forth unique in its kind among the communities of the three Gauls—as respects its legal relations, in some measure resembling Washington in the North American Federation. This unique town of the three Gauls was at the same time the Gallic capital. The three provinces had not any common chief authority, and, of high imperial officials, only the governor of the middle or Lugudunensian province had his seat there; but when emperors or princes stayed in Gaul they as a rule resided in Lyons. Lyons was, alongside of Carthage, the only city of the Latin half of the empire which obtained a standing garrison after the model of that of the capital.43 The only mint for imperial money, which we can point to with certainty in the West for the earlier period of the empire, is that of Lyons. Here was the headquarters of the transit–dues which embraced all Gaul; and to this as a centre the Gallic network of roads converged. But not merely had all government institutions, which were common to Gaul, their native seat in Lyons; this Roman town became also, as we shall see further on, the seat of the Celtic diet of the three provinces, and of all the political and religious institutions associated with it—of its temples and its yearly festivals. Thus Lugudunum rapidly rose into prosperity, helped onward by the rich endowment combined with its metropolitan position and by a site uncommonly favourable for commerce. An author of the time of Tiberius describes it as the second in Gaul after Narbo; subsequently it takes a place there by the side of, or before, its sister on the Rhone, Arelate. On occasion of the fire, which in the year 64 laid a great part of Rome in ashes, the Lugudunenses sent to those burnt out a subsidy of 4,000,000 sesterces (£43,500), and when the same fate befel their own town next year in a still harder way, the whole empire paid its contribution to them, and the emperor sent a like sum from his privy purse. The town rose out of its ruins with more splendour than before; and it has for almost two thousand years remained amidst all vicissitudes a great city up to the present day. In the later period of the empire, no doubt, it fell behind Treves. The town of the Treveri, named Augusta probably from the first emperor, soon gained the first place in the Belgic province; if still in the time of Tiberius Durocortorum of the Remi (Rheims) is named the most populous place of the province and the seat of the governors, an author from the time of Claudius already assigns the primacy there to the chief place of the Treveri. But Treves became the capital of Gaul44—we may even say of the West—only through the remodelling of the imperial administration under Diocletian. After Gaul, Britain, and Spain were placed under one supreme administration, the latter had its seat in Treves; and thenceforth Treves was also, when the emperors stayed in Gaul, their regular residence, and, as a Greek of the fifth century says, the greatest city beyond the Alps. But the epoch when this Rome of the north received its walls and its hot baths, which might well be named by the side of the city walls of the Roman kings and of the baths of the imperial capital, lies beyond the limits of our narrative. Through the first three centuries of the empire Lyons remained the Roman centre of the Celtic land, and that not merely because it occupied the first place in population and wealth, but because it was, like no other in the Gallic north and but few in the south, a town founded from Italy, and Roman not merely as regards rights, but as regards its origin and its character.

The cantonal organisation of the three Gauls.As the Italic town was the basis for the organisation of the south province, so the canton was for the northern, and predominantly indeed the canton of the Celtic formerly political, now communal, organisation. The importance of the distinction between town and canton is not primarily dependent on its intrinsic nature; even if it had been one of mere legal form, it would have separated the nationalities, and would have awakened and whetted, on the one hand, the feeling of their belonging to Rome, on the other hand, that of their being foreign to it. The practical diversity of the two organisations may not be estimated as of much account for this period, since the elements of the communal organisation—the officials, the council, the burgess–assembly—were the same in the one case as in the other, and distinctions going deeper, such as perhaps formally subsisted, would hardly be tolerated long by Roman supremacy. Hence the transition from the cantonal organisation to the urban was frequently effected of itself and without hindrance—we may even say, with a certain necessity, in the course of development. In consequence of this the qualitative distinctions of the two legal forms come into little prominence in our traditional accounts. Nevertheless, the contrast was certainly not a mere nominal one, but as regards the competence of the different authorities, judicature, taxation, levy, there subsisted diversities which were of importance, or at any rate seemed important, for administration, partly of themselves, partly in consequence of custom.

