The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Historical Significance of the Conquests of Caesar
This task Gaius Caesar undertook. It is more than an error,
it is an outrage upon the sacred spirit dominant in history,
to regard Gaul solely as the parade ground on which Caesar
exercised himself and his legions for the impending civil war.
Though the subjugation of the west was for Caesar so far a means
to an end that he laid the foundations of his later height of power
in the Transalpine wars, it is the especial privilege of a statesman
of genius that his means themselves are ends in their turn. Caesar
needed no doubt for his party aims a military power, but he did not
conquer Gaul as a partisan. There was a direct political necessity
for Rome to meet the perpetually threatened invasion of the Germans
thus early beyond the Alps, and to construct a rampart there
which should secure the peace of the Roman world. But even this
important object was not the highest and ultimate reason for which Gaul
was conquered by Caesar. When the old home had become too
narrow for the Roman burgesses and they were in danger of decay,
the senate's policy of Italian conquest saved them from ruin.
Now the Italian home had become in its turn too narrow; once more
the state languished under the same social evils repeating themselves
in similar fashion only on a greater scale. It was a brilliant
idea, a grand hope, which led Caesar over the Alps--the idea
and the confident expectation that he should gain there for his
fellow-burgesses a new boundless home, and regenerate the state
a second time by placing it on a broader basis.
Caesar in Spain
The campaign which Caesar undertook in 693 in Further Spain, may
be in some sense included among the enterprises which aimed at
the subjugation of the west. Long as Spain had obeyed the Romans,
its western shore had remained substantially independent of them
even after the expedition of Decimus Brutus against the Callaeci(1),
and they had not even set foot on the northern coast; while
the predatory raids, to which the subject provinces found
themselves continually exposed from those quarters, did no small
injury to the civilization and Romanizing of Spain. Against these
the expedition of Caesar along the west coast was directed.
He crossed the chain of the Herminian mountains (Sierra de Estrella)
bounding the Tagus on the north; after having conquered their
inhabitants and transplanted them in part to the plain, he reduced
the country on both sides of the Douro and arrived at the northwest
point of the peninsula, where with the aid of a flotilla brought
up from Gades he occupied Brigantium (Corunna). By this means
the peoples adjoining the Atlantic Ocean, Lusitanians and Callaecians,
were forced to acknowledge the Roman supremacy, while the conqueror
was at the same time careful to render the position of the subjects
generally more tolerable by reducing the tribute to be paid to Rome
and regulating the financial affairs of the communities.
But, although in this military and administrative debut of the great
general and statesman the same talents and the same leading ideas are
discernible which he afterwards evinced on a greater stage, his agency
in the Iberian peninsula was much too transient to have any deep effect;
the more especially as, owing to its physical and national peculiarities,
nothing but action steadily continued for a considerable time could
exert any durable influence there.
Gaul
A more important part in the Romanic development of the west
was reserved by destiny for the country which stretches between
the Pyrenees and the Rhine, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean,
and which since the Augustan age has been especially designated
by the name of the land of the Celts--Gallia--although strictly
speaking the land of the Celts was partly narrower, partly much
more extensive, and the country so called never formed a national
unity, and did not form a political unity before Augustus.
For this very reason it is not easy to present a clear picture
of the very heterogeneous state of things which Caesar encountered
on his arrival there in 696.
The Roman Province
Wars and Revolts There
In the region on the Mediterranean, which, embracing approximately
Languedoc on the west of the Rhone, on the east Dauphine and Provence,
had been for sixty years a Roman province, the Roman arms had seldom
been at rest since the Cimbrian invasion which had swept over it.
In 664 Gaius Caelius had fought with the Salyes about Aquae Sextiae,
and in 674 Gaius Flaccus,(2) on his march to Spain, with other
Celtic nations. When in the Sertorian war the governor Lucius Manlius,
compelled to hasten to the aid of his colleagues beyond the Pyrenees,
returned defeated from Ilerda (Lerida) and on his way home
was vanquished a second time by the western neighbours
of the Roman province, the Aquitani (about 676;(3)), this seems
to have provoked a general rising of the provincials between
the Pyrenees and the Rhone, perhaps even of those between the Rhone
and Alps. Pompeius had to make his way with the sword through
the insurgent Gaul to Spain,(4) and by way of penalty for their
rebellion gave the territories of the Volcae-Arecomici
and the Helvii (dep. Gard and Ardeche) over to the Massiliots;
the governor Manius Fonteius (678-680) carried out these arrangements
and restored tranquillity in the province by subduing the Vocontii
(dep. Drome), protecting Massilia from the insurgents,
and liberating the Roman capital Narbo which they invested.
