I.

CHARACTERISTICS IN COMMON

 

IN the Roman Empire, Africa, Spain and Gaul form a unity in the West, a counterpoise to the hellenized lands of the East. Their conquest was begun in the second century BC, and completed under the earliest emperors. The conditions of life in these countries prior to the Roman conquest, and, equally, the conditions under which they had been colonized by the Romans, had given them certain lasting characteristics in common, and the first task is to indicate this common heritage.

Even before the Roman conquest they had not lived in a state of complete barbarism. Their political and social life had become stabilized. The upper classes of their society expected and enjoyed the comforts of life. They had produced good work in the decorative arts, and, where circumstances were particularly favorable, more especially in certain parts of Spain, a really great art had made its appearance. Nevertheless, their political and economic horizon had remained limited, for they had produced no great or lasting State, and the radius of their commerce was not wide. Urban life had developed little, except in a few places penetrated by foreign influences. The role of Rome in these three countries (and this is their first point in common) lay in expanding their horizon. Rome introduced them into the vast organism of a State which covered most of the known world, into an economic system more complex than any they had known : Africans, Spaniards and Gauls came to know the products of distant lands, conceived new needs and new desires. Their civilization took a form essentially urban, of life in communities which each formed a cultural entity with collective interests and regular institutions.

The three countries have another characteristic in common. In each of them, the work of transformation accomplished by Rome was achieved by a very small minority of immigrants, directing the mass of the native population into new channels. One may say, speaking generally, that Africa, Spain and Gaul continued to be inhabited by their Berbers, Iberians and Celts, for the immigrants after the Roman conquest were few: each part of the Empire needed its own labor, and was hardly in a position to send its workpeople abroad. It is by a process of self-development, under the influence of a small number of Romans or romanized foreigners among them, that Africans, Spaniards and Gauls gradually conformed to the general Roman type, and became initiates of Roman civilization.

Africa, Spain and Gaul are each the gateway to remote lands. Before the conquest of the West, Greek and Roman history had been made on the shores of the Mediterranean, including in this the Black Sea, and in the valleys of the rivers that flow into it. On these shores Graeco-Italian civilization had been perfected. Those countries of the West which face inwards to the Mediterranean also face outwards to other worlds. North Africa extended southwards into a vast, mysterious continent, inhabited by shadowy races of men and by creatures of fable living in a climate almost intolerable to mankind. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, Mauretania and the Spanish peninsula confront the infinite expanse of the Ocean, with its daily tides and its undiscovered shores: a sea as different as possible from the Mediterranean. Gaul, too, is washed by the Ocean on her longest seaboard, and extends far to the north, where the climate, vegetation and conditions of culture were something new to the experience of the ancients; they saw here a Europe that was damp, misty, and unattractive; but here the long hard winters were compensated by regular harvests in summer.

Finally, it is to be remembered that in the first two centuries of the Empire the evolution of the three provinces followed much the same lines. There was an increasingly thorough exploitation of natural resources, which had as its consequence a steady advance towards economic independence. At the beginning of the first century, Rome prescribed for every country of her Empire a certain form of activity : she demanded from the subject countries work for Rome, for the greater ease and comfort of the Romans, the masters of the world. But little by little the provinces emancipated themselves. Africans, Spaniards and Gauls became Roman citizens and members of the governing classes. The western provinces could no longer be kept in economic subjection. Their resources were methodically developed, and, as time passed, each country had a wider range of products which provided it with the means of enlarging its commerce in normal times, and of supporting itself when need arose. From the middle of the first century to the beginning of the third, the outer regions of the Empire gradually rose from their subordinate position. The life of the Empire remained a unity, but it did not exclude the possibility of an autonomous life in its component parts, when the time should come for the unity to be broken.

 

II.

AFRICA

 

North Africa possessed a notable racial unity. It was inhabited entirely by Berbers, for the names Libyan, Numidian, Moor, Gaetulian, which were commonly used by the ancients, corresponded to no intrinsic differences of race, but only of geographical position. The new elements which were added to this primitive and lasting foundation were not very important. Semites had occupied the harbors in very early times, but they were never more than a small ruling class. These harbors, too, and some centers of trade in the interior, had always attracted traders, at first Orientals and Greeks, later Italians; but the mass of the population remained unchanged. Nor was the number of immigrants materially increased by Roman colonization. The high officials were for the most part birds of passage. The Italians who acquired estates in Africa did not come to live there. The most numerous of the non-African elements were the bodies of veterans sent to Africa to found colonies, and the soldiers on active service in the legions or the auxilia, who often remained in the country after their discharge. In this way Italians, Gauls, Spaniards, Asiatics, men from the Danubian countries, established themselves in Africa and supplied to African society a certain number of small land­owners. But the number of these foreign elements was in no way commensurate with their social and cultural importance. They formed a sort of aristocracy, but they were only a tiny fraction of the inhabitants, and, since many of them married African wives, their descendants were quickly merged in the mass of the Berber population. Moreover, although in the last century of the Republic, during the Civil Wars, such immigrants came fairly regularly, the pace soon slackened under the Principate, and came almost to a standstill in the course of the second century : the last colonies of veterans were founded by Nerva and Trajan. Under Hadrian and later, the army of Africa was recruited almost exclusively from the Africans themselves, with the single exception of the Syrian detachments, which were regularly recruited on the confines of the Syrian desert. As for the negroid element which, in antiquity as in every subsequent age, was introduced into North Africa by the channel of slavery, it is a curiosity worth noticing, but it is not an ethnological factor of any real importance.

Rome had not annexed the whole of North Africa at one stroke. A century had elapsed between the creation of the province of Africa and the annexation of Africa Nova, which brought a large increase of territory to the original province, towards the west and south : then more than eighty years passed before the kingdom of Mauretania became the two provinces of Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana. This conquest by stages continued even after the annexation of Mauretania, in the sense that the emperors gradually extended their authority over lands which had never been truly subject to the Numidian or Mauretanian kings, lands of mountain ranges, of expanses traversed by the nomads, or of lofty plateaux adjoining the desert. The reigns of Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Commodus and Septimius Severus each saw so many extensions or consolidations of the limes, which reached the farthest point of its development under the Severi. Thus little by little the Roman provinces were increased by regions won from barbarism, rather by a constant process of penetration than by operations of war. The work of police, of survey, and of development proceeded side by side, and the Empire gradually approached, and at some points reached, the Sahara itself.

The several regions of Africa thus did not start abreast in the acquisition of Roman civilization. Nor were they equally endowed by nature, forming as they do a complex geographical system, with coastal plains, fertile plateaux, and inviting valleys on the one hand, and on the other, districts inaccessible and naturally poor. For these reasons, in the several parts of North Africa were to be found different degrees of civilization. The chief ports were great towns, lively and somewhat cosmopolitan, where Latin and Greek were spoken. In the fertile districts arose urban communities, possessing all the institutions of civic life and every material comfort. In some places, notably in certain valleys of Tunis, they appear thickly grouped together; but as one moves westwards the urban centers become fewer and poorer, and the population clings more closely to its primitive culture.

The existence of peaceful and civilized districts side by side with districts in which Roman influence was recent and superficial, explains the particular form which the administration of the province of Africa itself had taken. Although it was a senatorial province, parts of it were still not perfectly safe, and it was called upon to extend its frontiers progressively towards the south, breaking fresh ground among warlike peoples. Thus it needed an army, and in fact it possessed a legion (III Augusta). Authority was divided between the proconsul, representative of the Senate, and the legatus in command of the legion, representative of the emperor. This dual authority in a single province, this army in a proconsular province, was exceptional. In practice, from the reign of Gaius onwards, the legatus of the legion was independent of the proconsul, and governed all the territory garrisoned by his troops; but it was not until the beginning of the third century that it was decided to bring theory and name into conformity with the prevalent practice, and to make of the territory governed by the legatus a separate province, to be called Numidia. Meanwhile Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana, except when circumstances justified a special re-arrangement of forces, were governed each by a procurator of equestrian rank.