Character of the cantons.The quantitative distinction is definitely recognisable. The cantons, at least as they present themselves among the Celts and the Germans, are throughout tribes more than townships; this very essential element was peculiar to all Celtic territories, and was often covered over rather than obliterated even by the subsequent Romanising. Mediolanum and Brixia were indebted for their wide bounds and their lasting power essentially to the fact that they were, properly speaking, nothing but the cantons of the Insubres and the Cenomani. The facts, that the territory of the town of Vienna embraced DauphinÉ and Western Savoy, and that the equally old and almost equally considerable townships of Cularo (Grenoble) and Genava (Geneva) were down to late imperial times in point of law villages of the colony of Vienna, are likewise to be explained from the circumstance that this was the later name of the tribe of the Allobroges. In most of the Celtic cantons one township so thoroughly preponderates that it is one and the same thing whether we name the Remi or Durocortorum, the Bituriges or Burdigala; but the converse also occurs, as e.g. among the Vocontii Vasio (Vaison) and Lucus, among the Carnutes Autricum (Chartres) and Cenabum (Orleans) balance each other; and it is more than questionable whether the privileges which, according to Italic and Greek organisation, attached as a matter of course to the ring–wall in contrast to the open field, stood de jure, or even merely de facto, on a similar footing among the Celts. The counterpart to this canton in the Graeco–Italic system was much less the town than the tribe; we have to liken the Carnutes to the Boeotians, Autricum and Cenabum to Tanagra and Thespiae. The specialty of the position of the Celts under the Roman rule as compared with other nations—the Iberians, for example, and the Hellenes—turns on this, that these larger unions continued to subsist as communities in the former case, while in the latter those constituent elements, of which they were composed, formed the communities. Older diversities of national development belonging to the pre–Roman epoch may have co–operated in the matter; it may possibly have been more easily practicable to take from the Boeotians the joint diet of their towns than to break up the Helvetii into three or four districts; political unions maintain their ground even after subjugation under a central power, in cases where their dissolution would bring about disorganisation. Yet what was done in Gaul by Augustus or, if it be preferred, by Caesar, was brought about not by the force of circumstances, but chiefly by the free resolution of the government, as it alone was in keeping with the forbearance otherwise exercised towards the Celts. For there was, in fact, in the pre–Roman time and even at the time of Caesar’s conquest a far greater number of cantons than we find later; in particular, it is remarkable that the numerous smaller cantons attached by clientship to a larger one did not in the imperial period become independent, but disappeared.45 If subsequently the Celtic land appears divided into a moderate number of considerable, and some of them even very large, canton–districts, within which dependent cantons nowhere make their appearance, this arrangement had the way no doubt paved for it by the pre–Roman system of clientship, but was completely carried out only under the Roman reorganisation.

Influence of the cantonal constitution.This continued subsistence and this enlargement of the cantonal constitution must have been above all influential in determining the further political development of Gaul. While the Tarraconensian province was split up into two hundred and ninety–three independent communities (p.72), the three Gauls numbered together, as we shall see, not more than sixty–four of them. Their unity and their recollections remained unbroken; the zealous adoration, which throughout the imperial period was paid among the Volcae to the fountain–god Nemausus, shows how even here, in the south of the land and in a canton transformed into a town, there was still a vivid sense of the traditional tie that bound them together. Communities with wide bounds, firmly knit in this way by inward ties, were a power. Such as Caesar found the Gallic communities, with the mass of the people held in entire political as well as economic dependence, and an overpowerful nobility, they substantially remained under Roman rule; exactly as in pre–Roman times the great nobles, with their train of dependents and bondsmen to be counted by thousands, played the part of masters each in his own home, so Tacitus describes the state of things in Tiberius’s time among the Treveri. The Roman government gave to the community comprehensive rights, even a certain military power, so that they under certain circumstances were entitled to erect fortresses and keep them garrisoned, as was the case among the Helvetii; the magistrates could call out the militia, and had in that case the rights and the rank of officers. This prerogative was not the same in the hands of the president of a small town of Andalusia, and of the president of a district on the Loire or the Moselle of the size of a small province. The large–hearted policy of Caesar the elder, to whom the outlines of this system must necessarily be traced back, here presents itself in all its grand extent.

Diet of the three Gauls.But the government did not confine itself to leaving with the Celts their cantonal organisation; it left, or rather gave, to them also a national constitution, so far as such a constitution was compatible with Roman supremacy. As on the Hellenic nation, so Augustus conferred on the Gallic an organised collective representation, such as they in the epoch of freedom and of disorganisation had striven after, but had never attained. Under the hill crowned by the capital of Gaul, where the Saone mingles its waters with those of the Rhone, on the 1st August of the year 74212., the imperial prince Drusus, as representative of the government in Gaul, consecrated to Roma and to the Genius of the ruler the altar, at which thenceforth every year on this day the festival of these gods was to be celebrated by the joint action of the Gauls. The representatives of all the cantons chose from their midst year by year the “priest of the three Gauls,” who on the emperor’s day presented sacrifice to the emperor and conducted the festal games in connection with it. This representative council had not only a power of administering its own property by means of officials, who belonged to the chief circles of the provincial nobility, but also a certain share in the general affairs of the country. Of its immediate interference in politics there is, it is true, no other trace than that, in the serious crisis of the year 70, the diet of the three Gauls dissuaded the Treveri from rising against Rome; but it had and used the right of bringing complaints as to the imperial and domestic officials acting in Gaul; and it co–operated, moreover, if not in the imposition, at any rate in the apportionment of the taxes,46 especially seeing that these were laid on not according to the several provinces but for Gaul in general. The imperial government certainly called into existence similar institutions in all the provinces, and not merely introduced in each of them the centralisation of sacred rites, but also—what the republic had not done—conferred on each one an organ for bringing requests and complaints before the government. Yet Gaul had in this respect, as compared with all other parts of the empire, at least a privilege de facto, as indeed this institution is here alone found fully developed.47 For one thing, the united diet of the three provinces necessarily had a more independent position in presence of the legates and procurators of each of them, than, for example, the diet of Thessalonica in presence of the governor of Macedonia. But then, in the case of institutions of this nature, far less depends on the measure of the rights conferred than on the weight of the bodies therein represented; and the strength of the individual Gallic communities was transferred to the diet of Lyons, just as the weakness of the individual Hellenic communities to that of Argos. In the development of Gaul under the emperors the diet of Lyons to all appearance promoted essentially that general Gallic homogeneity, which went there hand in hand with the Latinising.