Despair, however, and the financial embarrassment which the participation
in the sufferings of the Spanish war(5) and generally the official
and non-official exactions of the Romans brought upon the Gallic
provinces, did not allow them to be tranquil; and in particular
the canton of the Allobroges, the most remote from Narbo,
was in a perpetual ferment, which was attested by the "pacification"
that Gaius Piso undertook there in 688 as well as by the behaviour
of the Allobrogian embassy in Rome on occasion of the anarchist plot
in 691,(6) and which soon afterwards (693) broke into open revolt
Catugnatus the leader of the Allobroges in this war of despair,
who had at first fought not unsuccessfully, was conquered at Solonium
after a glorious resistance by the governor Gaius Pomptinus.
Bounds
Relations to Rome
Notwithstanding all these conflicts the bounds of the Roman
territory were not materially advanced; Lugudunum Convenarum,
where Pompeius had settled the remnant of the Sertorian army,(7)
Tolosa, Vienna and Genava were still the most remote Roman townships
towards the west and north. But at the same time the importance
of these Gallic possessions for the mother country was continually
on the increase. The glorious climate, akin to that of Italy,
the favourable nature of the soil, the large and rich region lying
behind so advantageous for commerce with its mercantile routes
reaching as far as Britain, the easy intercourse by land and sea
with the mother country, rapidly gave to southern Gaul an economic
importance for Italy, which much older possessions, such as those
in Spain, had not acquired in the course of centuries; and as
the Romans who had suffered political shipwreck at this period sought
an asylum especially in Massilia, and there found once more Italian
culture and Italian luxury, voluntary emigrants from Italy also
were attracted more and more to the Rhone and the Garonne.
"The province of Gaul," it was said in a sketch drawn ten years
before Caesar's arrival, "is full of merchants; it swarms with Roman
burgesses. No native of Gaul transacts a piece of business without
the intervention of a Roman; every penny, that passes from one hand
to another in Gaul, goes through the account books of the Roman
burgesses." From the same description it appears that in addition
to the colonists of Narbo there were Romans cultivating land
and rearing cattle, resident in great numbers in Gaul; as to which,
however, it must not be overlooked that most of the provincial land
possessed by Romans, just like the greater part of the English
possessions in the earliest times in America, was in the hands
of the high nobility living in Italy, and those farmers and graziers
consisted for the most part of their stewards--slaves or freedmen.
Incipient Romanizing
It is easy to understand how under such circumstances civilization
and Romanizing rapidly spread among the natives. These Celts
were not fond of agriculture; but their new masters compelled them
to exchange the sword for the plough, and it is very credible
that the embittered resistance of the Allobroges was provoked in part
by some such injunctions. In earlier times Hellenism had also
to a certain degree dominated those regions; the elements
of a higher culture, the stimulus to the cultivation of the vine
and the olive,(8) to the use of writing(9) and to the coining of money,
came to them from Massilia. The Hellenic culture was in this case
far from being set aside by the Romans; Massilia gained through
them more influence than it lost; and even in the Roman period
Greek physicians and rhetoricians were publicly employed
in the Gallic cantons. But, as may readily be conceived, Hellenism
in southern Gaul acquired through the agency of the Romans the same
character as in Italy; the distinctively Hellenic civilization
gave place to the Latino-Greek mixed culture, which soon made
proselytes here in great numbers. The "Gauls in the breeches,"
as the inhabitants of southern Gaul were called by way of contrast
to the "Gauls in the toga" of northern Italy, were not indeed
like the latter already completely Romanized, but they were even now
very perceptibly distinguished from the "longhaired Gauls"
of the northern regions still unsubdued. The semiculture becoming
naturalized among them furnished, doubtless, materials enough
for ridicule of their barbarous Latin, and people did not fail
to suggest to any one suspected of Celtic descent his "relationship
with the breeches"; but this bad Latin was yet sufficient
to enable even the remote Allobroges to transact business
with the Roman authorities, and even to give testimony in the Roman
courts without an interpreter.
