Gallic gods, Roman rites

Did any place remain where Gallo-Romans remained Gauls above all? Put otherwise, did some form of Celtic or Gallic identity persist beneath a public veneer of Romanized manners and culture, perhaps in the remoter parts of the country, or in the depths of forests or in mountain valleys? The argument of this book has so far made the opposite case. Roman and Gallic identities were opposed during an early – but brief – formative period; thereafter that opposition was supplanted by more familiar Roman contrasts, between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, military and civilian and so forth. Cultural distinctions echoed these social changes, so that the construction of theatres and temples or the possession of mosaics and consumption of fish-sauce rapidly came to signify good taste and social eminence, rather than adherence to a set of cultural norms associated first and foremost with alien conquerors. The villas of Brittany and the material culture of the Vosges villages seem to offer little support for the idea of islands of residual ‘Celticism’ in a Gallo-Roman sea. The spread of Roman style, right down to the most basic tableware, shows that even the poorest had learned to be impoverished in a Roman manner.

Historians who have taken a different line have most often based their case on Gallo-Roman religion. It is easy to see why this has been the case.

This book is a study of the origins and nature of the culture of the provinces of the early Roman empire. The creation of provincial cultures is not an obvious sequel to Rome's conquest of the Mediterranean world and its continental hinterlands. To illustrate the point we might imagine another – counter-factual – Roman empire, created in much the same way as the real one by armies led out on campaign by aristocratic generals to defend and extend Roman power, and to win booty, prestige and territory. As the campaigns become grander, the armies grow larger and fight further and further away from home until expansion ceases and there is peace in the provinces of this imaginary Roman empire. Taxes are paid and the odd rebellion essayed and suppressed but otherwise life goes on much as it did before in the cities of the Greeks, the villages of Gaul, the temples of the Egyptians and so on. If Counter-Rome's subjects farm a little harder and fight a little less, the day to day rhythm of their lives is unchanged, they speak the same languages as before, worship the same gods, inhabit the same houses and eat the same foods off the same pottery as they had always done. And when the empire withers away or collapses, as all empires – imaginary or real – must do, all is exactly as it was and no traces of it remain.

The civilizing process

At some point in the late 290s ad, an orator from the town of Autun in present day Burgundy made a speech before an imperial governor, perhaps the Prefect of the province of Lugdunensis I. The orator, Eumenius, was a powerful and wealthy citizen of the community of the Aedui, whose capital Autun was, and had recently returned from serving as Magister Memoriae at the court of Constantius Chlorus, one of the two Caesars, or junior emperors, who assisted the Augusti, who at that time ruled the Roman empire. Constantius had set in hand the restoration of Autun, which had been sacked a generation before during a Roman civil war; the work had already begun, and Eumenius had been entrusted by the Caesar with the task of instructing the Aeduan youth of Autun in the liberal arts, which meant above all in oratory. Now, in his speech, he sought the Caesar's permission to dedicate his considerable salary to the physical restoration of the Scholae Maenianae, the celebrated schools of Autun. Recalling Constantius' past services to the city, and both the ancient and recent services of the Aedui to Rome, Eumenius sought permission to perform an act of euergetism, of civic munificence, that would at the same time express his loyalty to his imperial patron, his civic patriotism, his adherence to the highest cultural ideals of the empire and his pre-eminence among his own people.

Becoming Roman

The culture of Roman Gaul had its origin in a single historical moment, a formative period shared with other provincial cultures in the East and the West, itself one aspect of a much broader reconfiguration of Roman power and culture. That formative period lasted a short century that spanned the turn of the millenia and centred around the principate of Augustus, although the shift to autocracy was only one component of these transformations. The life and manners of the south of Gaul, conquered at the end of the second century bc, were thus transformed at much the same time as those of the interior which Caesar added to the Roman empire almost seventy years later. Naturally it took the Gauls some time to satisfy the new cultural aspirations learnt in that period. The technology gap was formidable, and the cost of building a new civilization ruinous. But little by little imported wine and marble were replaced by local products, and stop-gap solutions like wooden fora and imitation sigillata were replaced with the real thing. Eventually, distinctively Gallo-Roman cultural forms appeared, some, like villae and fana, the results of Mediterranean technology applied to traditional structures, others simply local creations, like Gallo-Roman theatre-amphitheatres and the Jupiter columns of the north-east, that developed within the increasingly loose complex that formed Roman imperial culture. That increasing looseness is also evident in the appearance of regional traditions in everything from burial rites to ceramic tablewares.

