The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
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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), Augustonemētum (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 manœuvres 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