While the Celtic and Ligurian population of these regions
was thus in the course of losing its nationality, and was languishing
and pining withal under a political and economic oppression,
the intolerable nature of which is sufficiently attested by their
hopeless insurrections, the decline of the native population here
went hand in hand with the naturalizing of the same higher culture
which we find at this period in Italy. Aquae Sextiae and still
more Narbo were considerable townships, which might probably be
named by the side of Beneventum and Capua; and Massilia, the best
organized, most free, most capable of self-defence, and most
powerful of all the Greek cities dependent on Rome, under its
rigorous aristocratic government to which the Roman conservatives
probably pointed as the model of a good urban constitution,
in possession of an important territory which had been considerably
enlarged by the Romans and of an extensive trade, stood by the side
of those Latin towns as Rhegium and Neapolis stood in Italy
by the side of Beneventum and Capua.
Free Gaul
Matters wore a different aspect, when one crossed the Roman frontier.
The great Celtic nation, which in the southern districts already
began to be crushed by the Italian immigration, still moved
to the north of the Cevennes in its time-hallowed freedom.
It is not the first time that we meet it: the Italians had already
fought with the offsets and advanced posts of this vast stock
on the Tiber and on the Po, in the mountains of Castile and Carinthia,
and even in the heart of Asia Minor; but it was here that the main stock
was first assailed at its very core by their attacks. The Celtic race
had on its settlement in central Europe diffused itself chiefly
over the rich river-valleys and the pleasant hill-country
of the present France, including the western districts of Germany
and Switzerland, and from thence had occupied at least the southern
part of England, perhaps even at this time all Great Britain
and Ireland;(10) it formed here more than anywhere else a broad,
geographically compact, mass of peoples. In spite of
the differences in language and manners which naturally
were to be found within this wide territory, a close mutual intercourse,
an innate sense of fellowship, seems to have knit together
the tribes from the Rhone and Garonne to the Rhine and the Thames;
whereas, although these doubtless were in a certain measure locally
connected with the Celts in Spain and in the modern Austria,
the mighty mountain barriers of the Pyrenees and the Alps
on the one hand, and the encroachments of the Romans and the Germans
which also operated here on the other, interrupted the intercourse
and the intrinsic connection of the cognate peoples far otherwise
than the narrow arm of the sea interrupted the relations
of the continental and the British Celts. Unhappily we are not
permitted to trace stage by stage the history of the internal development
of this remarkable people in these its chief seats; we must be content
with presenting at least some outline of its historical culture
and political condition, as it here meets us in the time of Caesar.
Population
Agriculture and the Rearing of Cattle
Gaul was, according to the reports of the ancients, comparatively
well peopled. Certain statements lead us to infer that in the Belgic
districts there were some 200 persons to the square mile--
a proportion such as nearly holds at present for Wales
and for Livonia--in the Helvetic canton about 245;(11) it is probable
that in the districts which were more cultivated than the Belgic
and less mountainous than the Helvetian, as among the Bituriges,
Arverni, Haedui, the number rose still higher. Agriculture
was no doubt practised in Gaul--for even the contemporaries of Caesar
were surprised in the region of the Rhine by the custom of manuring
with marl,(12) and the primitive Celtic custom of preparing beer
(-cervesia-) from barley is likewise an evidence of the early
and wide diffusion of the culture of grain--but it was not held
in estimation. Even in the more civilized south it was reckoned not
becoming for the free Celts to handle the plough. In far higher
estimation among the Celts stood pastoral husbandry, for which
the Roman landholders of this epoch very gladly availed themselves
both of the Celtic breed of cattle, and of the brave Celtic slaves
skilled in riding and familiar with the rearing of animals.(13)
Particularly in the northern Celtic districts pastoral husbandry
was thoroughly predominant. Brittany was in Caesar's time
a country poor in corn. In the north-east dense forests, attaching
themselves to the heart of the Ardennes, stretched almost without
interruption from the German Ocean to the Rhine; and on the plains
of Flanders and Lorraine, now so fertile, the Menapian and Treverian
herdsman then fed his half-wild swine in the impenetrable oak-forest.
Just as in the valley of the Po the Romans made the production
of wool and the culture of corn supersede the Celtic feeding
of pigs on acorns, so the rearing of sheep and the agriculture
in the plains of the Scheldt and the Maas are traceable
to their influence. In Britain even the threshing of corn
was not yet usual; and in its more northern districts agriculture
was not practised, and the rearing of cattle was the only known mode
of turning the soil to account. The culture of the olive and vine,
which yielded rich produce to the Massiliots, was not yet prosecuted
beyond the Cevennes in the time of Caesar.