All the African provinces were not at the same stage of development, but all alike had one basic resource, agriculture. Agriculture, and, in the second place, stock-breeding, supplied almost the whole population with its livelihood: commerce was primarily in agricultural produce. Industry was of little importance. The quarries supplied local works, and at Simitthu (Chemtou in Tunis) was produced a yellow marble with red veins which was exported; but the mineral resources were exploited in a perfunctory way. Articles were manufactured for local markets only. A lamp factory at Caesarea (Cherchel in Algeria) was able to export examples of its wares to Spain, and other lamps, made in the province of Africa, went to Sardinia; but, in general, African pottery stayed in Africa. The peculiar vases, with anthropomorphic decoration, which were made at El Aouja in Tunis, appear not to have spread beyond a radius of sixty or seventy miles. The same is true, probably, of textiles and leather goods : usually every family supplied its own needs. Moreover, these local industries could not meet the requirements of the home market: decorated pottery was imported from Italy at first, later from Gaul; lamps and metal goods came from Italy: even the most ordinary building-materials, such as tiles and bricks, were imported from Italy, as late as the third century. This feebleness of African industry, this distaste for industrial activity, is a phenomenon which re-appears in every phase of the history of North Africa. It is due partly to the fact that the natives show no aptitude in the workshop, and partly, in antiquity, to the fact that the Romans deliberately diverted their activity into a different channel: they looked primarily to Africa as a source of their food-supply.

In the early days of the conquest, what Rome demanded from Africa was wheat. The country had always produced a good supply of wheat and barley, and now the Roman administrators, abandoning barley to the peasants and their cattle, forced on the Africans an intensive production of wheat, with a view to exporting it to Italy in bulk. Pliny the Elder, writing in the latter part of the first century, records with amazement the richness of the crop and the simplicity of the methods employed. He goes so far as to say that Africa is intended by nature to produce grain, and grain alone, although under the Carthaginians experience had shown that olives, vines and fruit trees could do very well. Nevertheless, these activities were systematically discouraged by the early emperors in favor of wheat-growing. We do not know how directly Africa was affected by the edict of Domitian limiting the culture of the vine in the provinces, but it is certain that the spirit of this edict is reflected in the Roman administration during the first century.

In the second century, however, this policy underwent a change, and agriculture in Africa assumed a new aspect. Provincials had now attained to the highest offices of the Empire, and Rome had neither the power nor the wish to impose on the provinces restrictions and prohibitions. Moreover, she now needed other things besides wheat: there is evidence that at the beginning of the third century Italy was short of oil, and that this shortage was not something new but a familiar fact. In Africa itself, continuous colonial expansion southwards brought cultivators into regions where the nature of the soil and the incidence of the rainfall are unfavorable to grain, and where the cultivation of the olive is clearly more lucrative. Thus the second century saw Africa no longer a specialist in the production of wheat. Some information about this new development in African agriculture is contained in several important inscriptions, all from Tunis in the original province of Africa, though the conditions to which they relate must certainly have prevailed, with some small variations in Numidia, and probably in Mauretania also. According to this evidence a great part of the soil of Africa was taken up by large estates known as saltus. The most important of all the great proprietors was the emperor himself, who owned vast saltus in every district: other estates belonged to private individuals, mostly senators, either Italians or Africans. The proprietor did not live on his estate, but farmed out the revenue from it, either as a whole or in lots, to conductores, who worked sometimes as individuals and sometimes in companies. Part of the land leased in this way was cultivated directly by the conductores or their agents : the rest of the estate was parceled out among coloni who were under contract to pay to the conductores a percentage of their returns, and also to work for a fixed number of days on the land cultivated directly by the conductores themselves.

These inscriptions are concerned most often with a procedure common enough in Africa, the clearing and development of waste land, marsh or scrub, and the reclaiming of land which had already been cleared once, but had been neglected by the cultivators, and had returned to its wild state. A measure known as the lex Manciana, dating either from the end of the Republic or from the first century of the Empire, conferred special rights upon cultivators who undertook to reclaim such lands : in addition to reducing, for a sufficiently long period, the rents due from them to the proprietor or the conductores who were his representatives, it guaranteed to them the right of occupation in perpetuity on a profit-sharing basis, and of transmission of the land to their descendants under the same conditions of tenure. The practice was confirmed by a law of Hadrian, which extended its scope and made it even more favorable to the pioneers, and this bold interference of the State in the administration of private estates ensured the extension of the productive lands and the development of new areas.

EXPORTS, LANGUAGE, RELIGION

On these areas claimed or reclaimed by the plough, cereals seem to have taken only a secondary place : the most important crop was the vine, and chiefly fruit trees, especially olives. Juvenal, towards the end of the first century, reproaches the oil of Africa with a strong taste and smell which make it hardly fit for the table; but it is reasonable to think that, in the course of the second century, the Africans learned how to treat their oil better. Little by little African oil captured every market, and no longer lamp oil merely, but oil for the kitchen and the toilet as well. Amphorae from Tubusuctu in Mauretania have been discovered at Rome, and they carried there the oil of Kabylia, where to this day the olive is one of the chief sources of wealth. The same oil travelled as far as Alexandria. After the olive, the most important tree was the fig: vegetables were grown also, and especially artichokes and beans.

Naturally these new developments did not mean that the cultivation of cereal crops was abandoned : indeed, it survived as long as the western Empire lasted. The annona of Africa filled the same place in the food-supply of Rome at the end of the second century as it had filled in the first, and in the stationes of African merchants installed at Ostia wheat was always an essential commodity. Barley, in the first two centuries, was consumed locally by stock­breeders, who exported notable strains both of horses and mules to Italy and the provinces; it is possible that barley, too, became an article of export to meet the needs of the armies, at the time when the cavalry had become the most important arm of the service, though this development can hardly have taken place much before the end of the third century.

Such were the primary products exported by Africa to the Roman world, and especially to Italy; the most important, wheat and oil; next, horses and mules, wine, fruit and vegetables. The list of exports included also various commodities of secondary interest: mineral products used in the manufacture of medicines or dyes; a wood, the citrus or thuya, in demand for high-class furniture; sponges, and rare delicacies of the table, such as jujubes and truffles. African dates were not very highly thought of in Pliny’s day; their reputation probably improved later, when the Romans had planted southern Tunis and the country round Biskra : but they never penetrated to the Souf or the valley of Wadi Rhir, where the date-palm flourishes best today. One special industry deserves a place to itself, namely the hunting of wild animals, which were captured alive and sent to Rome or elsewhere for the amphitheatre: lions, bears and panthers were most in demand. Finally, Africa transmitted to the Mediterranean world rarities which arrived by the caravan-routes from distant lands : by this means gold dust, ivory, precious stones, ostrich feathers, and black slaves made their way into the wealthy houses of Rome.