Composition of the diet.The composition of the diet, which is known to us with tolerable accuracy,48 shows in what way the question of nationalities was treated by the government. Of the sixty, afterwards sixty–four, cantons represented at the diet, only four fall to the Iberian inhabitants of Aquitania—although this region between the Garonne and the Pyrenees was divided among a very much larger number of, as a rule, small tribes—whether it was that the others were excluded altogether from representation, or that those four represented cantons were the meeting–places of canton–unions.49 Afterwards, probably in the time of Trajan, the Iberian district was separated from the Lyons diet, and had an independent representation given to it.50 On the other hand, the Celtic cantons in that organisation, with which we have formerly become acquainted, were substantially all represented at the diet, and likewise the half or wholly Germanic,51 so far as at the time of the institution of the altar they belonged to the empire. That there was no place in this cantonal representation for the capital of Gaul was a matter of course. Moreover, the Ubii do not appear at the diet of Lyons, but sacrifice at their own altar of Augustus: this was, as we saw (p.35), a remnant, which was allowed to subsist, of the intended province of Germany.

Restricted Roman franchise of the Gauls admitted to citizenship.While the Celtic nation in imperial Gaul was thus consolidated in itself, it was also guaranteed in some measure against Roman influences by the course pursued as regards the conferring of the imperial franchise for this domain. The capital of Gaul no doubt was, and continued to be, a Roman burgess–colony, and this was essentially bound up with the peculiar position which it occupied and was intended to occupy in contradistinction to the rest of Gaul. But while the south province was covered with colonies and organised throughout according to Italian municipal law, Augustus did not institute in the three Gauls a single burgess–colony; and probably even that municipal ius, which under the name of “Latin” formed an intervening stage between burgesses and non–burgesses, and afforded to its more notable holders burgess–rights in law for their persons and their descendants, was for a considerable time withheld from Gaul. The personal bestowal of the franchise, partly, according to general enactments, on the soldiers sometimes at their entering on, sometimes at their leaving, service, partly out of special favour on individuals, might certainly fall to the lot also of the Gaul; Augustus did not go so far as the republic went in prohibiting the Helvetian, for example, once for all from acquiring the Roman franchise, nor could he do so, after Caesar had in many cases given the franchise in this way to native Gauls. But he took at least from burgesses proceeding from the three Gauls—with the exception always of the Lugudunenses—the right of candidature for magistracies, and therewith at the same time excluded them from the imperial senate. Whether this enactment was made primarily in the interest of Rome or primarily in that of the Gauls, we cannot tell; certainly Augustus wished to secure both points—to check on the one hand the intrusion of the alien element into the Roman system, and thereby to purify and elevate the latter, and on the other hand to guarantee the continued subsistence of the Gallic idiosyncrasy after a fashion, which precisely by its judicious reserve promoted the ultimate blending with the Roman character more surely than an abrupt obtrusion of foreign institutions would have done.

Admission of individual communities to Latin rights.The emperor Claudius, himself born in Lyons and, as those who scoffed at him said, a true Gaul, set aside in great part these restrictions. The first town in Gaul which certainly received Italian rights was that of the Ubii, where the altar of Roman Germany was constructed; there Agrippina, the subsequent wife of Claudius, was born in the camp of her father Germanicus, and she procured in the year 50 colonial rights, probably Latin, for her native place, the modern Cologne. Perhaps at the same time, perhaps even earlier, the same privilege was procured for the town of the Treveri Augusta, the modern Treves. Some other Gallic cantons, moreover, were in this way brought nearer to the Roman type, such as that of the Helvetii by Vespasian, and also that of the Sequani (BesanÇon); but Latin rights do not seem to have met with great extension in these regions. Still less in the time of the earlier emperors was the full right of citizenship conferred in imperial Gaul on whole communities. Setting aside of the restricted franchise.But Claudius probably made a beginning by cancelling the legal restriction which excluded the Gauls that had attained to personal citizenship of the empire from the career of imperial officials; this barrier was set aside in the first instance for the oldest allies of Rome, the Haedui, and soon perhaps generally. By this step equality of position was essentially obtained. For, according to the circumstances of this epoch, the imperial citizenship had hardly any special practical value for the circles that were by their position in life excluded from an official career, and was of easy attainment for wealthy peregrini of good descent, who wished to enter on this career and on that account had need of it; but it was doubtless a slight keenly felt, when the official career remained in law closed against the Roman burgess from Gaul and his descendants.

