The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
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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 711[43.] 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