Although in the Roman world under the Empire Africa had developed her resources more widely than ever before, yet her activity remained fundamentally the same; the mass of her population underwent no change; and, inevitably, Roman Africa still presented many aspects reminiscent of her own past. The languages spoken in Africa before the Roman conquest, whether Berber dialects or Punic, continued in use. The existence of these African tongues is known from Latin authors, though it is not always clear whether they refer to Berber or to Punic. Most of the inscriptions in native dialects, commonly called Libyan, date from the Empire, and, though they are certainly few in number compared with the multitude of inscriptions in Latin, it is to be remembered that these dialects were primarily spoken languages, and their use in writing or in inscriptions was exceptional. Punic, too, survived chiefly as a spoken language: it was sometimes transcribed in Latin characters, and isolated words lasted on in the vocabulary of Roman Africa. The truth of the matter probably was that in the upper and middle classes many people were bilingual or even trilingual, speaking Libyan or Punic in private and Latin in public; whereas many of the illiterate poor conversed freely in Libyan or Punic only, and knew little Latin.

In religion, too, Africa kept her own personality. The Africans accepted without resistance the Graeco-Roman cults, such as the cult of the Capitoline Triad, of Mars, patron of the military colonies, of Venus, Apollo, Mercury, Neptune, Bacchus. The Imperial cult was actively and loyally observed, and Oriental cults took their place here as elsewhere in the West. But the primitive basis still remained. The genii of springs, trees, caves and mountains were still honored and feared: the magistrates of romanized towns or boroughs still repaired periodically to cult-centers hallowed by ancient tradition, to perform ceremonies in which the whole population probably took part. Votive offerings in Latin are made to deities whose names are perfectly unknown apart from the inscriptions which contain them; they are clearly native deities under a thin Latin disguise. Peculiarly deep-rooted in the hearts of the people were the Punic deities whom the natives had adopted at the time of the Carthaginian domination : the god Saturn and the goddess Caelestis have nothing Roman about them but their name, and are really African deities, the most popular in all this pantheon. Even the memory of the child-sacrifices formerly demanded by the Carthaginian Baal re-appears in dedications to Saturn when the Imperial regime was at its height. African craftsmen produced many stelae in honor of Saturn, on which the god, his priests or his worshippers, and the sacrificial beasts, are represented in registers placed one above the other with a naive workmanship and a sincerity that give this popular art, despite its imperfections, a charm of its owns. In certain sanctuaries in Tunis, those of the ancient Siagu and at Bir-Derbal, statues of terracotta, of Imperial date, perpetuate a very old type, that of a lion-headed goddess who represents the ‘Genius of the African land’.

To the Romans entering Africa for the first time the most striking characteristic which they encountered had been the nomadic life of many of its inhabitants. Nor did this habit of life disappear. Tribes which lived mainly by the rearing of stock continued to shift their quarters periodically, from winter pastures to summer pastures; but their movements were now controlled and limited by the Roman authorities. The nomadic life over wide areas was now to be found only beyond the limes, on those lofty plateaux in western Algeria which were never incorporated in the Roman provinces. The efforts of the Roman governors were directed towards attaching to the soil natives who had hitherto lived the life of cowboys and nomads; and the development of new lands naturally produced this same transformation. These natives attached to the soil lived, some of them, in tribes (gentes), with no urban settlements or municipal institutions. Such tribes were placed under the semi-military authority of a praefectus, in the early days of the Empire an officer of the army, but often in the second century a native chief whose loyalty was above suspicion.

But the progress of romanization was furthered above all by the transformation of the gentes into civitates, by the creation and development of urban settlements. The towns of Africa under the Empire were numerous, especially in the original Roman province and in Numidia. They were mostly small towns of a few thousand inhabitants, and very few had a population running into tens of thousands. Among these town-dwellers nearly everyone drew his livelihood directly or indirectly from the land whether as owners or as tenants or as laborers, some making the journey from town to country every day, others visiting the country at the busy seasons, and others dividing their time between their town houses and country seats. And, equally, the commerce and industry of these small towns, such as it was, depended on agriculture.

The origin of this taste for town life in cultivators of the soil was that living in a town gave them a political and social superiority. A town was not merely an assemblage of bricks and mortar: it was an administrative unity and a cultural entity, a microcosm with its assemblies, its magistrates, its budget, its customs, and its festivals. In the application to the African provinces of the municipal system conceived by Rome for her Empire in general, the Roman authorities, who wished to mould the Africans to their own general scheme of administration, did not lack the assistance of the Africans themselves, who wished to use this means to a higher level of dignity and comfort. As soon as the peasants found themselves in easy circumstances, they wanted to become town-dwellers, and by their efforts the hamlets and villages little by little increased in size and respectability, until they became worthy of the name of town, a name which many of them did in fact acquire.

The material traces of this urbanization and, in general, of the development of the African provinces are to be found at many places in Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, and western Morocco. On the coast, the great seaports gave access to Italy, Gaul, Spain, and the East, and the many small harbors invited a flourishing coastal trade. Inland, the absence of navigable rivers had decided the emperors to pay great attention to the road-system, which was planned, in its main lines, in the first century, and brought to completion by the Antonines and Severi. Many ingenious devices were employed to ensure that the water-supply of the country should be used to the full. The remains of Carthage give us hardly an adequate idea of this great capital, and the splendid monuments of Leptis Magna are not earlier than Septimius Severus; but there are several towns of less importance with remains sufficiently well preserved to give an accurate picture of ordinary life in Roman Africa. Such are Thugga (Dougga) and Thuburbo Maius in Tunis, pre-Roman villages which developed into towns, and in Algeria Thamugadi (Timgad) and Cuicul (Djemila), military colonies founded at the end of the first century, which soon spread beyond their walls and, in a generation or two, were provided with all the usual public buildings and places of amusement; in Morocco, Volubilis got a good start as the protégé first of Juba and later of Claudius, and did not lose ground later. Building in Africa preserved the main features of the Roman style of architecture and ornament, but adapted itself to peculiarities of African tradition or climate. The walls are sometimes of mud coated with plaster, more often of rubble with a binding of ashlar at intervals: the houses are not built round an Italian atrium but round a court of the Greek type, and often contain (as at Thugga and Bulla Regia in Tunis) rooms underground in which to shelter from the heat. No part of the Roman world is richer in mosaics.

There is no doubt that during the first two centuries of the Empire the population of Africa steadily increased. The Romans had always been astonished by the longevity of Africans : nonagenarians and centenarians are frequent in the inscriptions, and even if they are not all above suspicion, they must still represent a tendency which really existed. At the same time the rate of mortality among children and the young was not low; but the birth-rate was very high. The density of the sites dating from the second and third centuries implies a corresponding density of population.

THE UPPER CLASSES AND CULTURE

Every town was a center of Roman culture in which the Berbers could learn the language and the manners of Rome. The thriving state of agriculture allowed African families to become rich and improve their position in the social hierarchy. A municipal bourgeoisie of native origin was born and grew by stages, passing from the condition of peregrinitas to that of Latinitas, from the restricted Latin citizenship to the full citizenship, and emerging finally among the privileged classes of the equites and the senators. In the reign of Titus an African from Cirta became consuls : romanized Africans were now fit for the same tasks as Romans or Italians.

It is instructive to observe the part played in the formation of this municipal bourgeoisie by service in the army. In the first century Africans served in both the legions and in the auxilia in Africa and abroad, and from the time of Hadrian onwards they provided the great majority of recruits for the army of Africa. The veterans, when they were discharged after long years of service which had made them familiar with the Latin language and Roman customs, settled down either in their own country or in the neighborhood of their old garrison, where they enjoyed prestige and authority, and were called to take part in the municipal administration. For the Berbers in general, each veteran, and especially each group of veterans, provided an encouragement and an example.