Urban Life
The Gauls were from the first disposed to settle in groups;
there were open villages everywhere, and the Helvetic canton
alone numbered in 696 four hundred of these, besides a multitude
of single homesteads. But there were not wanting also walled towns,
whose walls of alternate layers surprised the Romans both by their
suitableness and by the elegant interweaving of timber and stones
in their construction; while, it is true, even in the towns
of the Allobroges the buildings were erected solely of wood.
Of such towns the Helvetii had twelve and the Suessiones an equal number;
whereas at all events in the more northern districts, such as among
the Nervii, while there were doubtless also towns, the population
during war sought protection in the morasses and forests rather
than behind their walls, and beyond the Thames the primitive
defence of the wooden barricade altogether took the place
of towns and was in war the only place of refuge for men and herds.
Intercourse
In close association with the comparatively considerable
development of urban life stands the activity of intercourse
by land and by water. Everywhere there were roads and bridges.
The river-navigation, which streams like the Rhone, Garonne, Loire,
and Seine, of themselves invited, was considerable and lucrative.
But far more remarkable was the maritime navigation of the Celts.
Not only were the Celts, to all appearance, the nation that first
regularly navigated the Atlantic ocean, but we find that the art
of building and of managing vessels had attained among them
a remarkable development. The navigation of the peoples
of the Mediterranean had, as may readily be conceived from the nature
of the waters traversed by them, for a comparatively long period
adhered to the oar; the war-vessels of the Phoenicians, Hellenes,
and Romans were at all times oared galleys, in which the sail
was applied only as an occasional aid to the oar; the trading vessels
alone were in the epoch of developed ancient civilization "sailers"
properly so called.(14) On the other hand the Gauls doubtless
employed in the Channel in Caesar's time, as for long afterwards,
a species of portable leathern skiffs, which seem to have been
in the main common oared boats, but on the west coast of Gaul
the Santones, the Pictones, and above all the Veneti sailed in large
though clumsily built ships, which were not impelled by oars
but were provided with leathern sails and iron anchor-chains;
and they employed these not only for their traffic with Britain,
but also in naval combat. Here therefore we not only meet
for the first time with navigation in the open ocean, but we find
that here the sailing vessel first fully took the place
of the oared boat--an improvement, it is true, which the declining
activity of the old world did not know how to turn to account,
and the immeasurable results of which our own epoch of renewed culture
is employed in gradually reaping.
Commerce
Manufactures
With this regular maritime intercourse between the British
and Gallic coasts, the very close political connection between
the inhabitants on both sides of the Channel is as easily explained
as the flourishing of transmarine commerce and of fisheries.
It was the Celts of Brittany in particular, that brought the tin
of the mines of Cornwall from England and carried it by the river
and land routes of Gaul to Narbo and Massilia. The statement,
that in Caesar's time certain tribes at the mouth of the Rhine subsisted
on fish and birds' eggs, may probably refer to the circumstance
that marine fishing and the collection of the eggs of sea-birds
were prosecuted there on an extensive scale. When we put together
and endeavour to fill up the isolated and scanty statements which have
reached us regarding the Celtic commerce and intercourse, we come
to see why the tolls of the river and maritime ports play a great
part in the budgets of certain cantons, such as those of the Haedui
and the Veneti, and why the chief god of the nation was regarded
by them as the protector of the roads and of commerce, and at
the same time as the inventor of manufactures. Accordingly the Celtic
industry cannot have been wholly undeveloped; indeed the singular
dexterity of the Celts, and their peculiar skill in imitating
any model and executing any instructions, are noticed by Caesar.
In most branches, however, their handicraft does not appear
to have risen above the ordinary level; the manufacture of linen
and woollen stuffs, that subsequently flourished in central
and northern Gaul, was demonstrably called into existence only
by the Romans. The elaboration of metals forms an exception,
and so far as we know the only one. The copper implements
not unfrequently of excellent workmanship and even now malleable,
which are brought to light in the tombs of Gaul, and the carefully
adjusted Arvernian gold coins, are still at the present day
striking witnesses of the skill of the Celtic workers in copper
and gold; and with this the reports of the ancients well accord,
that the Romans learned the art of tinning from the Bituriges
and that of silvering from the Alesini--inventions, the first of which
was naturally suggested by the traffic' in tin, and both of which
were probably made in the period of Celtic freedom.
