CHAPTER III.

The Organisation of Gaul.

After his constitutional position had thus been settled, Augustus was free to begin the great work of provincial re-organization. Towards the end of B.C. 27 he left Rome for Gaul and Spain, and did not return till the beginning of 24. The nearness of those provinces to Italy, their wealth and military importance made it imperative that Augustus should take them in hand at the earliest possible moment. In Gaul Cæsar's conquests had been terribly conclusive, but the country was still vexed by inter-tribal wars and German incursions, and the immense resources which it offered in men and

money had not yet been made fully available for the Roman treasury and the Roman army. No census had as yet been taken in the Gallic provinces, and without the census there could be no apportionment of the taxes at once effectual and just. There was similar work to be done in Spain, and there the task was further complicated by the fact that the conquest was not yet complete, and that the Cantabrian and Asturian highlanders "untaught," as the Roman Poet says of them, "to bear our yoke," were accustomed to plunder their more peaceable fellow countrymen living in the plains, and even to hold their ground against Roman armies. All the circumstances, therefore, impelled Augustus at once to set to work on that organisation and Romanisation of

[1. Cantabrum indoctum iuga ferre nostra. Hor. Odes, ii. 6, 2.]

Gaul and Spain by which the Roman Empire most evidently fulfilled its mission in the world. By holding Gaul for four centuries and stemming back the Germans for that period, the Romans made France possible and all that that name implies. Their work in keeping alike the German and the Moorish invader (for we hear of Moorish incursions into Baetica as early as the first century) out of Spain, in the same way secured that country for the Latin world, and the part which Augustus took in those two great tasks was by itself enough to give his name a right to a place among the makers of modern Europe.

The great war with Carthage took the Romans into Spain-only by occupying that country could Hannibal's communications be effectually cut; and the occupation of Spain made it necessary to secure the land-route thither through Southern Gaul. For a long time the Romans left it to their ally Massilia (Marseilles), to keep the way open for them; but the Massiliots had difficulties of their own with the mountain tribes of the Alps and of the Central Plateau, and their appeals to Rome for aid inevitably led to interference on a great scale. In the year B.C. 121, Rome defeated the Allobroges (Dauphiné and part of Savoy) and the Arverni (Auvergne); in 118 the colony of Narbo was founded, and about this time the Province, including not only the country still called Provence, but Languedoc and Roussillon on the other side of the Rhône as well, was definitively put under direct Roman administration. The colonial schemes of Gaius Gracchias, who had been on the look-out for land on which to settle the brokendown Italian farmers, had no doubt also a good deal

1. "Semitam tantum Galliæ tenebamus antea," says Cicero (de prov. cons. xiii. 33) of the period before Caesar's conquests.

to do with the institution alike of the colony and the province at that particular moment. A flood of Roman settlers poured into the country both then and for long afterwards, and the fertile land was so speedily Romanised that by the time of Augustus the "Provincia Narbonensis" was hardly less Italian than Italy itself.

Outside the "Province" the rest of Gaul went its own way for another sixty years or so. Then, in the year B.C. 58, Caesar began that marvellous career of conquest which in seven years laid Gaul, from the Atlantic to the Rhine, and from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, prostrate at the feet of Rome. The establishment of the three new provinces of Belgica, Celtica and Aquitania followed in B.C. 50. Celtica comprised the middle zone of France, extending from the Rhone to Brest, and from the Seine to the Garonne. Its population was, as the name shows, purely Celtic. Belgica was Celtic, with Germanic elements; Aquitania was predominantly Iberian. The new provinces corresponded roughly to the three-fold racial division of the country. For the next six years all Gaul, that is all four provinces, including Narbonensis, was under one command, but in the year of his death Cæsar assigned Narbonensis to Lepidus and Belgica to Hirtius, while Celtica and Aquitania fell to Munatius Plancus, the founder of Lyons. In the year B.C. 38 Agrippa was in Aquitaine, but his commission must have been a large one as we find him in the same year actively engaged in driving back German invaders across the Rhine. A decade later campaigns were conducted by conducted by Carinas against the Morini (Picardy), by Nonius Gallus against the Treviri (Moselle valley and the Eiffel), and by that brilliant young aristocrat, Messalla, in Aquitaine. Messalla not [1. See Appendix at end of chapter.]

only conquered the Aquitanian peoples, but, if we may trust the poet Tibullus, who was a member of his staff, pushed his troops in so many directions and so far as to touch the river Loire and even the distant Saone. Evidently, what with risings against Rome and inter-tribal wars, the whole country was still far from tranquil, and the boundaries of its provinces were readily ignored whenever military convenience or necessity suggested.

These constant military operations had, however, done much to make the country ready for Augustus. The prestige of his name, and the reorganisation which he promptly undertook effected the rest, and thenceforward Roman troops disappeared from the interior of Gaul. A third of the whole Roman army, comprising its best troops, was, however, stationed on the Rhine, and though its main and ostensible purpose was to keep back the Germans, it was evident, particularly to the Gauls themselves, that in case of need it could be used with overwhelming effect against insurgents in its rear. Still, it was in fact but rarely thus employed, and from Augustus onwards Gaul may be described as pacified. The object was gained by a tenderness for existing conditions and for the old customs and likings of the Gauls, so far as they could safely be left alone, which constitutes a brilliant example of Roman state-craft. The essential characteristics of ancient Gaul, as Cæsar found it and as Augustus found it after him, was that its soil was divided among a limited number of very large and powerful tribes. It was not a country of towns, though, of course, there were hill-fortresses and forest-strongholds which served as rallying points for defence and bases of operations for attack, and even under Roman rule the extension of what Tacitus calls the "civilisation of cities" in Gaul was extremely gradual outside the limits of the