The Africans took readily to intellectual pursuits. It is true that when Juvenal speaks of Africa as “the nurse of advocates”, his meaning is not so much that many Africans became advocates as that all Africans were fond of litigation. But at the same date the orator Septimius Severus, the grandfather of the future emperor, gave his friends at Rome the impression of being a polished Italian gentleman. Writers such as Apuleius and Fronto, representing the best in Latin literature in the second century, came from Madauros and Cirta. Salvius Julianus, Hadrian's great jurist, was an African; so too was Florus probably, and perhaps Aulus Gellius. The schools of Carthage were famous, and educated people prided themselves on as good a knowledge of Greek as of Latin. This flourishing culture came into its own with the Christian literature of the third century and later, in which Africa leads the field.

Thus archaeology and the history of letters alike suggest that towards the end of the second century Africa was effectively romanized. Nevertheless, one should beware of hasty conclusions. Outside the towns, outside the world of the aristocracy and the middle class, the world which is the concern of most of our surviving documents, lived a great country population, poor and obscure, which never comes to our notice directly, but was certainly far more numerous than the privileged classes of whom we do hear. There was a great gulf between the circumstances of the romanized bourgeoisie of landowners or capitalists and those of the country laborers living from hand to mouth. Out of this mass of the people, still ignorant of Roman manners and the Latin tongue, some individuals could emerge and rise to a higher level of comfort and culture, whether by the daily work of their hands or by means of military service; but for this process to have become general, it would have been necessary for Roman Africa after the second century to be able to look forward to a long period of peace and prosperity.

 

III.

SPAIN

 

Spain was the first of the three great countries of the West to make its entry into the Roman Empire, for the Spanish provinces were in existence two generations before the formation of an African province, and three generations before that of a province in Gaul. This seniority of the Spanish provinces had lasting consequences : the vocabulary of the Latin-speaking Spaniards showed an archaism which is probably due to the fact that Latin became current in Spain in the second century BC, and that under the Empire the Italian immigrants were too few to bring the vocabulary up to date with the Latin spoken in Rome at that time.

Before the Roman conquest Spain, more than any other Mediterranean country, contained elements of widely different origin. Each successive movement of peoples from East to West had left its deposit in the Spanish peninsula, where the Ocean barred the way to further progress. Thus the Iberians and the Celts had been superimposed on the Ligurians. On the other hand all the seafaring peoples—the Minoans, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, and perhaps the Etruscans—had been attracted by the rich mines of the country. In this compound the dominant element was the Iberian, which had left its mark on the whole population in common. There were, however, important local differences, according to the proportion of the various ethnic groups in each district, and these differences were accentuated by the physical geography of Spain, which divides the country into regions varying in climate and products, and very much shut off from one another. Before the Roman occupation Spain presented the appearance of a series of compartments, each living its own life, and each at a different stage of civilization.

Roman rule brought unity to Spain, in so far as the natural conditions allowed it. It promoted intercourse between the different parts of the country, and introduced everywhere the ingredients of a common civilization. The division into provinces under Augustus gave the Spaniards a field of activity which was wisely adapted to the nature of the country, though no efforts on the part of the Romans could wholly banish the local disparities. In Spain, as in Africa, no great change of population followed the Roman conquest. Colonies were already in existence, some founded during the wars of conquest, but most of them by Caesar or Augustus: and a number of Italians came to seek their fortune in Spain at the time of the Civil Wars. But the native inhabitants continued to form the vast majority of the population, and Italian immigration ceased to be of importance after the earliest emperors.

The controlling factor in the economic life of Spain had always been its mineral wealth, and under the Empire its relative importance increased as the mines of Greece and Asia Minor were worked out. Spain was the land of all the metals. Gold was found in the beds of rivers such as the Tagus, the Douro and the Tader, and above all in the mines of Galicia and Asturia: the purest gold came from Galicia, but Asturia preserves the most imposing remains of Roman works for the mining and washing of the rich earth. In the time of Pliny the Elder Galicia, Asturia and Lusitania together yielded twenty thousand pounds of gold a year. Silver was found usually in conjunction with lead and chiefly in two districts, on the Mediterranean coast about Cartagena, and in the Sierra Morena near Castulo, though there were also silver mines at Aljustrel in Lusitania, and silver was produced as a by­product in the gold mines. Lead was a secondary product of the silver mines, and there were lead mines in Cantabria and Baetica. Tin was mined in Lusitania and Galicia, and there was also the tin which could reach Spain from Britain, by an old route which was still perhaps not completely abandoned. Most of the Roman world's supply of copper came from Spain : the most important mines were those of the Mons Marianus in the west of the Sierra Morena, which exported their yield by way of Corduba, and other copper deposits were worked in southern Lusitania and the country of the Vettones. Iron was mined on the Mediterranean coast near Dianium, and especially in the north among the Cantabrians and Vascones. The mines of Sisapo on the borders of Baetica and Nearer Spain were the only ones known to the ancients that produced mercury: cinnabar came from them also. Finally, various parts of Spain produced materials for dyes and drugs.

Spain was thus foremost among the countries of the ancient world as a source of the precious metals and the metals in common use, and this was in fact her special function in the Imperial system. The military organization, the roads, the boundaries of the administrative areas, were alike dictated primarily by considerations of how the mines could best be exploited and their returns increased. This exploitation drew large working populations into barren mountain districts where food-supply was a problem and life was hard. Little is known of this miserable proletariate, in which there was little difference between slaves and free workers, but it formed a quite considerable part of the population of Spain.

At the end of the Republic many of the Spanish mines were privately owned, and probably in most cases the owner's title to the property had been acquired during the period of conquest, and would not bear close inspection. Under the first emperors the mines became the property of the State, that is to say of the Fiscus or the emperor’s patrimonium, by a gradual and varied process of acquisition by purchase, inheritance or confiscation, applied first to the gold mines, and later to the silver mines and the rest. They were then farmed out to conductores, who could sublet them in their turn, and the Imperial Treasury thus derived a vast revenue from them. The metals from these mines were exported from the harbors of Spain in the form of ingots, and ingots of Spanish lead in particular have been found in different parts of the Mediterranean world. Nevertheless, part of the minerals was worked up in Spain itself. Several towns, such as Bilbilis, Turiaso and Toletum were famous for their steel industries, which owed their success to the special qualities of the river-water used in their processes, and which supported a flourishing export trade. Jewelry and bronze statuettes were still manufactured as they had been before the Roman occupation, but these articles hardly supplied the local demand for them. The quarries too, and building-materials, tiles and bricks, manufactured in the country, did no more than supply local needs, with the exception of the marble quarries of the Mons Marianus in Baetica, which probably produced marble for export. Mica, lapis specularis, was obtained in Celtiberia near Segobriga, from a vein which was originally the only one known to the Roman world; but in the time of the elder Pliny new veins had been discovered in Cyprus, Cappadocia and Sicily, and finally in Africa, though the Spanish mica continued to be the best. But the growing competition of manufactured glass probably meant that mica was less used than formerly.

Although the exploitation of the mines certainly claimed the first attention of the Imperial officials, because in this respect no other province could take the place of Spain, nevertheless agriculture came a good second. Spain could do more than support her own peoples, including the thickly populated mining areas; she could also contribute to the food-supply of Rome and Italy. Spain was able to supply the three primary products of ancient agriculture, wheat, olive oil and wine. Wheat is grown all over Spain except on the north coast where the rainfall is too high. The olive, according to Pliny, had penetrated by his time in Hispanias medias, by which he means, no doubt, that it grew, as it grows today, not only on the west and east coast, and in the valleys of the Ebro, the Guadalquivir and the Douro, but inland as far as the central plateau of Castile, south of the Sierra de Guadarrama. Vines of one quality or another are found in every part of the peninsula. Two especially productive regions were thoroughly exploited, Andalusia, including the valleys of the Guadalquivir and its tributaries, and the coast from the Pyrenees to the south of Valencia. The harvests of Baetica rivaled those of Egypt and the best lands in Sicily: indeed their wheat was the best in weight of all wheat imported to Rome, except the African. The soil that produced the wheat supported olive trees also, and the oil of Baetica was second in quality only to that of Venafrum. The best wines came from the Mediterranean coast, from the neighborhood of Barcelona, Tarragona and Valencia, and from the Balearic Isles: moreover, the most famous of the Italian vines, such as the Falernian, were introduced into Baetica, and probably elsewhere in Spain.

