The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  Caesar and Augustus reorganized Gaul into four provinces: Gallia Narbonensis in the south, known to the Romans as provincia, and to us as Provence, then largely Hellenized through the Greek settlements on the Mediterranean coast; Aquitania in the southwest, chiefly Iberian in population; in the center Gallia Lugdunensis, overwhelmingly Celtic; and in the northeast Belgica, predominantly German. Rome recognized and abetted these ethnic divisions to forestall united revolt. The tribal cantons were retained as administrative areas; the magistrates were chosen by owners of property, whose allegiance was secured by Rome’s support of them against the lower classes; and Roman citizenship was granted as a prize to loyal and useful Gauls. A provincial assembly of representatives chosen from every canton met each year in Lyons; at first it limited itself cautiously to the ritual of Augustan worship, but soon it passed on to sending requests to the Roman governors, then recommendations,.then demands. The administration of justice was taken out of the hands of the Druids, who were suppressed, and France received Roman law. For almost a century Gaul submitted peacefully to the new yoke; for a moment in A.D. 68, and again in 71, revolt flared under Vindex and Civilis; but the people gave scant support to these movements, and the love of liberty yielded to the enjoyment of prosperity, security, and peace.

  Under the Pax Romana Gaul became one of the richest parts of the Empire. Rome marveled at the wealth of the Gallic nobles who entered the Senate under Claudius, and a century later Florus contrasted the flourishing economy of Gaul with the decline of Italy.33 Forests were cleared, swamps were drained, agriculture was improved even to the introduction of a mechanical reaper,34 and the grape and the olive spread into every canton of Gaul. Already in the first century Pliny and Columella praised the wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. There were large estates tilled by serfs and slaves and owned by the forerunners of medieval feudal lords; but there were also many small proprietors, and wealth was more evenly distributed in ancient Gaul, as in modern France, than in almost any other civilized state. Progress was especially rapid in industry. By A.D. 200 Gallic potters and ironworkers were stealing the markets of Germany and the West from Italy, Gallic weavers were doing the largest textile business in the Empire, and the factories of Lyons were turning out not only commercial glass, but wares of artistic excellence.35 Industrial techniques were handed down from father to son and formed a precious part of the classical heritage. Over 13,000 miles of road, built or improved by Roman engineers, teemed with transport and trade.

  Enriched with this expanded economic life, the towns of ancient Celtica became the cities of Roman Gaul. In Aquitania the capital, Burdigala (Bordeaux), was one of the busiest of Atlantic ports; Limonum (Limoges), Avaricum (Bourges), and Augustonemetum (Clermont-Ferrand) were already rich; the last paid Zenodotus 400,000 sesterces for a colossus of Mercury.36 In Gallia Narbonensis there were so many cities that Pliny described it as “more like Italy than a province.”37 Farthest west was Tolosa (Toulouse), famous for its schools. Narbo (Narbonne), capital of the province, was in our first century the greatest city of Gaul, the chief port of exit for Gallic goods to Italy and Spain; “here,” Sidonius Apollinaris would say, “are walls, promenades, taverns, arches, porticoes, a forum, a theater, temples, baths, markets, meadows, lakes, a bridge, and the sea.”38 Farther east, on the great Via Domitia from Spain to Italy, lay Nemausus (Nîmes). Its pretty Maison Carrée was raised by Augustus and the town to commemorate his grandsons Lucius and Caius Caesar; its inner colonnade is lamentably sunk into the cella wall, but its free Corinthian columns are as lovely as any in Rome. The amphitheater, which seated 20,000, is still the scene of periodical pageantry. The Roman aqueduct that brought Nîmes fresh water became in time the Pont du Gard, or Bridge of the Gard River; standing today as a gigantic ruin in the rugged countryside beyond the city, its massive lower arches contrast to fine effect with the smaller arches above them to make the structure a revealing witness of Rome’s engineering art.