Celtic and Latin language.While in the organising of administration the national character of the Celts was respected so far as was at all compatible with the unity of the empire, this was not the case as regards language. Even if it had been practicable to allow the communities to conduct their administration in a language, of which the controlling imperial officials could only in exceptional cases be masters, it undoubtedly was not the design of the Roman government to erect this barrier between the rulers and the ruled. Accordingly, among the coins struck in Gaul under Roman rule, and monuments erected on behalf of any community, there has been found no demonstrably Celtic inscription. The use of the language of the country otherwise was not hindered; we find as well in the southern province as in the northern monuments with Celtic inscription, written in the former case always with the Greek,52 in the latter always with the Latin53 alphabet; and probably at least several of the former, certainly all of the latter, belong to the epoch of Roman rule. The fact that in Gaul, outside of the towns having Italian rights and the Roman camps, inscribed monuments occur at all in but small number, is in all probability to be accounted for mainly by supposing that the language of the country, treated as dialect, appeared just as unsuited for such employment as the unfamiliar imperial language, and hence the erection of memorial–stones did not become generally adopted here as in the Latinised regions; the Latin probably may at that time in the greater part of Gaul have had nearly the same position, as it had subsequently in the earlier Middle ages overagainst the popular language of the time. The vigorous survival of the national language is most distinctly shown by the reproduction of the Gallic proper names in Latin, not seldom with the retention of non–Latin forms of sound. The facts that spellings like Lousonna and Boudicca with the non–Latin diphthong ou found their way even into Latin literature, that for the aspirated dental, the English th, there was even employed in Roman writing a special sign (D), that Epadatextorigus is written alongside of Epasnactus, and Ðirona alongside of Sirona—make it almost a certainty that the Celtic language, whether in the Roman territory or beyond it, had in or before this epoch undergone a certain regulation in the matter of writing, and could already at that time be written as it is written in the present day.

Evidences of continued use of Celtic.Nor are evidences wanting of its continued use in Gaul. When the names of towns Augustodunum (Autun), Augustonemetum (Clermont), Augustobona (Troyes), and various similar ones arose, Celtic was necessarily still spoken even in middle Gaul. Arrian, under Hadrian, gives in his disquisition on cavalry, the Celtic expression for particular manoeuvres borrowed from the Celts. Irenaeus, a Greek by birth, who towards the end of the second century acted as a clergyman in Lyons, excuses the defects of his style by saying that he lives in the country of the Celts, and is compelled constantly to speak in a barbarian language. In a juristic treatise from the beginning of the third century, in contrast to the rule of law that testamentary directions in general are to be drawn up in Latin or Greek, any other language, e.g., Punic or Gallic, is allowed for fidei commissa. The emperor Alexander had his end announced to him by a Gallic fortune–teller in the Gallic language. Further, the church father Jerome, who had been himself in Ancyra as well as in Treves, assures us that the Galatians of Asia Minor and the Treveri of his time spoke nearly the same language, and compares the corrupt Gallic of the Asiatic with the corrupt Punic of the African. The Celtic language has maintained itself in Brittany, just as in Wales, to the present day; but while the province no doubt obtained its present name from the insular Britons who, in the fifth century fled thither before the Saxons, the language was hardly imported for the first time with these, but was to all appearance handed down from one generation to another there for thousands of years. In the rest of Gaul naturally during the course of the imperial period Roman habits step by step gained ground; but the Celtic idiom was put an end to here, not so much by the Germanic immigration as by the Christianising of Gaul, which did not, as in Syria and Egypt, adopt and make a vehicle of the language of the country that was set aside by the government, but preached the Gospel in Latin.

Romanising stronger in the east.In the progress of Romanising, which in Gaul, apart from the southern province, continued to be left in substance to inward development, there is apparent a remarkable diversity between the eastern Gaul and the west and north—a difference, which turns doubtless in part, but not solely, on the contrast between the Germans and the Gauls. In the occurrences at and after Nero’s fall this diversity comes into prominence even as exercising a political influence. The close contact of the eastern cantons with the camps on the Rhine and the recruiting of the Rhenish legions, which took place especially here, procured earlier and more complete entrance for Roman habits there than in the region of the Loire and the Seine. On occasion of those quarrels the Rhenish cantons—the Celtic Lingones and Treveri, as well as the Germanic Ubii or rather the Agrippinenses—went with the Roman town of Lugudunum and held firmly to the legitimate Roman government, while the insurrection, at least, as was observed, in a certain sense national, originated from the Sequani, Haedui, and Arverni. In a later phase of the same struggle we find under altered party–relations the same disunion—those eastern cantons in league with the Germans, while the diet of Rheims refuses to join them.

Native road–measurement.While the Gallic land was thus in respect of language treated in the main just like the other provinces, we again meet with forbearance towards its old institutions in the regulations as to weights and measures. It is true that, alongside of the general imperial ordinance, which was issued in this respect by Augustus, the local observances continued in many places to subsist agreeably to the tolerant, or rather indifferent, attitude of the government in such things; but it was only in Gaul that the local arrangement afterwards supplanted that of the empire. The roads in the whole Roman empire were measured and marked according to the unit of the Roman mile (1.48 kilom.), and up to the end of the second century this applied also to those provinces. But from Severus onward its place was taken in the three Gauls and the two Germanies by a mile correlated no doubt to the Roman, but yet different and with a Gallic name, the leuga (2.22 kilomÈtres), equal to one and a half Roman miles. Severus cannot possibly have wished in this matter to make a national concession to the Celts; this is not in keeping either with the epoch or with that emperor in particular, who stood in an attitude of expressed hostility to these very provinces; it must have been considerations of expediency that influenced him. These could only be based on the fact that the national road–measure, the leuga or else the double leuga, the German rasta, which latter corresponds to the French lieue, continued to subsist in these provinces after the introduction of the unit of road–measure to a much greater extent than was the case in other countries of the empire. Augustus must have extended the Roman mile formally to Gaul and placed the itineraries and the imperial highways on that footing, but must have in reality left to the country the old road–measurement; and so it may have happened that the later administration found it less inconvenient to acquiesce in the double unit for postal traffic54 than to continue to make use of a road–measure practically unknown in the country.

