quam tuus ex nostro corde recedat honos.[181]
Even if conquered peoples chafe under the yoke of Rome at first, Rutilius is confident that it is all for their good:
Profuit invitis, te dominante, capi.
The great achievement of the Empire is that it made a city of the world: ‘urbem fecisti quod prius orbis erat’. Rome, he maintains, is greater than her deeds: ‘Quod regnas minus est quam quod regnare mereris’. And as her buildings dazzle his sight, he exclaims in admiration:
Ipsos crediderim sic habitare deos.[182]
The whole of Gaul was not equally loyal. While the South remained predominantly Roman to the end, the North, ‘audax Germania’, Claudian calls it,[183] was less friendly, and its hostility increased as time went on.
The Aeduan panegyrist, who implores help for the future from the Emperor Constantine, while he thanks him for the benefits of the past, shows the bearing of physical features upon this difference between North and South.[184] In contrast with the cultivated fields of the South, its ‘viae faciles’, its ‘navigera flumina’, we find in Belgica ‘vasta omnia, inculta squalentia, multa tenebrosa, etiam militaris vias ita confragosas et alternis montibus arduas atque praecipites, ut vix semiplena carpenta, interdum vacua, transmittant’. The roads are very bad (regionum nostrarum aditum atque aspectum tam foedum tamque asperum), and even an ardent panegyrist must admit that loyalty is damped, when, in addition to an exiguous harvest, you must experience difficulties of transport. It is remarkable how important a part the road plays in the Roman Empire, one way or another. Here, barbarism on the one hand and bad roads on the other proved a formidable combination against civilization. It is not surprising to find, therefore, that as we go north traces of Gallo-Roman schools become fewer, inscriptions bearing on education almost non-existent, and Greek almost unknown.
But the testimony of literature to the Romanization of Gaul is far less eloquent than that of the extant remains. The modern traveller in Provence might well be tempted to exclaim with Pliny ‘Italia verius quam provincia’. The theatres and amphitheatres at Fréjus and Arles, the arch and theatre at Orange, the temple of Augustus and Livia at Vienne, and above all the Maison Carrée, the Porta Augusta and the Thermae at Nîmes, and the neighbouring Pont du Gard, challenge comparison with the great buildings of Italy and even of Rome herself. And these are but the most notable examples of evidence which may be found in less degree in almost every village of Provence.
Outside the ‘old province’, though the evidence is naturally less impressive in bulk and less widely spread in area, yet the walls and gates of Autun, the amphitheatre at Paris, the Porte de Mars at Reims, the arch at Langres, the Porte Noire and amphitheatre at Besançon, and the theatre at remote Lillebonne, tell the tale of Roman influence on the Tres Galliae; and to these must be added the great buildings of Trèves which, as an imperial capital, occupies a place apart.
And what is writ large on these great monuments is written no less unmistakably in the contents of the French museums. That of the world-famous statues of Venus three come from Narbonensis is significant of the taste of Gallic connoisseurs. These great masterpieces were of course imported, but the discoveries at Martres Tolosanes attest the existence of local schools of sculpture.[185] Even if the reliefs of Gallic tombstones in the north and centre diverge somewhat sharply from the Roman convention in preferring the naturalistic to the allegorical in their choice of subject, yet the form is predominantly classical. And the readiness of Gaul to learn the industrial arts of Italy is strikingly proved by its pottery. The manufacture of the red ‘Arretine’ ware or ‘terra sigillata’ was already flourishing among the Ruteni in the first century A.D., and met with such success that it was actually exported to Italy, and finally displaced the home product.[186] In this useful if humble art, Gaul, like Greece, took captive her captor.