  Eastward on the Mediterranean, at the mouth of the Rhone, Caesar founded Arelate (Aries), in the hope that it would replace rebellious Massalia as a shipbuilding center and port. Massalia (Marseilles), already old when Caesar was born, remained Greek in language and culture until his death. Through its harbor Hellenic agriculture, arboriculture, viticulture, and culture had entered Gaul; here, above all, western Europe exchanged its goods for those of the classic world. It was one of the great university centers of the Empire, especially renowned for its school of law. It declined after Caesar, but maintained its ancient status as a free city, independent of the provincial governor. Farther east were Forum Iulii (Fréjus), Antipolis (Antibes), and Nicaea (Nice)—this in the little province of the Maritime Alps. Sailing up the Rhone from Arelate the traveler came to Avenio (Avignon) and Arausio (Orange); here a powerful arch survives from Augustus’ days, and an immense Roman theater still hears ancient plays.

  The largest of the Gallic provinces was Gallia Lugdunensis, named from Lugdunum (Lyons), its capital. Situated at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saône, and at the crossing of great highways built by Agrippa, the city became the trading center of a rich region and the capital of all Gaul. Iron, glass, and ceramic industries helped to sustain a population of 200,000 in our first century.40 Northward lay Cabillonum (Chalon-sur-Saône), Caesarodunum (Tours), Augustodunum (Autun), Cenabum (Orléans), and Lutetia (Paris). “I have spent the winter” (357-58), writes the Emperor Julian, “in our beloved Lutetia, for so the Gauls term the little town of the Parisii, a small island in the river. . . . Good wine is grown here.”41

  Belgica, which included parts of France and Switzerland, was almost entirely agricultural; its industry was for the most part attached to the villas whose numerous remains suggest a baronial life of comfort and luxury. Here Augustus founded the cities now known as Soissons, St. Quentin, Senlis, Beauvais, and Trèves. The last, Augusta Trevirorum, rose to prominence as the headquarters of the army defending the Rhine; under Diocletian it replaced Lyons as the capital of Gaul, and in the fifth century it was the greatest city north of the Alps. It is still rich in classic remains—the Porta Nigra in its Roman wall, the Baths of St. Barbara, the Tomb of the Secundini family at nearby Igel, and the crude reliefs on the fortress blocks of neighboring Neumagen.

  In and around these towns life slowly changed its surface and obstinately renewed its elements. The Gauls kept their character, their breeches, and for three centuries their language. Latin triumphed in the sixth century, chiefly through its use by the Roman Church, but it was already being clipped and nosed into French. In Gaul Rome achieved her greatest triumph in the transmission of civilization. Great French historians like Jullian and Funck-Brentano 43 have thought that France would have fared better without the Roman conquest, but a still greater historian believed that the Roman conquest was the sole alternative to a German conquest of Gaul. If Caesar had not won there, says Mommsen,

  the migration of peoples would have occurred 400 years sooner than it did, and would have come at a time when Italian civilization had not become naturalized either in Gaul, or on the Danube, or in Africa and Spain. Inasmuch as the great Roman general and statesman with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists of the Romano-Greek world; inasmuch as with firm hand he established the new system of aggressive defense, down even to its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the Empire by rivers and artificial ramparts ... he gained for the Greco-Roman culture the interval necessary to civilize the West.44

  The Rhine was the frontier between classic and primitive civilization. Gaul could not defend that frontier; Rome did; and that fact determined the history of Europe to this day.

  V. BRITAIN

  About 1200 B.C.. a branch of the Celts crossed over from Gaul and settled in England. They found there a mingled population of dark-haired people, possibly Iberian, and light-haired Scandinavians. They conquered these natives, married them, and spread through England and Wales. About 100 B.C.. (for so the egocentric foreshortening of
history telescopes eventful centuries, and erases vital generations from a crowded memory) another branch of Celts came from the Continent and dispossessed their kinsmen of southern and eastern Britain. When Caesar came he found the island peopled by several independent tribes, each with its expansive king. He gave to all the population the name Britami, from a Gallic tribe, so called, just south of the Channel, in the belief that the same tribe inhabited both shores.

