The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
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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 727[27.] 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 735[19.], and that of the emperor himself during the years 738–741[16–13.]; and the governors or commanders on the Rhine belonging to the imperial house, Tiberius, stepson of Augustus, in 738[16.], his brother Drusus, 742–745[12–9, 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