Wheat and oil were exported to Italy: Spain is one of the four grain-producing provinces represented in a mosaic at Ostia in the first century AD (the other three are Sicily, Africa and Egypt). Among the broken amphorae of Monte Testaccio on the bank of the Tiber, very many came from Spain, and more particularly from the Guadalquivir valley, and wheat and oil were their principal contents. From the moment when Italian oil ceased to meet the needs of the Roman market, a fierce competition probably arose between the oil of Spain and that of Africa, and, although it is impossible to follow its history, it seems likely that Africa slowly gained the upper hand. The export of wine was probably less extensive, though the fact that certain Spanish wines gained a great name in Italy proves that Roman connoisseurs had a chance of enjoying them.

Secondary to these staple products was the cultivation of fruit and vegetables; honey, bees-wax and pitch were also exported. Among exports, too, were two kinds of textiles, the raw material being grown and treated on the spot. Flax was grown on the Mediterranean coast and made into the finest linen at Tarraco and Saetabis; the same crop flourished also in Galicia under the Empire. Esparto (the alfa grass of North Africa today) was peculiar to Spain in antiquity, since the Romans never exploited it in Africa: the campus spartarius was a plain one hundred miles long and thirty miles across near Cartagena, and its crop was used for many inexpensive articles of everyday use, such as ropes, baskets and sandals, which found ready buyers among the sailors and miners, and bulked largely in the cargoes of the ships which sailed from Cartagena or Dianium. Raisers of stock concerned themselves principally with horses, donkeys and mules, which did well in Lusitania, Galicia, Asturia and Celtiberia. Excellent woolen fabrics came from the flocks of all three provinces. The mountaineers of the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian mountains reared pigs and exported hams which were famous. Finally, one very old industry, fishing, was always active on many parts of the coast, especially the oyster, tunny and mackerel fisheries, with the subsidiary industries of curing and the manufacture of garum. Here was a profitable opening for various commercial companies, which seem to have included a number of Orientals.

The trade of Spain was first and foremost an export trade of raw materials and foodstuffs to Italy, though manufactured goods were imported from Italy and Gaul. A good number of Spaniards made the journey to Italy, and even settled down in Rome or Ostia. The presence of Gauls in the neighborhood of Tarraco and of Spaniards in southern Gaul, and the comparatively large number of Africans in the Spanish towns, indicate the close relations which normally existed between Spain and the provinces which were her neighbors.

SOLDIERS

As early as the period of conquest the Romans had seen possibilities in Spain beyond the mere production of minerals and foodstuffs. They had quickly recognized the military qualities of the Spaniards as cavalry and infantry. The first emperors drew heavily upon the manpower of Spain. In the legions serving in Spain in the first century many recruits came from the towns of Baetica and of Nearer Spain and Lusitania, and there were many Spaniards also in legions (such as XX Valeria Victrix) which did not belong to the army of Spain. Lusitania and Nearer Spain supplied soldiers for the praetorian cohorts. Above all, very many of the auxiliary corps bear Spanish names : most of these were formed in the first century; certainly many Spaniards took part in the campaigns of this date, and Spaniards appear in the first Roman settlements in Mauretania. With the progress of Romanization, however, these military qualities declined. Spain was not a frontier province, and from the reign of Vespasian onwards the garrison amounted to no more than one legion (VII Gemina) supported by auxilia. Most of the auxiliary corps with Spanish names served in countries far from Spain itself, in Britain, on the Rhine and the Danube, or in the East, and they were recruited on the spot. Moreover, the advance of urbanization in Spain quickly narrowed the areas from which auxiliaries could be recruited.

The Spanish contribution to the army was soon reduced practically to the legion VII Gemina, which continued to draw the great majority of its soldiers from Lusitania and especially from Nearer Spain. It even appears that under Hadrian the Spaniards in general showed a distaste for military service which attracted the displeasure of the Emperor, though he could still form a cohors I Aelia Hispanorum miliaria equitata to send to Britain, and about the same date Spaniards were quite numerous in the first urban cohort on garrison duty at Carthage. The soldier's life kept its charm longest for the more backward peoples such as the Asturians and Cantabrians, among whom Trajan raised for his Dacian war not cohorts or alae, but a new type of corps known as symmachiarii, the non-Roman type described by the Pseudo­Hyginus as nationes, and appearing later in the second century under the name of numeri. These facts are symptoms of the state of culture in Spain, which was still not uniform in the second century. The veneer of Roman manners and institutions varied in thickness, but it could not change the native material underneath with all its local tendencies.

LANGUAGE, RELIGION, ART

Landmarks of the old native society survived in the partition of Spain in Roman times into a great number of cities (more than five hundred in fact). This division into tiny territorial units is no more than a survival and a consequence of the Iberian political system of small independent groups, all ready to fly at one another's throats, and avoiding all save ephemeral alliances. At the height of the Imperial regime the group which exercised the strongest attraction for the Spanish mind was still often a mere fraction of a tribe, a gentilitas, and all the efforts of the Roman government did not wholly succeed in widening the Spanish outlook and making the Spaniards feel that they belonged to a great State; consequently the regio, the administrative unit for purposes of the census and of recruiting, and the conventus, the cultural entity associated with the Imperial cult, had a far greater significance from the Roman point of view than they possessed in the minds of the peoples. There was however a transition to Roman manners and habits of thought among the upper and middle classes in the more highly developed parts of the country, in Baetica, on the Mediterranean coastal plains, in the Ebro valley and on the coast which now belongs to Portugal. But in the mining districts the working populations remained rough and barbarous. On the central plateau the old culture clung to its ground, and Romanization was really effective only in a few places where cities had sprung up. The greatest resistance of all was encountered in the scattered populations of north and north-west (Vasconia, Cantabria, Asturia and Galicia); although nearly the whole of the army of occupation was concentrated here, Iberian tradition persisted most stubbornly. The native languages were in a way to becoming extinct in the richer parts of the country, but they were still spoken, by the common people at least, in central Spain and in the north and north-west; they appear, indeed, to have survived up to the present day in Basque.

In the same districts, too, the native religions kept their largest following. In Lusitania, and especially in Asturia and Galicia, a number of Latin inscriptions are dedications to gods with names which are purely barbarous except for a Latin termination, in many cases gods probably of springs or rivers. Such native gods are found also, though less frequently, in the conventus of Clunia and Saragossa; in the conventus of Cartagena they are very rare, and in the conventus of Tarraco and in Baetica they never appear at all. Sometimes, again, the native deities were fused with Graeco-Roman gods, and in these cases the Roman name receives as an epithet either the old Iberian name or a derivative from it : such names are Juppiter Ahoparaliomegus, Mars Cariociecus, Proserpina Ataecina. The next stage is reached when the epithet disappears : then the old native deity was worshipped under its Roman name, and thus the native cults lived on, even in the most romanized districts, under their Latin disguise. Probably these cults had more vogue among the poor than among the governing classes, and probably their place in the cultural life of the Spanish people was more important than the evidence of inscriptions suggests.

