the situation; they did not ravage the country, as the Germans had done; they did not appropriate such and such a piece of land; but everywhere they assumed the mastery: they laid heavy burdens upon the population; they removed the rightful chieftains who were opposed to them, and forcibly placed or maintained in power those only who were subservient to them. Independently of the Roman empire, Caesar established everywhere his own personal influence; by turns gentle or severe, caressing or threatening, he sought and created for himself partisans amongst the Gauls, as he had amongst his army, showing favor to those only whose devotion was assured to him. To national antipathy towards foreigners must be added the intrigues and personal rivalry of the conquered in their relations with the conqueror. Conspiracies were hatched, insurrections soon broke out in nearly every part of Gaul, in the heart even of the peoplets most subject to Roman dominion. Every movement of the kind was for Caesar a provocation, a temptation, almost an obligation to conquest. He accepted them and profited by them, with that promptitude in resolution, boldness and address in execution, and cool indifference as to the means employed, which were characteristic of his genius. During nine years, from A. U. C. 696 to 705, and in eight successive campaigns, he carried his troops, his lieutenants, himself, and, ere long, war or negotiation, corruption, discord, or destruction in his path, amongst the different nations and confederations of Gaul, Celtic, Kymric, Germanic, Iberian or Hybrid, northward and eastward, in Belgica, between the Seine and the Rhine; westward, in Armorica, on the borders of the ocean; south-westward, in Aquitania; centre-ward, amongst the peoplets established between the Seine, the Loire, and the Saone. He was nearly always victorious, and then at one time he pushed his victory to the bitter end, at another stopped at the right moment, that it might not be compromised. When he experienced reverses, he bore them without repining, and repaired them with inexhaustible ability and courage. More than once, to revive the sinking spirits of his men, he was rashly lavish of his person; and on one of those occasions, at the raising of the siege of Gergovia, he was all but taken by some Arvernian horsemen, and left his sword in their hands. It was found a while afterwards, when the war was over, in a temple in which the Gauls had hung it. Caesar’s soldiers would have torn it down and returned it to him; but “let it be,” said he; “’tis sanctified.” In good or evil fortune, the hero of a triumph at Rome or a prisoner in the hands of Mediterranean pirates, he was unrivalled in striking the imaginations of men and growing great in their eyes. He did not confine himself to conquering and subjecting the Gauls in Gaul; his ideas were ever outstripping his deeds, and he knew how to make his power felt even where he had made no attempt to establish it. Twice he crossed the Rhine to hurl back the Germans beyond their river, and to strike to the very hearts of their forests the terror of the Roman name (A. U. C. 699, 700). He equipped two fleets, made two descents on Great Britain (A. U. C. 699, 700), several times defeated the Britons and their principal chieftain Caswallon (Cassivellaunus), and set up across the channel, the first landmarks of Roman conquest. He thus became more and more famous and terrible, both in Gaul, whence he sometimes departed for a moment to go and look after his political prospects in Italy, and in more distant lands, where he was but an apparition.