Religion of the country.Of far greater significance is the attitude of the Roman government to the religion of the country; in this beyond doubt the Gallic nationality found its most solid support. Even in the south province the worship of non–Roman deities must have held its ground long, much longer than, for example, in Andalusia. The great commercial town of Arelate, indeed, has no other dedications to show than to gods worshipped also in Italy; but in FrÉjus, Aix, NÎmes, and the whole coast region generally, the old Celtic divinities were in the imperial epoch not much less worshipped than in the interior of Gaul. In the Iberian part of Aquitania also we meet numerous traces of the indigenous worship altogether different from the Celtic. All the images of gods, however, that have come to light in the south of Gaul bear a stamp deviating less from the usual type than the monuments of the north; and, above all, it was easier to manage matters with the national gods than with the national priesthood, which meets us only in imperial Gaul and in the British Islands,—the Druids (iv. 236)iv.225.. It would be vain labour to seek to give any conception of the internal character of the Druidic doctrine, strangely composed of speculation and imagination; only some examples may be allowed to illustrate its singular and fearful nature. The power of speech was symbolically represented in a bald–headed, wrinkled, sunburnt old man, who carries club and bow, and from whose perforated tongue fine golden chains run to the ears of the man that follows him—betokening the flying arrows and the crushing blows of the old man mighty in speech, to whom the hearts of the multitude willingly listen. This was the Ogmius of the Celts; to the Greeks he appeared as a Charon dressed up as Herakles. An altar found in Paris shows us three images of the gods with annexed inscription; in the middle Jovis, on his left Vulcan, on his right Esus “the horrid with his cruel altars,” as a Roman poet terms him, and yet a god of commerce and of peaceful dealing;55 he is girded for labour like Vulcan, and, as the latter carries hammer and tongs, so he hews a willow tree with the axe. A frequently recurring deity, probably named Cernunnos, is represented cowering with crossed legs; on its head it bears a stag’s antlers, on which hangs a neck chain, and holds in its lap a money–bag; before it stand cattle and goats—apparently, as if it were meant to express the ground as the source of riches. The enormous difference of this Celtic Olympus—void of all chasteness and beauty and delighting in quaint and fantastic mingling of things very earthly—from the simply human forms of the Greek, and the simply human conceptions of the Roman, religion enables us to guess the barrier which stood between these conquered and their conquerors. With this were connected, moreover, very serious practical consequences; a comprehensive traffic in secret remedies and charms, in which the priests played at the same time the part of physicians, and in which, alongside of the conjuring and the blessing, human sacrifices occurred, and healing of the sick by the flesh of those thus slain. That direct opposition to the foreign rule prevailed in the Druidism of this period cannot at least be proved; but, even if this were not the case, it is easy to conceive that the Roman government, which elsewhere let alone all local peculiarities of worship with indifferent toleration, contemplated this Druidical system, not merely in its extravagances but as a whole, with apprehension. The institution of the Gallic annual festival in the purely Roman capital of the country, and with the exclusion of any link attaching it to the national cultus, was evidently a counter–move of the government against the old religion of the country, with its yearly council of priests at Chartres, the centre of the Gallic land. Augustus, however, took no further direct step against Druidism than that of prohibiting any Roman citizen from taking part in the Gallic national cultus. Tiberius in his more energetic way acted with decision, and prohibited altogether this priesthood with its retinue of teachers and healing practitioners; but it does not quite speak for the practical success of this enactment that the same prohibition was issued afresh under Claudius: it is narrated of the latter that he caused a Gaul of rank to be beheaded, simply because he was convicted of having brought into application the charms customary in his own country for a good result in proceedings before the emperor. That the occupation of Britain, which had been from of old the chief seat of these priestly actings, was in good part resolved on in order thereby to get at the root of the evil, will be fully set forth in the sequel (p.185). In spite of all this the priesthood still played an important part in the revolt which the Gauls attempted after the downfall of the Claudian dynasty; the burning of the Capitol—so the Druids preached—announced the revolution in affairs, and the beginning of the dominion of the north over the south. But, although this oracle came subsequently to be fulfilled, it was not so through this nation and in favour of its priests. The peculiarities of the Gallic worship doubtless still exerted their effect even later; when in the third century a distinctive Gallo–Roman empire came into existence for some time, Hercules played the first part on its coins partly in his Graeco–Roman form, partly as Gallic Deusoniensis or Magusanus. But of the Druids there is no further mention, except only so far as the sage women in Gaul down to the time of Diocletian passed under the name of Druidesses and uttered oracles, and the ancient noble houses still for long boasted of Druidic progenitors on their ancestral roll. The religion of the country fell into the background still more rapidly perhaps than the native language, and Christianity, as it pushed its way, hardly encountered in the former any serious resistance.

