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

by Theodor Mommsen

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.

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.

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 74212., 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.

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.

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.

Admission of individual communities to Latin rights.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. Setting aside of the restricted franchise.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.

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 (D), 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.

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.

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.

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.