The art of Spain in the Empire is, on the surface, Roman provincial art, academic and banal. The temples of the great towns, the statues of public men, and the costly monuments of the dead conform to the conventions of the age. But in the background some signs of originality are to be found in the country districts and the arts of the people. The sculptures of the mining district of Castulo show an original combination of the human figure with geometric and vegetable decoration. In the neighborhood of Clunia and Palencia, in the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian mountains, and in the Asturias, the funeral stelae are skillfully decorated and have their own technique, flat low-relief obtained by cutting away the background, with the stone trimmed into small slightly convex triangular surfaces, in a style reminiscent of wood-carving. The painted pottery which had formerly been one of the most interesting examples of Iberian art was still manufactured in Roman times. In architecture one really original feature, the Norman arch or Moorish arch, was probably invented in Spain : under the Romans it was confined to the art of the people, where it appears on stelae and on terra sigillata, but later under the Visigoths it was free to develop, and finally became prominent in the art and decoration of the Mohammedan periods.

TOWNS AND ROADS 

In Spain, as elsewhere, one must distinguish between town and country. The country remained to a great extent native, and it was the towns which were the centers of romanization. Their number increased greatly under the Empire. The Romans sometimes built a town to replace a group of villages; or they allowed or encouraged the inhabitants of a small and inaccessible acropolis to remove into the plain and build a town there; or, again, they gave an urban centre to a scattered country population. This last move was particularly common in the north and north-west, where towards the end of the first century or early in the second the Roman administration formed settlements of an urban type in native cities which did not possess them, usually in the neighborhood of a cross-road or a market or a hot spring. Native cities which in Pliny have the name of a tribe appear in Ptolemy as urban centers, and evidently the process of urbanization had gone forward in the interval. These Spanish towns were numerous, and correspondingly unimportant for the most part. In the Guadalquivir valley especially the towns were so near together that they were in close competition, and most of them numbered only a few thousand inhabitants. Those towns, too, which did attain to a greater size found themselves engaged in a competition which brought no decisive victory: in Baetica Corduba, Hispalis and Gades were rivals, on the Mediterranean coast Valentia, Tarraco and Barcino, in Lusitania the administrative capital Emerita, and the prosperous Olisipo.

The communications between all these administrative and economic centers were maintained by a splendid road-system which was in essentials the work of Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius. The arterial roads were the roads from Gaul. The first came from Narbonese Gaul over the eastern Pyrenees and so through Tarraco, Valentia, Castulo, Corduba and Hispalis to Gades: a second ran over the col du Somport to Caesaraugusta (Saragossa), through central Spain from north-east to south-west, and finally reached Emerita and the Lusitanian ports: the third came down from the col de Roncevaux to Pompaelo (Pampeluna), thence through Asturia and Galicia to the ports of Brigantium (Corunna) and Iria Flavia (El Padrón, south of Compostella) the future road of Saint James. The most important of the cross-country roads was the one which branched off from this last road at Asturica and went from north to south as far as Gades, passing through Salmantica, Emerita, Italica and Hispalis. In addition, transport by water was often possible. There was an active coastal trade, and it is certain that the towns of the conventus of Gades, which formed a long narrow coastal strip, communicated by sea as much as or more than by road. Boats plied constantly on the Guadalquivir (up to Corduba) and its principal tributaries, the Maenuba and the Singilis (to Astigi): other navigable rivers were the Anas, Tagus, Douro, Minius and the Ebro as far inland as Vareia near Logroriol.

Nature had placed great obstacles in the way of modernizing the country and ensuring the free passage of men and goods, and here the Romans had their opportunity of winning great technical victories, such as the bridge at Alcantara and the aqueduct at Segovia. The Roman towns of Spain, though their remains are less well preserved than those of Africa, still allow us to imagine what some ancient cities must have looked like: there is Tarragona, rising in splendid tiers on an eminence from which one surveys the Mediterranean as from a balcony, and Italica spreading its wealth of statues and mosaics over the Guadalquivir plain, and Merida, the ancient Emerita, with its magnificent bridges, aqueducts, temples and places of amusement, all the more remarkable because the city was a creation of the Roman will in a district of no great natural wealth. In these towns lived a bourgeoisie which soon enough was ripe to serve the Roman State in the highest positions. As early as 40 BC Spain supplied a consul, the first Cornelius Balbus, and under Augustus a proconsul of Africa who celebrated a triumph, Cornelius Balbus the second: in the first century she produced many Roman senators, and it was from the municipal middle class of Baetica that Trajan and Hadrian rose to the principate. Even more remarkable is the position of Spain in the Latin literature of the first century, with Porcius Latro, the two Senecas and Lucan, Quintilian and Martial, not to mention the technical writers such as Hyginus, Pomponius Mela and Columella. The excellence of the Spanish schools is proved also by the merit of the poems among our inscriptions, which in Spain are distinctly above the average.

Spain thus made an important contribution to the best Roman society. But it must not be forgotten that this was only the Spanish upper class, and beneath it there was a large population which remained on a lower level of life, and was less receptive of Roman influences. Above all, when Rome had done all that she could to make the land a unity, the land remained divided, a complex of districts which were unities in themselves, as nature and their past history had formed them.

 

IV.

GAUL

 

Augustus had begun, and Tiberius finished, a series of measures which left Gaul divided into four provinces, with an excrescence in the shape of the two Germanies, originally military areas, but later provinces themselves. Of the Gallic provinces one, Narbonensis, was senatorial, comprising territory conquered by the Romans at the end of the second century BC. Caesar's conquests, Gallia Comata, became the Imperial provinces of Aquitania, Lugdunensis and Belgica, with an Imperial cult in common. The division of Transalpine Gaul between Senate and princeps was natural enough, for Narbonensis, besides being the oldest province of them all, was also geographically distinct from the others, by reason of its Mediterranean climate and its situation. It falls for the most part inside the zone favorable to the growth of the olive, which never penetrated to the other parts of Gaul towards the Atlantic, the Channel or the Rhine. Greek influences emanating from Massilia for centuries before the Roman conquest had long since left their mark on the country's civilization. Moreover, Narbonensis lay on the road between Italy and Spain, and offered a route which was a welcome alternative to the stormy Gulf of Lyons; so that she not only belonged to the original nucleus of the Empire as the rest of Gaul did not, but actually formed the connecting link between the countries of the western Mediterranean. The prime function of the three Imperial provinces, on the other hand, was to maintain and support the German provinces, which protected the Empire against barbarism, whether from the threat of invasion or the tendency to encroach by infiltration.

These differences appeared in the character of the towns and the composition of the population. In Narbonensis there were many towns, at least on the coast and in the Rhône valley; and many of them were colonies in which had settled veterans of Caesar or of Augustus, an important Italian leaven working in the original population. Towards the end of the Republic and under the earliest Emperors, these towns were adorned with elegant monuments, embodiments of a fusion between the Greek tradition which still lived in the districts inland from Massilia, and a desire to imitate Roman manners. The bourgeoisie of these parts was quickly romanized, and gave to the early Empire men who shared in its government, men such as Burrus from Vaison, Valerius Asiaticus, consul in AD 46, from Vienne, and Agricola the father-in-law of Tacitus, from Frejus. Roman letters, too, received their contribution. Cornelius Gallus, poet and high official, came from Frejus; Pompeius Trogus belonged to the region of Vaison; and two of the leading orators under the Julio-Claudians, Votienus Montanus and Domitius Afer, came the one from Narbonne, the other from Nimes. It was from Nimes that Antoninus Pius sprang, the son and grandson of Roman consuls. Indeed, Pliny the Elders was led to observe that Italy and Narbonensis were practically one and the same thing. There were parts, it is true, near the Alps, where the colonies were fewer, and the municipal territories more extensive; but, even so, smaller centers of population were there to compete with the great town of the district, and to arrive at urban status themselves by a gradual evolution. Narbonensis, in fact, was a land of towns, each dominating a rather small area round about it.