Economic condition.Southern Gaul, withdrawn more than any other province by its position from hostile assault, and, like Italy and Andalusia, a land of the olive and the fig, rose under the imperial government to great prosperity and rich urban development. The amphitheatre and the sarcophagus–field of Arles, the “mother of all Gaul,” the theatre of Orange, the temples and bridges still standing erect to this day in and near NÎmes, are vivid witnesses of this down to the present time. Even in the northern provinces the old prosperity of the country was enhanced by the lasting peace, which, certainly with lasting pressure of taxation, accrued to the land by means of the foreign rule. “In Gaul,” says a writer of the time of Vespasian, “the sources of wealth are at home, and flood the earth with their abundance.”56 Perhaps nowhere do equally numerous and equally magnificent country–houses make their appearance,—especially in the east of Gaul, on the Rhine and its affluents; we discern clearly the rich Gallic nobility. Famous is the testament of a man of rank among the Lingones, who directs that there should be erected for him a memorial tomb and a statue of Italian marble or best bronze, and that, among other things, his whole implements for hunting and fowling be burned along with him. This reminds us of the elsewhere mentioned hunting–parks enclosed for miles in the Celtic country, and of the prominent part which the Celtic hounds for the chase and Celtic huntsmanship play in the Xenophon of Hadrian’s time, who does not fail to add that the hunting system of the Celts could not have been known to Xenophon the son of Gryllos. To this connection belongs likewise the remarkable fact that in the Roman army of the imperial period the cavalry was, properly speaking, Celtic, not merely inasmuch as it was pre–eminently recruited from Gaul, but also because the manoeuvres, and even the technical expressions, were in good part derived from the Celts; we see here how, after the disappearance of the old burgess–cavalry under the republic, the cavalry became reorganised by Caesar and Augustus with Gallic men and in Gallic fashion. The basis of this notable prosperity was agriculture, towards the elevation of which Augustus himself worked with energy, and which yielded rich produce in all Gaul, apart perhaps from the steppe–region on the Aquitanian coast. The rearing of cattle was also lucrative, especially in the north, particularly the rearing of swine and sheep, which soon acquired importance for manufactures and for export; the Menapian hams (from Flanders) and the Atrebatian and Nervian cloth–mantles (near Arras and Tournay) went forth in later times to the whole empire.

Culture of the vine.Of special interest was the development of the culture of the vine. Neither the climate nor the government was favourable to it. The “Gallic winter” remained long proverbial among the inhabitants of the southern lands; as, indeed, it was on this side that the Roman empire extended farthest towards the north. But narrower limits were drawn for the Gallic cultivation of the vine by Italian commercial competition. Certainly the god Dionysos accomplished his conquest of the world on the whole slowly, and only step by step did the drink prepared from grain give way to the juice of the vine; but it was a result of the prohibitive system that in Gaul beer maintained itself at least in the north as the usual spirituous drink throughout the whole period of the empire; and even the emperor Julian, on his abode in Gaul, came into conflict with this pseudo–Bacchus.57 The imperial government did not indeed go so far as the republic, which placed under police prohibition the culture of the vine and olive on the south coast of Gauliii.177;ii.375.(iii.175; ii.398); but the Italians of their time were withal the true sons of their fathers. The flourishing condition of the two great emporia on the Rhine, Arles and Lyons, depended in no small degree on the market for Italian wine in Gaul; by which fact we may measure what importance the culture of the vine must at that time have had for Italy. If one of the most careful administrators who held the imperial office, Domitian, issued orders that in all the provinces at least the half of the vines should be destroyed58—which, it is true, were not so carried out—we may thence infer that the diffusion of the vine–culture was at all events subjected to serious restriction on the part of the government. In the Augustan age it was still unknown in the northern part of the Narbonese province (iv.227, note)iv.217., and, though here too it was soon taken up, it yet appears to have remained through centuries restricted to the Narbonensis and southern Aquitania; of Gallic wines the better age knows only the Allobrogian and the Biturigian, according to our way of speaking, the Burgundian and the Bordeaux.59 It was only when the reins of the empire fell from the hands of the Italians, in the course of the third century, that this was changed, and the emperor Probus (276–282) at length threw the culture of the vine open to the provincials. Probably it was only in consequence of this that the vine gained a firm footing on the Seine as on the Moselle. “I have,” writes the emperor Julian, “spent a winter” (it was the winter of 357–358) “in dear Lutetia, for so the Gauls term the little town of the Parisii, a small island lying in the river and walled all round. The water is there excellent and pure to look at and to drink; the inhabitants have a pretty mild winter, and good wine is grown among them; in fact, some even rear figs, covering them up in winter with wheaten straw as with a cloth.” And not much later the poet of Bordeaux, in his pleasing description of the Moselle, depicts the vineyards as bordering that river on both banks, “just as my own vines wreathe for me the yellow Garonne.”

Network of highways.The internal intercourse, as well as that with the neighbouring lands, especially with Italy, must have been very active, and the network of roads must have been much developed and fostered. The great imperial highway from Rome to the mouth of the Baetis, which has been mentioned, under Spain (p.74), was the main artery for the land traffic of the south province; the whole stretch, kept in repair in republican times from the Alps to the Rhone by the Massaliots, from thence to the Pyrenees by the Romans, was laid anew by Augustus. In the north the imperial highways led mainly to the Gallic capital or to the great camps on the Rhine; yet sufficient provision seems to have been made for other requisite communication.

