Gallic Pottery
And what a work it was! Archæology is now beginning to prove to history that the so-called barbarians were by no means always savages. Even the “naked woad-stained” Britons had their arts and industries and political systems. The Gauls, when Cæsar attacked them, were well on the road to civilisation. Druidism was a declining force, town-life was beginning, and there was even a fairly artistic coinage. The Gallic pottery is by no means destitute of beauty. As soldiers the Gauls showed many of the qualities of their descendants, a devoted impetuosity in the charge, coupled with a lack of tenacity in resistance which always cost them dear. Much of Cæsar’s success was due to his skill in dividing them against themselves, but many of his difficulties arose from their fickle disposition. Mommsen, like a true Bismarckian German, has a striking comparison of the ancient Gallic Celt with the modern Irishman.
Gallic pottery
“On the eve,” he says, “of parting from this remarkable nation, we may be allowed to call attention to the fact that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire and the Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits which we are accustomed to recognise as marking the Irish. Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields; the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation ... the droll humour ... the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds of past ages, and the most decided talent for rhetoric and poetry; the curiosity—no trader was allowed to pass before he had told in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news—and the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts ... the childlike piety which sees in the priest a father and asks him for advice in all things” (this, by the way, was apparently a characteristic of the contemporary Germans also), “the unsurpassed fervour of national feeling, and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen cling together almost like one family in opposition to the stranger; the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance leader that presents himself, but at the same time the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage equally remote from presumption and pusillanimity, to perceive the right time for waiting and for striking, to obtain or even barely to tolerate any organisation, any sort of fixed military or political discipline. It is, and remains, at all times and places the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisitive, credulous, amiable, clever, but—from a political point of view—thoroughly useless nation; and therefore its fate has been always and everywhere the same.”
The internal politics of Gaul seem to have been marked by a division between two parties, one the conservative party of the aristocratic knights, the other a nationalist and popular faction. Cæsar used these divisions for the furtherance of his scheme of conquest. He was not only a consummate general with an instinct for strategic points and huge combinations, but he was also a superb regimental officer in the making of soldiers. By the end of his ten years he had forged a small but invincible army devoted to his interests and entirely confident in his leadership. Personally, moreover, the Roman debauchee was the best soldier in the army. Physically he was a stranger to weariness or fatigue. He could travel immense distances with incredible rapidity, alone on horseback, or with a handful of followers. He seemed ubiquitous. In the battle, when his men wavered, he would leap down into the ranks, sword in hand, or snatch the standard from the hand of a centurion and fight among the foremost. No detail of fortification or commissariat escaped him, and he, more than any one else, showed the power of engineering in warfare. In the supreme battle against Pompeius he even carried his devotion to the spade beyond reasonable limits when he tried to circumvallate the much larger camp of his enemies. One of his most surprising exploits was when half Gaul, supposed to be pacified, rose in sudden revolt under Vercingetorix. With a much smaller army he chased the rebels into the fortress of Alesia, neglecting for the time all communication with his base, and fully aware that a still larger army would soon advance to the relief of the besieged. He therefore entrenched himself outside the gates of the city and kept off the relieving force with one hand while he continued the siege with the other. But while he was capable of brilliant strokes of audacity like this, he was also a cold and cautious organiser of victory, ready to meet his enemies on their own ground and with their own weapons.
Plate XVII. TEMPLE OF VESTA, TIVOLI