It was not so in the three Imperial provinces. There the Roman administration preserved, with few exceptions, the division by civitates, cities which Caesar had found in existence. In the part of Aquitania adjoining the Pyrenees the population followed the rule which we have seen in Spain; the same local particularism resulted in a division into very small units of population, each of which lived within its own valley. But elsewhere in the three provinces the cities were comparatively few, and each city had a correspondingly large territory, varying in character and resources, and capable of an independent life of its own. The city of Gallia Comata is an economic and political entity, a sort of State in miniature. It has a central and initiative organ which is the town, the capital of the civitas, and also secondary organs, boroughs or villages, the centre of the pagi which are the subdivisions of the civitas. The country recognizes the supremacy and authority of the capital, but is not oppressed or effaced by it, since it contains in itself a good proportion of the most active and useful elements in the city-community. In the country districts included in each community are to be found either isolated farms, great or small, or hamlets of laborers and artisans, or centers of population which gradually spring up round a cross roads or a market or a sanctuary. Such places are focuses of industry with a function of their own, because the area of the city-community is great, and the capital a long way off. The country was subordinate to the town in Gaul as elsewhere in the Roman world; but in Gaul the opposition between the two was probably the least profound, and its effects the least marked. This population received few foreign elements superimposed on its Celtic foundation, and consequently Celtic traditions survived, traditions which made the relations between country and town not so much an affair of dependence and supremacy as of a combination between the two on equal terms.

Gaul was always rich in corn, vegetables and fruit, and under the Empire she became the richer, in that the pax Romana assured regular harvests and greater facilities for marketing. She thus supported her own population, and in most years had a surplus of many of her products for export to Italy or to the armies on the Rhine. The vine grew in many parts of the country, and wine was produced in latitudes well to the north of Paris. In the north, the local wines were drunk at home, but the wines of Languedoc, the Rhône, Burgundy and the Garonne were exported. Nevertheless, this industry was not always well seen by the emperors, for as long as the Italian vineyards produced enough wine for home consumption and for export, the producers demanded that the output from the provinces should be restricted, and they succeeded in moving the authorities in their favor. A measure passed about the time of the conquest of Narbonensis, restricting the growing of vines in the provinces, which had long ceased to be effective, was re-enforced by Domitian, who laid down not merely that no new vines were to be planted, but even that a part of the existing vines was to be destroyed. How far this law was put into practice cannot be determined; but we know of no revolt, or even discontent, resulting from it, and may perhaps conclude that it was not rigorously enforced, and that in many instances governors and procurators were content to turn a blind eye. It seems almost certain that the legal prohibition had very largely fallen into desuetude by the time it was officially repealed by Probus in the second half of the third century, and we may conclude that a long competition between Italian wines and the wines of Gaul and other provinces ended in a victory for the provincials. Olive oil, too, gave Italian producers grounds for the same fears at the time of the conquest of Gaul. Nevertheless, in the first century the growth of the olive made great strides in Narbonensis, where no doubt the presence of colonists of Italian origin counted for much, since it is difficult to stop people from growing what they have always grown, and what they like to grow. Narbonensis never came into competition with Africa or Baetica : her oil hardly travelled outside Gaul and the Germanies, and even these provinces were obliged to import Spanish oil as well, though many of the peasants probably still used their native oils, made in all likelihood from beechnuts or walnuts.

Among cereals wheat naturally took pride of place, though much barley was grown also, particularly in the north, where it was turned to good use for making beer. Flax and hemp, grown for textiles, were very profitable. The breeding of horses and mules, sheep, cattle and pigs were all flourishing industries: and Gaul was famous for its hounds. Hides, cheeses and hams were exported in great abundance.

In mineral resources Gaul was not wholly deficient, but the seams which had been freely worked before the conquest were now insignificant compared with the wealth of Spain, Noricum and Britain, and, a little later, of Dacia. Mines were closed down, except silver and iron mines: and even iron and silver were no longer exported on the old scale, but were used at home, and finally left the country, if they did leave it, in the shape of manufactured goods.

Industrial activity is the distinguishing mark of Roman Gaul, an activity embracing in its innumerable workshops articles of every kind for consumption at home or abroad. It is most often in the hands of men working at home and for their own account. A workshop is run by the members of one family, with, at the most, a few paid workmen in addition. In only a few cases, notably in the pottery and glass industries, did the industrial system develop so as to include a number of real factories employing many workmen, whether free laborers or slaves.

The output and the profits of Gallic manufacturers depended very greatly on the quality of the workmanship. There were many Gauls who were good and clever craftsmen. Trade secrets were handed down from father to son, and maintained the excellence of the finished article. An important consideration was the great forests of Gaul, which had suffered comparatively little from deforestation, and thus provided cheap and plentiful fuel. This connection between forest and industry explains the great number of ruins that have been found in the forests of France, and especially in the north: they are the sites of ancient workshops. The Gauls were metal-workers and goldsmiths, and made, besides articles of everyday use, jewelry and objets d'art, silver plate, bronze statuettes, fibulae and enameled boxes: the fibulae of the Gaul Aucissa were fashionable in distant countries. The products of the textile industry were greatly in demand, and especially its cloaks, as well as sails and mattresses, both well-known Gallic specialties. Of the workers in wood, the coopers, coach-builders and shoemakers of Gaul were known and respected everywhere.

But the most developed and most expansive industry was that of pottery, and its companion industry, glass-making. The Gallic potters began by imitating the potters of Italy, but later they had their own processes and their own types, less elaborate and hence less expensive than Arretine ware, and they ended by capturing nearly every market. The most famous workshops are in the Massif Central, namely, in the first century, at La Graufesenque and Montans in the territory of the Ruteni; later in the first century and early in the second at Banassac in the territory of the Gabali; and in the second century at Lezoux in the territory of the Arverni. As early as the first century great quantities of Gallic pottery had reached Pompeii, and later it is found not only all over Gaul, but in Italy, Africa, Spain, Britain and Germany: in the southern parts of the Empire the vases from La Graufesenque are the most frequent, in the north those of Lezoux. In spite of the local competition and imitation encountered by Gallic wares in countries where they had originally enjoyed a monopoly, they continued to be exported abundantly and profitably right up to the crisis of the third century. The glassworkers, of whom the most famous is Frontinus in the north of Gaul, followed the example of the potters, though their products, being more fragile, were less suitable for export.

All this commerce was served by a system of communications well conceived in the first place, and established for the most part since the time of Augustus and Agrippa. Here Gaul had one great advantage over every other province in its numerous river-ways, navigable nearly all the year round. Some rivers had a deeper and more regular flow than now, and the boats of that day drew little water, with the result that navigation was possible not only on the great arteries (the Rhône and the Saône, the Moselle, the Seine up to Troyes, the Loire up to Roanne, and the Garonne up to Toulouse), but also on such rivers as the Ardeche, the Doubs, the Yonne and the Allier. There were no canals joining these river-routes, but the junction was made by portages where the valleys were nearest to each other, and in this way the Doubs was linked up with the Rhine, the Saône with the Moselle and with the Seine or Yonne, the Rhône with the Allier, and the Aude with the Garonne. The corporations of boat-owners were rich and influential, and the towns situated at the junction of a river-route with important roads were the trading centres of Gaul: the prosperity of Narbonne, Arles, Bordeaux, Lyons and Treves derived originally from this source, which indeed leads also to the future fortunes of Paris.