Hellenism in south Gaul.If the southern province in the olden time belonged intellectually to the Hellenic type, the decline of Massilia and the mighty progress of Romanism in southern Gaul produced, no doubt, an alteration in that respect; nevertheless this portion of Gaul remained always, like Campania, a seat of Hellenism. The fact that Nemausus, one of the towns sharing the heritage of Massilia, shows on its coins of the Augustan period Alexandrian numbering of the years and the arms of Egypt, has been not without probability referred to the settlement by Augustus himself of veterans from Alexandria in this city, which presented no attitude of opposition to Hellenism. It may, doubtless, also be brought into connection with the influence of Massilia, that to this province, at least as regards descent, belonged that historian, who—apparently in intentional contrast to the national–Roman type of history, and occasionally with sharp sallies against its most noted representatives, Sallust and Livy—upheld the Hellenic type, the Vocontian Pompeius Trogus, author of a history of the world beginning with Alexander and the kingdoms of the Diadochi, in which Roman affairs are set forth only within this framework, or by way of appendix. Beyond doubt in this he was only retaliating, which was strictly within the province of the literary opposition of Hellenism; still it remains remarkable that this tendency should find its Latin representative, and an adroit and fluent one, here in the Augustan age. From a later period Favorinus deserves mention, of an esteemed burgess–family in Arles, one of the chief pillars of polymathy in Hadrian’s time; a philosopher with an Aristotelian and sceptical tendency, at the same time a philologue and rhetorician, the scholar of Dion of Prusa, the friend of Plutarch and of Herodes Atticus, assailed polemically in the field of science by Galen and in light literature by Lucian, sustaining lively relations generally with the noted men of letters of the second century, and not less with the emperor Hadrian. His manifold investigations, among other matters, concerning the names of the companions of Odysseus that were devoured by Scylla, and as to the name of the first man who was at the same time a man of letters, make him appear as the genuine representative of the erudite dealing in trifles that was then in vogue; and his discourses for a cultivated public on Thersites and the ague, as well as his conversations in part recorded for us “on all things and some others,” give not an agreeable, but a characteristic, picture of the literary pursuits of the time. Here we have to call attention to what he himself reckoned among the remarkable points of his career in life, that he was by birth a Gaul and at the same time a Greek author. Although the literati of the West frequently gave, as occasion offered, specimens of their Greek, but few of them made use of this as the proper language of their authorship; in this case its use would be influenced in part by the scholar’s place of birth.

Latin literature in the south province.South Gaul, moreover, had so far a share in the Augustan bloom of literature, that some of the most notable forensic orators of the later Augustan age, Votienus Montanus († 27 A.D.), from Narbo—named the Ovid of orators—and Gnaeus Domitius Afer (consul in 39 A.D.) from Nemausus, belonged to this province. Generally, as was natural, Roman literature extended its circulation also over this region; the poets of Domitian’s time sent their free copies to friends in Tolosa and Vienna. Pliny, under Trajan, is glad that his minor writings find even in Lugudunum not merely favourable readers, but booksellers who push their sale. But we cannot produce evidence for the south of any such special influence, as Baetica exercised in the earlier, and northern Gaul in the later, imperial period, on the intellectual and literary development of Rome. The fair land yielded richly wine and fruits; but the empire drew from it neither soldiers nor thinkers.

Literature in imperial Gaul.Gaul proper was in the domain of science the promised land of teaching and learning; this presumably was due to the peculiar development and to the powerful influence of the national priesthood. Druidism was by no means a naive popular faith, but a highly developed and pretentious theology, which in the good church–fashion strove to enlighten, or at any rate control, all spheres of human thought and action, physics and metaphysics, law and medicine; which demanded of its scholars unwearied study, it was said, for twenty years, and sought and found these its scholars pre–eminently in the ranks of the nobility. The suppression of the Druids by Tiberius and his successors must have affected in the first instance these schools of the priests, and have led to their being at least publicly abolished; but this could only be done effectively when the national training of youth was brought face to face with the Romano–Greek culture, just as the Carnutic council of Druids was confronted with the temple of Roma in Lyons. How early this took place in Gaul, without question under the guiding influence of the government, is shown by the remarkable fact that in the formerly mentioned revolt under Tiberius the insurgents attempted above all to possess themselves of the town of Augustodunum (Autun), in order to get into their power the youths of rank studying there, and thereby to gain or to terrify the great families. In the first instance these Gallic Lycea may well have been, in spite of their by no means national course of training, a leaven of distinctively Gallic nationality; it was hardly an accident that the most important of them at that time had its seat, not in the Roman Lyons, but in the capital of the Haedui, the chief among the Gallic cantons. But the Romano–Hellenic culture, though perhaps forced on the nation and received at first with opposition, penetrated, as gradually the antagonism wore off, so deeply into the Celtic character, that in time the scholars applied themselves to it more zealously than the teachers. The training of a gentleman, somewhat after the manner in which it at present exists in England, based on the study of Latin and in the second place of Greek, and vividly reminding us in the development of the school–speech, with its finely cut points and brilliant phrases, of more recent literary phenomena springing from the same soil, became gradually in the West a sort of chartered right of the Gallo–Romans. The teachers there were probably at all times better paid than in Italy, and above all were better treated. Quintilian already mentions with respect among the prominent forensic orators several Gauls; and not without design Tacitus, in his fine dialogue on oratory, makes the Gallic advocate, Marcus Aper, the defender of modern eloquence against the worshippers of Cicero and Caesar. The first place among the universities of Gaul was subsequently taken by Burdigala, and indeed generally Aquitania was, as respects culture, far in advance of middle and northern Gaul; in a dialogue written there at the beginning of the fifth century one of the speakers, a clergyman from ChÂlon–sur–SaÔne, hardly ventures to open his mouth before the cultivated Aquitanian circle. This was the sphere of working of the formerly–mentioned professor Ausonius, who was called by the emperor Valentinian to be teacher of his son Gratian (born in 359), and who has in his miscellaneous poems raised a monument to a large number of his colleagues; and, when his contemporary Symmachus, the most famous orator of this epoch, sought a private tutor for his son, he had one brought from Gaul in recollection of his old teacher who had his home on the Garonne. By its side Augustodunum remained always one of the great centres of Gallic studies; we have still the speeches which were made before the emperor Constantine, asking, and giving thanks for, the re–establishment of this school of instruction.

