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 Cæsar 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. Take for an example Autun, the Druids’ town : the Romans made of it a great centre of their civilization ; the school of rhetoric of Autun was reckoned to furnish the most brilliant orators of the Empire ; its monuments were beautiful. But the old faith was not ousted or treated with contempt. The grandfather of the poet Ausonius was a Druid, and, in the middle of the fourth century, discoursed of the secrets of the stars and delivered justice according to the ancient Celtic rites ; walking in the streets of Autun, the good man might encounter the augurs of Mercury, or some deacon from the Christian Church established in the town since the first decades of the Christian Era. They were all citizens of the Empire, and equals.

It is difficult for us to form an idea of life in the Roman Empire : such an immense federation of peoples associated in an enchantment of material prosperity. Peace and power spread out such mighty wings that the races of the earth were harboured under them. And the national idea seemed abolished. The Greeks of Marseilles, the large Syrian colonies of Lyons the great industrial city on the Rhône, were as much at home in Gaul as the Romans or the Celts themselves. The conquered nations felt no barrier between them and supremacy : were not the Emperors Vespasian and Titus of Gaulish origin ? If, for example, we glance for an instant at the genealogy of that Druid of Autun, we perceive how rapid was the ascension of a man of talent and how far-reaching the attraction of Rome. Cæcilius Arbor himself had been an unsuccessful person : a noble Druid, compromised in the revolt of Victorinus, he fled from Autun to Aquitaine in the concluding years of the third century, and, in his new home at Bordeaux, found his Celtic lore and Druid philosophy of such scant account that, in order to earn his children’s bread, he was obliged to practise more remunerative accomplishments, such as fortune-telling and astrology. It is probable that Caecilius Arbor was never quite at home in that splendid Gallo-Roman Bordeaux, nor did he express himself easily in Latin, but used in his home circle some Celtic dialect and considered Greek the natural language of philosophy.

His son, however, Emilius Magnus Arbor, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Bordeaux, was the glory of the bar of Toulouse and one of the great Latin orators of his time. The men of Gaul were famous for their eloquence. The echo of Emilius Arbor’s gift spread through the Empire till, at Constantinople, the Emperor heard of him and sent for the Gaulish barrister to educate his son.

Meanwhile, Emilius’s sister had married a young doctor of Bordeaux, one Julius Ausonius, a specialist in rheumatic diseases. Their son, Decimus Magnus Ausonius, was the Latin poet, dear to all who have a secret attachment to minor verse. But, for the case in point, it is more important that Ausonius, the Druid’s grandson, should have been the Governor of the Emperor Gratian, a Count of the Empire, First Consul of the year 379, Prefect of Africa, Prefect of Italy, and Prefect of the Gauls.

Thanks to Ausonius, who, born in 309, lived till the closing years of the fourth century—thanks to that excellent descriptive poet and letter-writer—we can form a living idea of what Gaul looked like under the Emperors Constantine, Valentinian, and Gratian. Even more than other ages, that age was a period of transition. The Roman Empire reigned supreme on the solid Roman roads that ran, from Bordeaux, for example, to Paris, to Treves, to Spain, to Rome, and (with a marine interval) Jerusalem. The carriages and horses of Gaul were far renowned ; there was a mail-post ; in fact, the service of the road was far better than it was to be in the Middle Ages and much as it existed at the date of the invention of railroads.

For the men of the Roman Empire were no stay-at-homes ; they were continually upon their beautiful roads : soldiers, officials, or travellers. As you approached the towns, there, too, the magnificence of Rome was apparent in its state : villas whose vast constructions, faced by flowery porticoes and peristyles, crowned terraced gardens, where fountains played and statues gleamed among the greenery ; there were noble monuments, baths, theatres, temples ; among the farming villages there stood some modest Christian church. The grandson of Ausonius, Paulinus of Pella, gives us an excellent idea of a country house in Gaul at the end of the fourth century : “ All that I asked in my youth [says he] was a comfortable mediocrity ; for instance, a commodious villa with a double set of apartments disposed to the south for use in winter, and open to the north for summer-time ; a well-furnished table ; many slaves and in the flower of their youth ; furniture of all sorts in great profusion ; silver plate more precious for its workmanship than for its weight ; among the staff of servants, artists of several sorts, quick to execute my fancies and devices ; good stables full of horses and carriages of various sorts for driving.” Paulinus says nothing of his library, but we know that Ausonius, his grandfather, was rich both in books and in instruments of music.

But as the traveller neared the towns of Gaul all this antique state and space and splendour shrank and changed : the cities of the reign of Constantine were the narrow, stifling cities of the early Middle Ages, For already the Barbarians had begun their inroads. The beautiful open cities of antiquity, spread largely on the plain, with spacious streets interspersed with gardens, with colossal temples, baths, porticoes, amphitheatres, were things of yesterday ; many of these monuments still existed (since some of them remain to-day), but outside the city walls, scattered among the vineyards. And the towns themselves had shrunken into fortresses with huge encircling walls garnished with towers : the towers of Bordeaux (said Ausonius) “ pierce the clouds.” The port was rich and busy, doing already a large trade in wine with England ; the University was no less brilliant than it is to-day (Ausonius has left an agreeable gallery of portraits of the professors), but Bordeaux was no longer pleasant as a residential place ; it had sadly fallen off from the antique enchantment, the exquisite urbanity, of the grandeur that was Rome.

This Roman Gaul of Constantine and Valentinian and their successors, with the Barbarian at the gates, was already full of the promise of the Middle Ages. The attempt of Julian to bring back the ancient gods had failed ; though the landed nobility still clung to his device (they cling to it to-day, with a difference), and rallied to the cry : “ τά πατρἰα ἐθη, το͡υς...