The mass of the population of Gaul consisted of farmers and artisans. This fact combined with the survival of the pagi as communities with a certain individuality of their own to assist the survival of the native culture. There was never any real conflict between the pre-Roman customs and the process of romanization. The Celts of Gaul, unlike the Berbers and the Iberians, were related to the Italians by language, with all its implications of similarity in thought and feeling, and this Indo-European relationship between the conquering and the conquered people was vital to their good understanding. The new manners brought by the Romans found no violent opposition, though they did not drive out the ancient customs completely: the civilization of Roman Gaul is in fact a combination of the two, and it is this which gives it its originality. The structure of society in general remained what it had always been; in each city there was an aristocracy of great landlords surrounded by a multitude of clients and small tenants. It was no great change for the rich noble of independent Gaul to become the Gallo-Roman senator, when under Claudius the Senate was thrown open to some of the provincial citizens of Gallia Comata; and such a senator, living on the income from his estates, and controlling directly or indirectly a mass of peasants and workpeople, was a powerful conservative element in the social system, and later, when the Empire began to break up, was destined to be the most stable element in a crumbling world. He dominated, but he protected. Under his shadow peasants and workmen could live safely, if humbly, and famines and bankruptcies were rare.

In housing and dress, old habits died hard. The toga did not supersede the national costumes, the sagum, trousers and cowled cloak. The Celtic speech remained for long the popular speech of the countryside, and lawyers in the third century still recognized the validity of documents drawn up in the Gallic tongue. Nevertheless, Latin gained ground daily: many people were bilingual, and in the towns there was an increasing number of Gauls who knew Latin only. Curiously enough, there are cups made for the use of tavern-keepers and their customers, that is to say, of the common people, which bear inscriptions—greetings, wishes or toasts—in Latin. The schools worked hard to diffuse the Latin speech and letters. There were famous schools at Toulouse and Treves, at Marseilles, where the progress of Latin did more and more to efface Greek traditions, and at Autun, in that country of the Aedui which from the first had co-operated so effectively to advance Roman influence. Although few notable writers were educated in these schools under the Flavians and Antonines­Favorinus of Arles, contemporary of Hadrian and the best known Gallic man of letters, is no more than a second-rate figure—there is still no reason to doubt that the general level of the instruction which they introduced into the aristocracy and middle class was high enough.

But it is in religion, as is natural, that the tenacity of the old Celtic life is most obvious. The Druids, indeed, and their rites had been suppressed by the Imperial police. But there was no incompatibility between the native cults and the cults superimposed on them by Roman influences, one of which, the semi-political cult of Rome and Augustus, assembled every year round the altar at Lyons, where the Saône joins the Rhone, the representatives of the sixty-four civitates of Celtic Gaul. Worshippers still flocked regularly to their ancestral sanctuaries (notably at Alesia). In many cases the native gods had been assimilated by the Romans to Graeco-Italian gods, so that by an easy syncretism the two gods were worshipped under the one name, as the great Gallic god Teutates disguised himself under the name and attributes of Mercury. Sometimes, however, the Celtic name was preserved: or a native epithet could be attached to the name of a Roman god; or a Roman god could have a native goddess associated with him as his consort, a form of union which gives us the couples Mercury and Rosmerta, Apollo and Sirona; or, again, a Celtic deity could live on quite undisturbed, as did Epona, the goddess of horses, whose cult passed far beyond the frontiers of Gaul and spread throughout the Empire. The common people and peasants and soldiers clung especially to the cult of the Matres or Matronae, the ancient and popular deities of springs, rivers, forests or mountains, guardians of the land and of its inhabitants.

The same mixture of imitation and local tradition can be seen in the images of the gods, statues, statuettes and reliefs: on the one hand, the conventional Jupiter or Mercury, on the other hand gods with three heads or with the antlers of a stag. In the cities of Belgica (and also in Germany) were many columns surmounted by a giant with a serpent's tail beneath a mounted figure, where the idea is native and the execution is in the Roman style: a mythical struggle between light and darkness or between heaven and earth is expressed by forms which draw their inspiration from classical art. The architecture of the temples shows yet another example of the same process, for they are often built to a square plan derived from Celtic tradition, but they are surrounded with porticos. The sculpture which comprises the monuments of these Gallo-Roman cults is usually clumsy and uninspired. There is more originality and variety and fidelity in the funeral stelae, which have for their favorite theme not, as in Africa, a representation of prophylactic symbols, nor, as in Spain, a schematic picture of the world of the dead, but simply the likeness of the living man in the attitudes of his daily work and dressed for his workshop or booth. This popular realistic art is most attractive. The obvious pleasure with which the Gallo-Roman sculptor treats such scenes must certainly have some connection with development of a skilled craftsmanship in Gaul. Speaking generally, the survival in this art of the Celtic spirit, which makes itself seen in a certain independence of the strict discipline of classicism, makes it alive despite all its imperfections.

In the South of France, the ancient Narbonensis, monuments still standing make it easiest to imagine what the towns of Roman Gaul were like. Frejus, Arles, Nimes, Orange, Vaison or Vienne still possess fine ancient buildings—temples, arches, theatres, amphitheatres, aqueducts or baths—which date, many of them, from the early Empire, and the rest from the age of the Antonines. Elsewhere in France the monuments were often less soundly built, and their ruins have not lasted so well, but, even so, innumerable remains are still to be seen scattered over the land or collected in the museums.

The importance of Gaul in the Imperial system as the mainstay of the two provinces of Germany deserves to be emphasized. The close connection between the Gauls and the Germanies is illustrated even by the administrative boundaries, for the Treviri were included in Belgica, while the Lingones belonged to Upper Germany until the second century, and the Sequani until the end of the third. There were no troops in Gaul itself, except a corps of police, the urban cohort in barracks at Lyons, and several posts to maintain the safety of certain important roads: but the country was a recruiting ground for the armies of Germany. The German legions in the first century and early second century contained a rather high proportion of Gauls; and, especially, a great part of the auxilia of the armies of Germany in the first century was originally recruited from Gaul. They include several cohorts of Aquitani, cohorts of Bituriges and Belgae, and alae of Gauls which often bear the name of the officer who first formed them. Later, the progress of romanization found the Gauls with less taste for military service; their numbers in the legions diminished, and the auxiliary corps which were Gallic by name and origin were transferred to more distant provinces and recruited there. But the provinces of Gaul did not cease to support and strengthen the armies of Germany, for even if the supplies of men failed somewhat, they never ceased to supply them with food, material and articles of daily use. The contractors for the armies of the Rhine were among the most important business men in the country.

Another notable function of Gaul was as the gateway to Britain and the North. The normal route from Rome to Britain was via Lyons, Langres, Reims, Soissons and Boulogne, the port that secured communication between the continent and Britain. Many Gauls served in the army of Britain, too, while military service was still popular. There was an active import and export and carrying trade across the Straits of Dover. From the Channel ports also, Gallic sailors travelled, hugging the coast, to the lands of the Batavians and Frisians and even beyond. This maritime route, no less than the newer land routes from Aquileia across the Alps and from the Black Sea up the Dnieper, brought the Romans into contact with "the most remote of mankind", the dwellers by the North Sea and the Baltic, and the populations of East Germany and Scandinavia. Gaul thus contributed more than any other province to a widening of the Empire's horizon, and an extension of Roman civilization beyond its birthplace and home in the Mediterranean lands.