Beyond the city

What significance should the countryside have in an investigation of how Gauls became Romans? One common strategy employed by historians is to use the culture of the countryside to puncture the pretensions of the town. There is something to be gained rhetorically from setting Gallo-Roman cities against the vast backdrop of their rural hinterlands, if only to illustrate how few, small and far apart urban centres were in some parts of the Gallic provinces. It does not follow, however, either that Roman culture was restricted to the new cities of Gaul, or that the countryside was excluded from processes of cultural change.

In fact, every aspect of Gallic life was to some extent transformed by integration into the empire, including most spheres of rural life. New crops were introduced, particularly for arboriculture, and the geographical range of some Mediterranean species, including the vine and the olive, was extended inland. New technologies were adopted, for example new methods of storing grain, of processing agricultural produce and of draining marshes. These changes were perhaps not as significant as the agricultural revolution that had begun and gathered pace in the centuries immediately preceding the Roman conquest. The first large scale production of metal agricultural tools was associated in the late iron age with demographic growth, attested by settlement evidence as well as by classical accounts of migrations and huge armies, and with agricultural expansion involving both some deforestation and the cultivation of heavier soils.

A new world of goods

The testament of the Lingon, discussed in the previous chapter, demanded that the altar beside his tomb be built of marble from Luni in Italy. The stipulation reveals not only a desire for the best quality stone but, more significantly, a knowledge of where the best marble was to be found. That discrimination is part of the Lingon's self-representation, as an aristocrat of taste who recognizes and demands quality. But it also serves as a reminder of the complexity of the cultural competence that Gallo-Roman aristocrats had had to acquire in order to consume in accordance with their new identities in the imperial order. Like all upwardly mobile groups they must have found their new positions bewildering at first, as they were presented with unfamiliar choices from all the good things of the empire. Consumption was problematic enough for Italian elites in this period, but the new aristocracies of the western provinces faced additional difficulties as they struggled to avoid provincialism. The reputation of Valerius Asiaticus, a Julio-Claudian senator from Vienne, renowned not only for his wealth but also for his ostentatious display of it, suggests that at least some of them did get it wrong.

Consumption was problematic principally because it was one way in which Romans expressed their public identities. The late Republic and early empire were characterized by fierce debates about what kinds of consumption were appropriate for members of the Roman elite.

Gallo-Romans in their own words

Gallo-Roman civilization was not built in a day. Nor were all parts of Gaul, nor all sectors of Gallic societies equally affected by the civilizing process. The aim of this chapter is to map out – in broad lines – the cultural geography of Roman Gaul, the rhythms and timing of change, and its social distribution. The picture that emerges will be elaborated and nuanced later, but this outline is sufficient to make clear the overriding importance of Roman power in explaining the emergent patterning of Gallo-Roman culture. Gallic culture was transformed at the points of most intense contact between Romans and Gauls. The period of maximum change corresponded to the period when Roman power over Gaul was suddenly intensified. The social groups most effected were those in closest contact with the various representatives of the imperial state. All this is exactly as might have been expected in view of the relationships that have been established between Roman imperialism and cultural change in Gaul.

Mapping cultural change is not easy. Ideally a wide range of variables would be considered, each well dated and provenanced and socially unambiguous, but the result would be a book in its own right and very difficult to construct from the state of the evidence for Roman Gaul. Instead, a single category of evidence – epigraphy – will be used here to establish a provisional outline of the cultural geography of Roman Gaul.