  Celtic Britain was in customs, language, and religion essentially like Celtic Gaul, but its civilization was less advanced. It passed from bronze to iron some six centuries before Christ, three centuries after Gaul. Pytheas, the Massiliot explorer, sailing the Atlantic to England about 350 B.C., found the Cantii of Kent already prosperous with agriculture and trade. The soil was fertile from abundant rain and contained rich ores of copper, iron, tin, and lead. By Caesar’s time domestic industry was able to supply an active commerce among the tribes and with the Continent, and coins were minted in bronze and gold.45 His invasions were reconnaissance raids; he brought back the double assurance that the tribes were incapable of united resistance and that the crops were adequate to feed an invading army coming at the proper time. A century later (A.D. 43) Claudius crossed the Channel with 40,000 men whose discipline, armament, and skill proved too much for the natives; Britain in her turn became a Roman province. In 61 a British tribal queen, Boudicca or Boadicea, led a furious revolt, alleging that Roman officers had ravished both her daughters, plundered her realm, and sold many of its freemen into slavery. While the Roman governor Paulinus was busy conquering the Isle of Man, Boudicca’s army overcame the single legion that opposed it and marched upon Londinium—already, says Tacitus, “the chief residence of merchants, and a great mart of trade.”46 Every Roman found there or in Verulamium (St. Albans) was killed; 70,000 Romans and their allies were slain before Paulinus and his legions caught up with the rebel force. Boudicca, standing with her daughters in a chariot, fought heroically in defeat. She drank poison, and 80,000 Britons were put to the sword.

  Tacitus tells how his father-in-law Agricola, as governor of Britain (A.D. 78-84), brought civilization to a “rude, scattered, and warlike people” by establishing schools, spreading the use of Latin, and encouraging cities and rich men to build temples, basilicas, and public baths. “By degrees,” says the caustic historian, “the charms of vice gained admission to British hearts; baths, porticoes, and elegant banquets grew into vogue; and the new manners, which in reality only served to sweeten slavery, were by the unsuspecting Britons called the arts of polished humanity.”47 In swift campaigns Agricola carried these arts, and Roman rule, to the Clyde and the Forth, defeated an army of 30,000 Scots, and wished to go farther when Domitian recalled him. Hadrian built a wall (122-27) seventy miles across the island from Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne as a defense against not-unsuspecting Scots; and twenty years later Lollius raised farther north the thirty-three-mile Wall of Antoninus between the firths of Clyde and Forth. For over two centuries these fortifications kept Britain safe for Rome.

  As Rome’s rule achieved stability it became more lenient. The cities were managed by native senates, assemblies, and magistrates, and the countryside was left, as in Gaul, to tribal chieftains amenable to Roman surveillance. It was not so urban a civilization as Italy’s, nor so rich as Gaul’s; but it was under Roman stimulus and protection that most British cities now took form. Four of them were Roman “colonies,” whose freemen enjoyed Roman citizenship: Camulodunum (Colchester), the first Roman capital of Britain, and the seat of the provincial council; Lindum, whose modern name Lincoln declares its ancient privilege; Eboracum (York), an important military post; and Glevum, whose name Gloucester merges Glevum with Chester, the Anglo-Saxon word for town.II Chester, Winchester, Dorchester, Chichester, Leicester, Silchester, and Manchester appear to have had their beginnings in the first two centuries of Roman rule. These were small towns, each with some 6000 souls; but they had paved and drained streets, forums, basilicas, temples, and houses with stone foundations and tiled roofs. Viroconium (Wroxeter) had a basilica accommodating 6000 persons, and public baths where hundreds could bathe at once. The hot springs of Aquae Salis (“Salt Waters”), now Bath, made it a fashionable resort in ancient days, as its surviving thermae show. Londinium rose to economic and military importance because of its position on the Thames and its radiating roads. It grew to a population of 60,000 and soon replaced Camulodunum as Britain’s capital.49