The representation in literature of this zealous scholastic activity is of a subordinate kind, and of slight value—declamations, which were stimulated especially by the later conversion of Treves into an imperial residence and the frequent sojourn of the court in the Gallic land, and occasional poems of a multifarious character. The making of verses was, like the supply of speeches, a necessary function of the teaching office, and the public teacher of literature was at the same time a poet not exactly born, but bespoken. At least the depreciation of poetry, which is characteristic of the otherwise similar Hellenic literature of the same epoch, did not prevail among these Occidentals. In their verses the reminiscence of the school and the artifice of the pedant predominate,60 and pictures of vivid and real feeling, as in the Moselle–trip of Ausonius, but rarely occur. The speeches, which we are indeed in a position to judge of only by some late addresses delivered at the imperial palace, are models in the art of saying little in many words, and of expressing absolute loyalty with an equally absolute lack of thought. When a wealthy mother sent her son, after he had acquired the copiousness and ornateness of Gallic speech, onward to Italy to acquire also the Roman dignity,61 this was certainly more difficult of acquisition for these Gallic rhetoricians than the pomp of words. For the early Middle age such performances as these exercised decisive influence; through them in the first Christian period Gaul became the seat proper of pious verses and withal the last refuge of scholastic literature, while the great mental movement within Christianity did not find its chief representatives there.

Constructive and plastic art.In the sphere of the constructive and plastic arts the climate itself called forth various phenomena unknown, or known only in their germs, to the south proper. Thus the heating of the air, which in Italy was usual only for baths, and the use of glass windows, which was likewise far from common there, were comprehensively brought into application in Gallic architecture. But we may perhaps speak of a development of art peculiar to this region, in so far as figures and, in progress of time, representations of scenes of daily life emerge in the Celtic territory with relatively greater frequency than in Italy, and replace the used–up mythological representations by others more pleasing. It is certainly almost in the sepulchral monuments alone that we are able to recognise this tendency to the real and the genre, but it doubtless prevailed in the practice of art generally. The arch of Arausio (Orange), from the early imperial period, with its Gallic weapons and standards; the bronze statue of the Berlin museum found at Vetera, representing apparently the god of the place with ears of barley in his hair; the Hildesheim silver–plate, probably proceeding in part from Gallic workshops, show a certain freedom in the adoption and transformation of Italian suggestions. The tomb of the Julii at St. Remy, near Avignon, a work of the Augustan age, is a remarkable evidence of the lively and spirited reception of Hellenic art in southern Gaul, as well in its bold architectural structure of two square storeys crowned by a peristyle with conic dome, as also in its reliefs which, in style most nearly akin to the Pergamene, present battle and hunting scenes with numerous figures, taken apparently from the life of the persons honoured, in picturesque animated execution. It is remarkable that the acme of this development is reached—by the side of the southern province—in the district of the Moselle and the Maas. This region, not placed so completely under Roman influence as Lyons and the headquarter–towns on the Rhine, and more wealthy and civilised than the districts on the Loire and the Seine, seems to have in some measure produced of itself this exercise of art. The tomb of a man of rank in Treves, well known under the name of the Igel Column, gives a clear idea of the tower–like monuments, crowned with pointed roof and covered on all sides with representations of the life of the deceased, that are here at home. Frequently we see on them the landlord, to whom his peasants present sheep, fish, fowls, eggs. A tombstone from Arlon, near Luxemburg, shows, besides the portraits of the two spouses, on the one side a cart and a woman with a fruit–basket, on the other a sale of apples above two men squatting on the ground. Another tombstone from Neumagen, near Treves, has the form of a ship; in this sit six mariners plying the oars; the cargo consists of large casks, alongside of which the merry–looking steersman seems—one might imagine—to be rejoicing over the wine which they contain. We may perhaps bring them into connection with the serene picture which the poet of Bordeaux has preserved to us of the Moselle valley, with its magnificent castles, its many vineyards, and its stirring doings of fishermen and of sailors, and find in it the proof that in this fair land, more than fifteen hundred years ago, there was already the pulsation of peaceful activity, serene enjoyment, and warm life.