The Gauls observed

The greater part of the Roman empire was conquered in the last generation of the free Republic and the reign of the first princeps. The rapidity of Roman expansion in that period, along with the new intensity in the encounter with Hellenism that it entailed, prompted many Romans to reconsider conventional wisdoms about their place in the world. From those reflections emerged new conceptions of Rome's past and Rome's destiny and new ideas about Roman identity, Roman virtue and Roman civilization. One of these new ideas has special relevance for this study: a growing consciousness that Romans were destined by the gods to conquer, rule and civilize the world.

Recent attempts to explain the diversity of modern colonialisms and imperialisms have led historians to examine the attitudes and ideals with which each power approached empire – among them notions of race and class, religion and sexuality, civility and nature, history and progress – and the ways in which consensuses and debates about these issues affected, and were in turn affected by, the imperial project. Unless the historian's aim is simply to condemn past imperialists by modern standards, understanding empire necessitates some consideration of these issues, perhaps even some empathetic efforts.

A world of villages

Barbarism might be defined in negative terms as an absence of civilized qualities. Among the many respects in which Gauls might be found lacking by the discriminating gaze of their new rulers was that they did not live in cities. The city was conceived of as a community of citizens united by laws and the worship of the gods, the natural environment of men, in other words that in which they could best realize their moral potential. Beyond the civilized world of cities, the classical writers described men living in villages, scattered through the countryside, or else as nomads, wanderers with no fixed abode eating raw flesh like animals, drinking only milk. The spread of civilization could thus be traced in the foundation of cities. The public monuments of a city were the physical expression of its politeia and the high culture of the elite might be termed urbanitas, a term that came to embrace refinement, taste and literary style. Even in their suburban and rural villae, the elites of the early empire created little islands of urban culture, residences marked out as urban by architecture and domesticated gardens, by the comforts with which they were equipped, baths, mosaics and wall paintings depicting idealized rural vistas, and slave staffs. Those excluded by the ideal of urbanitas were the uneducated of the town as well as of the country, and like humanitas, the ideal operated as a class marker.

In A.D. 495 (or thereabouts) the Bishop of Rome sent a stern letter to some of his fellow Christians in the city, denouncing those who continued to celebrate the ancient ritual of the Lupercalia. Almost two hundred years after the emperor Constantine had started the process of making Christianity the ‘official’ religion of the Roman State, in a city that must in some ways have seemed a securely Christian environment (with its great churches — old St Peter's, St John Lateran — rivalling in size and splendour the most famous buildings of the pagan past), Bishop Gelasius was faced with the problem of an old pagan ritual that would not die. Many members of his flock watched eagerly, it seems, as every 15 February a group of youths, very scantily clad, rushed around the city (as similar groups had done for more than a thousand years), lashing with a thong anyone who came across their path. But these Christians were not just eager, interested or curious spectators. It was even worse than this from Gelasius’ point of view; for they claimed that it was vital to the safety and prosperity of Rome that this ancient ritual should continue to be performed - a claim that had always been one of the most powerful, and most commonly repeated, justifications of the traditional (pagan) gods and their cult. Proper worship of the Roman gods ensured the success of Rome: that was an axiom not easily overthrown, even by Christians in the late fifth Century A.D.

In mounting his attack, Gelasius looked back over more than a millennium of Roman history to the very origins of the Lupercalia - and to the prehistoric inhabitants of the seven hills, who invented the ritual (so Roman myths claimed) generations before Romulus arrived on the scene to found Rome itself. Gelasius may have publicly set himself against the traditions and mythologies of his pagan predecessors; but he knew his enemy and confidently appealed to the history of the institution he was attacking, spanning the centuries between Christian Rome and the earliest years of traditional Roman paganism. These are precisely the centuries that we explore in this book: the millennium or more that takes Rome from a primitive village to world empire and finally to Christian capital.