Mining
Hand in hand with dexterity in the elaboration of the metals went
the art of procuring them, which had attained, more especially in
the iron mines on the Loire, such a degree of professional skill
that the miners played an important part in the sieges. The opinion
prevalent among the Romans of this period, that Gaul was one
of the richest gold countries in the world, is no doubt refuted
by the well-known nature of the soil and by the character
of the articles found in the Celtic tombs, in which gold appears
but sparingly and with far less frequency than in the similar
repositories of the true native regions of gold; this conception
no doubt had its origin merely from the descriptions which Greek
travellers and Roman soldiers, doubtless not without strong
exaggeration, gave to their countrymen of the magnificence
of the Arvernian kings,(15) and of the treasures of the Tolosan
temples.(16) But their stories were not pure fictions. It may
well be believed that in and near the rivers which flow
from the Alps and the Pyrenees gold-washing and searches for gold,
which are unprofitable at the present value of labour, were worked
with profit and on a considerable scale in ruder times and with a system
of slavery; besides, the commercial relations of Gaul may,
as is not unfrequently the case with half-civilized peoples,
have favoured the accumulation of a dead stock of the precious metals.
Art and Science
The low state of the arts of design is remarkable,
and is the more striking by the side of this mechanical skill
in handling the metals. The fondness for parti-coloured and brilliant
ornaments shows the want of a proper taste, which is sadly confirmed
by the Gallic coins with their representations sometimes exceedingly
simple, sometimes odd, but always childish in design, and almost
without exception rude beyond parallel in their execution.
It is perhaps unexampled that a coinage practised for centuries
with a certain technical skill should have essentially limited itself
to always imitating two or three Greek dies, and always
with increasing deformity. On the other hand the art of poetry
was highly valued by the Celts, and intimately blended
with the religious and even with the political institutions
of the nation; we find religious poetry, as well as that of the court
and of the mendicant, flourishing.(17) Natural science and philosophy
also found, although subject to the forms and fetters of the theology
of the country, a certain amount of attention among the Celts;
and Hellenic humanism met with a ready reception wherever
and in whatever shape it approached them. The knowledge of writing
was general at least among the priests. For the most part in free Gaul
the Greek writing was made use of in Caesar's time, as was done
among others by the Helvetii; but in its most southern districts
even then, in consequence of intercourse with the Romanized Celts,
the Latin attained predominance--we meet with it, for instance,
on the Arvernian coins of this period.
Political Organization
Cantonal Constitution
The political development of the Celtic nation also presents
very remarkable phenomena. The constitution of the state was based
in this case, as everywhere, on the clan-canton, with its prince,
its council of the elders, and its community of freemen capable
of bearing arms; but the peculiarity in this case was that it never
got beyond this cantonal constitution. Among the Greeks and Romans
the canton was very early superseded by the ring-wall as the basis
of political unity; where two cantons found themselves together
within the same walls, they amalgamated into one commonwealth;
where a body of burgesses assigned to a portion of their fellow-
burgesses a new ring-wall, there regularly arose in this way a new
state connected with the mother community only by ties of piety
and, at most, of clientship. Among the Celts on the other hand
the "burgess-body" continued at all times to be the clan; prince
and council presided over the canton and not over any town,
and the general diet of the canton formed the authority of last resort
in the state. The town had, as in the east, merely mercantile
and strategic, not political importance; for which reason the Gallic
townships, even when walled and very considerable such as Vienna
and Genava, were in the view of the Greeks and Romans nothing
but villages. In the time of Caesar the original clan-constitution
still subsisted substantially unaltered among the insular Celts
and in the northern cantons of the mainland; the general assembly held
the supreme authority; the prince was in essential questions bound
by its decrees; the common council was numerous--it numbered
in certain clans six hundred members--but does not appear
to have had more importance than the senate under the Roman kings.
In the more stirring southern portion of the land, again,
one or two generations before Caesar--the children of the last kings
were still living in his time--there had occurred, at least
among the larger clans, the Arverni, Haedui, Sequani, Helvetii,
a revolution which set aside the royal dominion and gave the power
into the hands of the nobility.