The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 1

by Theodor Mommsen

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.

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.

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.

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 72727. 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 73519., and that of the emperor himself during the years 738–74116–13.; and the governors or commanders on the Rhine belonging to the imperial house, Tiberius, stepson of Augustus, in 73816., his brother Drusus, 742–74512–9, 9–7, A.D. 3–5, 9–11., Tiberius again, 745–747, 757–759, 763–765, 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.

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.

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.

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 71143. 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.

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.