Chapter III: The Gallic Provinces (1)

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.

[Sidenote: 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. 230 f.} 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 Languedoc[38]; 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 716 {38.}, then on the part of Marcus Valerius Messalla, the well-known patron of the Roman poets, who in the year 726 or 727 {28 or 27.}, 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.

[Sidenote: Insurrections.]

[Sidenote: Under Tiberius.]

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. 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.}, Tiberius again, 745-747 {9-7.}, 757-759 {A.D. 3-5.}, 763-765 {A.D. 9-11.}, 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 town[40] 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 Gaul[44]--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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 742 {12.}, 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Admission of individual communities to Latin rights.]

[Sidenote: Setting aside of the restricted franchise.]

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. 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.

[Sidenote: 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 Latin[53] 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 (Ð), 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 traffic[54] than to continue to make use of a road-measure practically unknown in the country.

[Sidenote: Religion of the country.]