  Most of the homes in Roman London were of brick and stucco, in smaller towns, of wood. Climate determined their architecture: a gable roof to shed rain and snow, and many windows to let in whatever sun might shine; for even “on clear days,” said Strabo, “the sun is to be seen only for three or four hours.”50 But interiors followed the Roman style—mosaic floors, large bathrooms, muraled walls, and (far more than in Italian homes) central heating by hot-air conduits in walls and floors. Coal—mined from surface veins—was used not only for warming houses but for industrial processes like smelting lead. Apparently the mines of ancient Britain were owned by the state, but were leased to private entrepreneurs.51 There was a factory (fabrica) at Bath for the manufacture of iron weapons,52 and probably the making of pottery, bricks, and tiles had reached the factory stage; but most industries were carried on in homes, small shops, and villas. Five thousand miles of Roman roads, and innumerable waterways, were the arteries of a brisk internal trade. A modest foreign commerce, inverting the custom of Britain today, exported raw materials for manufactured goods.

  How deeply did Roman civilization, in its four centuries of domination, penetrate the life and soul of Britain? Latin became the language of politics, law, literature, and the educated minority, but in the countryside and among many workers in the towns the Celtic tongue survived; even now, in Wales and the Isle of Man, it holds its own. Roman schools in Britain spread literacy and determined the Roman form of the English alphabet; and a stream of Latin words poured into English speech. Temples were built to Roman gods, but the common man cherished his Celtic deities and feasts. Even in the cities Rome sank no lasting roots. The people submitted apathetically to a rule that brought them a fructifying peace and such prosperity as the island would not experience again until the Industrial Revolution.

  VI. THE BARBARIANS

  The decisions of Augustus and Tiberius not to attempt the conquest of Germany were among the pivotal events of European history. Had Germany been conquered and Romanized like Gaul, nearly all Europe west of Russia would have had one organization, one government, one classic culture, perhaps one tongue; and central Europe might have served as a buffer against those eastern hordes whose pressure upon the Germans caused the Germanic invasions of Italy.

  We call them Germans, but they themselves have never used this name, and no one knows when it came.III They were in classic days a medley of independent tribes occupying Europe between the Rhine and the Vistula, between the Danube and the North and Baltic Seas. Gradually, in the two centuries from Augustus to Aurelius, they passed from migratory hunting and herding to agriculture and village life; but they were still so far nomadic that they rapidly exhausted the land they tilled and then moved on to conquer new acres by the sword. If we may believe Tacitus, war was the German’s meat and drink:

  To cultivate the earth, and wait the regular produce of the seasons, is not the maxim of a German; you will more readily persuade him to attack the enemy and provoke honorable wounds on the field of battle. To earn by the sweat of your brow what you might gain at the price of your blood is in the opinion of a German a sluggish principle, unworthy of a soldier.53

  The Roman historian, lamenting the deterioration of his own people under luxury and peace, described with the exaggeration of a moralist the martial qualities of the Germans, and the ardor with which the women spurred them into battle, often fighting by their side. Flight from the enemy meant lifelong disgrace, in many cases suicide. Strabo described the Germans as “wilder and taller than the Gauls,”54 and
Seneca, as if he had read Tacitus, drew ominous conclusions: “To those vigorous bodies, to those souls unwitting of pleasures, luxury, and wealth, add but a little more tactical skill and discipline—I say no more; you [Romans] will only be able to hold your own against them by returning to the virtues of your sires.”55

  In peace, Tacitus reports, these warriors were correspondingly indolent. The men spent their time (presumably after hunting or harvesting) in eating heavy meals of meat and drinking rivers of beer, while the women and children did the work of the home.56 The German bought his wife from her father by a gift of cattle or weapons; he had the power of life and death over her and their children, subject to the approval of the tribal assembly; nevertheless, women were held in high honor, were often asked to decide tribal disputes, and were as free to divorce their husbands as these were to divorce them.57 Some chieftains had several wives, but the usual German family was monogamous and maintained (we are assured) a lofty level of marital morality. Adultery was “seldom heard of” and was punished in the woman by cutting off her hair and driving her naked through the streets to be flogged as she fled. The wife was allowed to practice abortion if she wished,58 but normally she bore many children. A man without children was so rare that wills were not made; it was assumed that the property of the family would go down from father to son, generation after generation.59