The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
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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.
Chapter IV.
Roman Germany and the Free Germans
Limitation of Roman Germany.
The two Roman provinces of Upper and Lower Germany were the result of that defeat of the Roman arms and of Roman policy under the reign of Augustus which has been already (p. 55 f.) described. The original province of Germany, which embraced the country from the Rhine to the Elbe, subsisted only twenty years, from the first campaign of Drusus, 742 U.C.[12.], down to the battle of Varus and the fall of Aliso, 762 U.C.[A.D. 9.];but as, on the one hand, it included the military camps on the left bank of the Rhine—Vindonissa, Mogontiacum, Vetera—and, on the other hand, even after that disaster, more or less considerable portions of the right bank remained Roman, the governorship and the command were not, in a strict sense, done away by that catastrophe, although they were, so to speak, placed in suspense. The internal organisation of the Three Gauls has been already set forth; they embraced the whole country as far as the Rhine without distinction of descent—except that the Ubii, who had only been brought over to settle in Gaul during the last crises, did not belong to the sixty–four cantons, while the Helvetii, the Triboci, and generally the districts elsewhere held in occupation by the Rhenish troops, doubtless did so belong. The intention had been to gather together the German cantons between the Rhine and Elbe into a similar association under Roman supremacy, as had been constituted in the case of the Gallic cantons, and to bestow upon it, in the altar to Augustus of the Ubian town—the germ of the modern Cologne—an executive centre similar to that which the altar of Augustus at Lyons formed for Gaul; for the more remote future the transference of the chief camp to the right bank of the Rhine, and the restoration of the left, at least in the main, to the governor of the Belgica, were doubtless in contemplation. But these projects came to an end with the legions of Varus; the Germanic altar of Augustus on the Rhine became or remained the altar of the Ubii;