CHAPTER II. THE GALLO-ROMANS: BORDEAUX

When the Romans burst in their order and their splendour into Gaul, they found before them a people, not savage indeed, but individualized to the verge of incoherence. The Gauls were brave, “soldiers to a man, and at every age,” as Ammianus puts it. But they were undisciplined and disunited. The Romans were at least as brave, very hard, dour, and persevering fighters, and they were admirably organized. Therefore in the space of eight years Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. And on their new possessions the Romans imposed the system of their culture so profoundly that to-day the French remain a Latin nation as conspicuously as they are a Celto-Frankish race.

The Roman system of conquest differed from that of most of the peoples of antiquity; it ennobled rather than humiliated. Rome imposed her rule on the vanquished; she neither enslaved nor exterminated. Her armies overwhelmed a country like a fertilizing tide, and then retired to Rome, leaving behind them her social organization, her municipal system, her culture, and her language. In exchange, she accorded to the towns included in her Empire the rights of Roman citizenship. The Gallo-Roman cities sent delegates to the metropolis, who voted there on questions of war and state and Empire on the same terms as other Roman citizens; while, in Gaul, each town preserved a certain measure of Home Rule, choosing its own religious worship, ordaining its priests and regulating its ceremonies, electing its civic magistrates, administering its own estates and revenues, and deciding all questions of purely local interest. If in any respect the towns outran their due limits, Rome proceeded with vigour (as against the Christians of Lyons in A.D. 177), ‘but her system was to prefer an occasional persecution in punishment of an excess to any sequence of preventive measures.

After some ineffectual revolts and revolutions, the Gauls yielded to the prestige of the Universal City; with every generation they admired her more wholeheartedly; and by the fourth century most of them could say with Ausonius:“Romam colo“ - “Rome is my religion.”

And indeed Rome had done much for Gaul. From Treves in the north to Bordeaux in the south, and the magnificent villas by the Mediterranean Sea, her rough military towns, her homely farms and fields, had been changed into marvellous gardens, into cities with aqueducts and amphitheatres and temples no less splendid or lovely than those of Rome herself. And all this with no rude displacing of beloved landmarks.