The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor MommsenЧитать онлайн книгу.
limits were drawn for the Gallic cultivation of the vine by Italian commercial competition. Certainly the god Dionysos accomplished his conquest of the world on the whole slowly, and only step by step did the drink prepared from grain give way to the juice of the vine; but it was a result of the prohibitive system that in Gaul beer maintained itself at least in the north as the usual spirituous drink throughout the whole period of the empire; and even the emperor Julian, on his abode in Gaul, came into conflict with this pseudo–Bacchus.57 The imperial government did not indeed go so far as the republic, which placed under police prohibition the culture of the vine and olive on the south coast of Gaul[iii. 177; ii. 375.] (iii. 175; ii. 398); but the Italians of their time were withal the true sons of their fathers. The flourishing condition of the two great emporia on the Rhine, Arles and Lyons, depended in no small degree on the market for Italian wine in Gaul; by which fact we may measure what importance the culture of the vine must at that time have had for Italy. If one of the most careful administrators who held the imperial office, Domitian, issued orders that in all the provinces at least the half of the vines should be destroyed58—which, it is true, were not so carried out—we may thence infer that the diffusion of the vine–culture was at all events subjected to serious restriction on the part of the government. In the Augustan age it was still unknown in the northern part of the Narbonese province (iv. 227, note)[iv. 217.], and, though here too it was soon taken up, it yet appears to have remained through centuries restricted to the Narbonensis and southern Aquitania; of Gallic wines the better age knows only the Allobrogian and the Biturigian, according to our way of speaking, the Burgundian and the Bordeaux.59 It was only when the reins of the empire fell from the hands of the Italians, in the course of the third century, that this was changed, and the emperor Probus (276–282) at length threw the culture of the vine open to the provincials. Probably it was only in consequence of this that the vine gained a firm footing on the Seine as on the Moselle. “I have,” writes the emperor Julian, “spent a winter” (it was the winter of 357–358) “in dear Lutetia, for so the Gauls term the little town of the Parisii, a small island lying in the river and walled all round. The water is there excellent and pure to look at and to drink; the inhabitants have a pretty mild winter, and good wine is grown among them; in fact, some even rear figs, covering them up in winter with wheaten straw as with a cloth.” And not much later the poet of Bordeaux, in his pleasing description of the Moselle, depicts the vineyards as bordering that river on both banks, “just as my own vines wreathe for me the yellow Garonne.”
Network of highways.
The internal intercourse, as well as that with the neighbouring lands, especially with Italy, must have been very active, and the network of roads must have been much developed and fostered. The great imperial highway from Rome to the mouth of the Baetis, which has been mentioned, under Spain (p. 74), was the main artery for the land traffic of the south province; the whole stretch, kept in repair in republican times from the Alps to the Rhone by the Massaliots, from thence to the Pyrenees by the Romans, was laid anew by Augustus. In the north the imperial highways led mainly to the Gallic capital or to the great camps on the Rhine; yet sufficient provision seems to have been made for other requisite communication.
Hellenism in south Gaul.
If the southern province in the olden time belonged intellectually to the Hellenic type, the decline of Massilia and the mighty progress of Romanism in southern Gaul produced, no doubt, an alteration in that respect; nevertheless this portion of Gaul remained always, like Campania, a seat of Hellenism. The fact that Nemausus, one of the towns sharing the heritage of Massilia, shows on its coins of the Augustan period Alexandrian numbering of the years and the arms of Egypt, has been not without probability referred to the settlement by Augustus himself of veterans from Alexandria in this city, which presented no attitude of opposition to Hellenism. It may, doubtless, also be brought into connection with the influence of Massilia, that to this province, at least as regards descent, belonged that historian, who—apparently in intentional contrast to the national–Roman type of history, and occasionally with sharp sallies against its most noted representatives, Sallust and Livy—upheld the Hellenic type, the Vocontian Pompeius Trogus, author of a history of the world beginning with Alexander and the kingdoms of the Diadochi, in which Roman affairs are set forth only within this framework, or by way of appendix. Beyond doubt in this he was only retaliating, which was strictly within the province of the literary opposition of Hellenism; still it remains remarkable that this tendency should find its Latin representative, and an adroit and fluent one, here in the Augustan age. From a later period Favorinus deserves mention, of an esteemed burgess–family in Arles, one of the chief pillars of polymathy in Hadrian’s time; a philosopher with an Aristotelian and sceptical tendency, at the same time a philologue and rhetorician, the scholar of Dion of Prusa, the friend of Plutarch and of Herodes Atticus, assailed polemically in the field of science by Galen and in light literature by Lucian, sustaining lively relations generally with the noted men of letters of the second century, and not less with the emperor Hadrian. His manifold investigations, among other matters, concerning the names of the companions of Odysseus that were devoured by Scylla, and as to the name of the first man who was at the same time a man of letters, make him appear as the genuine representative of the erudite dealing in trifles that was then in vogue; and his discourses for a cultivated public on Thersites and the ague, as well as his conversations in part recorded for us “on all things and some others,” give not an agreeable, but a characteristic, picture of the literary pursuits of the time. Here we have to call attention to what he himself reckoned among the remarkable points of his career in life, that he was by birth a Gaul and at the same time a Greek author. Although the literati of the West frequently gave, as occasion offered, specimens of their Greek, but few of them made use of this as the proper language of their authorship; in this case its use would be influenced in part by the scholar’s place of birth.
Latin literature in the south province.
South Gaul, moreover, had so far a share in the Augustan bloom of literature, that some of the most notable forensic orators of the later Augustan age, Votienus Montanus († 27 A.D.), from Narbo—named the Ovid of orators—and Gnaeus Domitius Afer (consul in 39 A.D.) from Nemausus, belonged to this province. Generally, as was natural, Roman literature extended its circulation also over this region; the poets of Domitian’s time sent their free copies to friends in Tolosa and Vienna. Pliny, under Trajan, is glad that his minor writings find even in Lugudunum not merely favourable readers, but booksellers who push their sale. But we cannot produce evidence for the south of any such special influence, as Baetica exercised in the earlier, and northern Gaul in the later, imperial period, on the intellectual and literary development of Rome. The fair land yielded richly wine and fruits; but the empire drew from it neither soldiers nor thinkers.
Literature in imperial Gaul.
Gaul proper was in the domain of science the promised land of teaching and learning; this presumably was due to the peculiar development and to the powerful influence of the national priesthood. Druidism was by no means a naive popular faith, but a highly developed and pretentious theology, which in the good church–fashion strove to enlighten, or at any rate control, all spheres of human thought and action, physics and metaphysics, law and medicine; which demanded of its scholars unwearied study, it was said, for twenty years, and sought and found these its scholars pre–eminently in the ranks of the nobility. The suppression of the Druids by Tiberius and his successors must have affected in the first instance these schools of the priests, and have led to their being at least publicly abolished; but this could only be done effectively when the national training of youth was brought face to face with the Romano–Greek culture, just as the Carnutic council of Druids was confronted with the temple of Roma in Lyons. How early this took place in Gaul, without question under the guiding influence of the government, is shown by the remarkable fact that in the formerly mentioned revolt under Tiberius the insurgents attempted above all to possess themselves of the town of Augustodunum (Autun), in order to get into their power the youths of rank studying there, and thereby to gain or to terrify the great families. In the first instance these Gallic Lycea may well have been, in spite of their by no means national course of training, a leaven of distinctively Gallic nationality; it was hardly an accident that the most important of them at that time had its seat, not in the Roman Lyons, but in the capital of the Haedui, the chief among the Gallic cantons. But the Romano–Hellenic culture, though perhaps forced