Influence of the cantonal constitution.
This continued subsistence and this enlargement of the cantonal constitution must have been above all influential in determining the further political development of Gaul. While the Tarraconensian province was split up into two hundred and ninety–three independent communities (p. 72), the three Gauls numbered together, as we shall see, not more than sixty–four of them. Their unity and their recollections remained unbroken; the zealous adoration, which throughout the imperial period was paid among the Volcae to the fountain–god Nemausus, shows how even here, in the south of the land and in a canton transformed into a town, there was still a vivid sense of the traditional tie that bound them together. Communities with wide bounds, firmly knit in this way by inward ties, were a power. Such as Caesar found the Gallic communities, with the mass of the people held in entire political as well as economic dependence, and an overpowerful nobility, they substantially remained under Roman rule; exactly as in pre–Roman times the great nobles, with their train of dependents and bondsmen to be counted by thousands, played the part of masters each in his own home, so Tacitus describes the state of things in Tiberius’s time among the Treveri. The Roman government gave to the community comprehensive rights, even a certain military power, so that they under certain circumstances were entitled to erect fortresses and keep them garrisoned, as was the case among the Helvetii; the magistrates could call out the militia, and had in that case the rights and the rank of officers. This prerogative was not the same in the hands of the president of a small town of Andalusia, and of the president of a district on the Loire or the Moselle of the size of a small province. The large–hearted policy of Caesar the elder, to whom the outlines of this system must necessarily be traced back, here presents itself in all its grand extent.
Diet of the three Gauls.
But the government did not confine itself to leaving with the Celts their cantonal organisation; it left, or rather gave, to them also a national constitution, so far as such a constitution was compatible with Roman supremacy. As on the Hellenic nation, so Augustus conferred on the Gallic an organised collective representation, such as they in the epoch of freedom and of disorganisation had striven after, but had never attained. Under the hill crowned by the capital of Gaul, where the Saone mingles its waters with those of the Rhone, on the 1st August of the year 742[12.], the imperial prince Drusus, as representative of the government in Gaul, consecrated to Roma and to the Genius of the ruler the altar, at which thenceforth every year on this day the festival of these gods was to be celebrated by the joint action of the Gauls. The representatives of all the cantons chose from their midst year by year the “priest of the three Gauls,” who on the emperor’s day presented sacrifice to the emperor and conducted the festal games in connection with it. This representative council had not only a power of administering its own property by means of officials, who belonged to the chief circles of the provincial nobility, but also a certain share in the general affairs of the country. Of its immediate interference in politics there is, it is true, no other trace than that, in the serious crisis of the year 70, the diet of the three Gauls dissuaded the Treveri from rising against Rome; but it had and used the right of bringing complaints as to the imperial and domestic officials acting in Gaul; and it co–operated, moreover, if not in the imposition, at any rate in the apportionment of the taxes,46 especially seeing that these were laid on not according to the several provinces but for Gaul in general. The imperial government certainly called into existence similar institutions in all the provinces, and not merely introduced in each of them the centralisation of sacred rites, but also—what the republic had not done—conferred on each one an organ for bringing requests and complaints before the government. Yet Gaul had in this respect, as compared with all other parts of the empire, at least a privilege de facto, as indeed this institution is here alone found fully developed.47 For one thing, the united diet of the three provinces necessarily had a more independent position in presence of the legates and procurators of each of them, than, for example, the diet of Thessalonica in presence of the governor of Macedonia. But then, in the case of institutions of this nature, far less depends on the measure of the rights conferred than on the weight of the bodies therein represented; and the strength of the individual Gallic communities was transferred to the diet of Lyons, just as the weakness of the individual Hellenic communities to that of Argos. In the development of Gaul under the emperors the diet of Lyons to all appearance promoted essentially that general Gallic homogeneity, which went there hand in hand with the Latinising.
Composition of the diet.
The composition of the diet, which is known to us with tolerable accuracy,48 shows in what way the question of nationalities was treated by the government. Of the sixty, afterwards sixty–four, cantons represented at the diet, only four fall to the Iberian inhabitants of Aquitania—although this region between the Garonne and the Pyrenees was divided among a very much larger number of, as a rule, small tribes—whether it was that the others were excluded altogether from representation, or that those four represented cantons were the meeting–places of canton–unions.49 Afterwards, probably in the time of Trajan, the Iberian district was separated from the Lyons diet, and had an independent representation given to it.50 On the other hand, the Celtic cantons in that organisation, with which we have formerly become acquainted, were substantially all represented at the diet, and likewise the half or wholly Germanic,51 so far as at the time of the institution of the altar they belonged to the empire. That there was no place in this cantonal representation for the capital of Gaul was a matter of course. Moreover, the Ubii do not appear at the diet of Lyons, but sacrifice at their own altar of Augustus: this was, as we saw (p. 35), a remnant, which was allowed to subsist, of the intended province of Germany.
Restricted Roman franchise of the Gauls admitted to citizenship.
While the Celtic nation in imperial Gaul was thus consolidated in itself, it was also guaranteed in some measure against Roman influences by the course pursued as regards the conferring of the imperial franchise for this domain. The capital of Gaul no doubt was, and continued to be, a Roman burgess–colony, and this was essentially bound up with the peculiar position which it occupied and was intended to occupy in contradistinction to the rest of Gaul. But while the south province was covered with colonies and organised throughout according to Italian municipal law, Augustus did not institute in the three Gauls a single burgess–colony; and probably even that municipal ius, which under the name of “Latin” formed an intervening stage between burgesses and non–burgesses, and afforded to its more notable holders burgess–rights in law for their persons and their descendants, was for a considerable time withheld from Gaul. The personal bestowal of the franchise, partly, according to general enactments, on the soldiers sometimes at their entering on, sometimes at their leaving, service, partly out of special favour on individuals, might certainly fall to the lot also of the Gaul; Augustus did not go so far as the republic went in prohibiting the Helvetian, for example, once for all from acquiring the Roman franchise, nor could he do so, after Caesar had in many cases given the franchise in this way to native Gauls. But he took at least from burgesses proceeding from the three Gauls—with the exception always of the Lugudunenses—the right of candidature for magistracies, and therewith at the same time excluded them from the imperial senate. Whether this enactment was made primarily in the interest of Rome or primarily in that of the Gauls, we cannot tell; certainly Augustus wished to secure both points—to check on the one hand the intrusion of the alien element into the Roman system, and thereby to purify and elevate the latter, and on the other hand to guarantee the continued subsistence of the Gallic idiosyncrasy after a fashion, which precisely by its judicious reserve promoted the ultimate blending with the Roman character more surely than an abrupt obtrusion of foreign