But the greatest minds are far from foreseeing all the consequences of their deeds, and all the perils proceeding from their successes. Caesar was by nature neither violent nor cruel; but he did not trouble himself about justice or humanity, and the success of his enterprises, no matter by what means or at what price, was his sole law of conduct. He could show, on occasion, moderation and mercy; but when he had to put down an obstinate resistance, or when a long and arduous effort had irritated him, he had no hesitation in employing atrocious severity and perfidious promises. During his first campaign in Belgica, (A. U. C. 697 and 57 B.C.), two peoplets, the Nervians and the Aduaticans, had gallantly struggled, with brief moments of success, against the Roman legions. The Nervians were conquered and almost annihilated. Their last remnants, huddled for refuge in the midst of their morasses, sent a deputation to Caesar, to make submission, saying, “Of six hundred senators three only are left, and of sixty thousand men that bore arms scarce five hundred have escaped.” Caesar received them kindly, returned to them their lands, and warned their neighbors to do them no harm. The Aduaticans, on the contrary, defended them selves to the last extremity. Caesar, having slain four thousand, had all that remained sold by auction; and fifty-six thousand human beings, according to his own statement, passed as slaves into the hands of their purchasers. Some years later another Belgian peoplet, the Eburons, settled between the Meuse and the Rhine, rose and inflicted great losses upon the Roman legions. Caesar put them beyond the pale of military and human law, and had all the neighboring peoplets and all the roving bands invited to come and pillage and destroy “that accursed race,” promising to whoever would join in the work the friendship of the Roman people. A little later still, some insurgents in the centre of Gaul had concentrated in a place to the south-west, called Urellocdunum (nowadays, it is said, Puy d’Issola, in the department of the Lot, between Vayrac and Martel). After a long resistance they were obliged to surrender, and Caesar had all the combatants’ hands cut off, and sent them, thus mutilated, to live and rove throughout Gaul, as a spectacle to all the country that was, or was to be, brought to submission. Nor were the rigors of administration less than those of warfare. Caesar wanted a great deal of money, not only to maintain satisfactorily his troops in Gaul, but to defray the enormous expenses he was at in Italy, for the purpose of enriching his partisans, or securing the favor of the Roman people. It was with the produce of imposts and plunder in Gaul that he undertook the reconstruction at Rome of the basilica of the Forum, the site whereof, extending to the temple of Liberty, was valued, it is said, at more than twenty million five hundred thousand francs. Cicero, who took the direction of the works, wrote to his friend Atticus, “We shall make it the most glorious thing in the world.” Cato was less satisfied; three years previously despatches from Caesar had announced to the Senate his victories over the Belgian and German insurgents. The senators had voted a general thanksgiving, but, “Thanksgiving!” cried Cato, “rather expiation! Pray the gods not to visit upon our armies the sin of a guilty general. Give up Caesar to the Germans, and let the foreigner know that Rome does not enjoin perjury, and rejects with horror the fruit thereof!”
Caesar had all the gifts, all the means of success and empire, that can be possessed by man. He was great in politics and in war; as active and as full of resource amidst the intrigues of the Forum as amidst the combinations and surprises of the battle-field, equally able to please and to terrify. He had a double pride, which gave him double confidence in himself, the pride of a great noble and the pride of a great man. He was fond of saying, “My aunt Julia is, maternally, the daughter of kings; paternally, she is descended from the immortal gods; my family unites, to the sacred character of kings who are the most powerful amongst men, the awful majesty of the gods who have even kings in their keeping.” Thus, by birth as well as nature, Caesar felt called to dominion; and at the same time he was perfectly aware of the decadence of the Roman patriciate, and of the necessity for being popular in order to become master. With this double instinct he undertook the conquest of the Gauls as the surest means of achieving conquest at Rome. But owing either to his own vices or to the difficulties of the situation, he displayed in his conduct and his work in Gaul so much violence and oppression, so much iniquity and cruel indifference, that, even at that time, in the midst of Roman harshness, pagan corruption, and Gallic or German barbarism, so great an infliction of moral and material harm could not but be followed by a formidable reaction. Where there are strength and ability, the want of foresight, the fears, the weaknesses, the dissensions of men, whether individuals or peoples, may be for a long while calculated upon; but it may be carried too far. After six years’ struggling Caesar was victor; he had successively dealt with all the different populations of Gaul; he had passed through and subjected them all, either by his own strong arm, or thanks to their rivalries. In the year of Rome 702 he was suddenly informed in Italy, whither he had gone on his Roman business, that most of the Gallic nations, united under a chieftain hitherto unknown, were rising with one common impulse, and recommencing war.
The same perils and the same reverses, the same sufferings and the same resentments, had stirred up amongst the Gauls, without distinction of race and name, a sentiment to which they had hitherto been almost strangers, the sentiment of Gallic nationality and the passion for independence, not local any longer, but national. This sentiment was first manifested amongst the populace and under obscure chieftains; a band of Carnutian peasants (people of Chartrain) rushed upon the town of Genabum (Gies), roused the inhabitants, and massacred the Italian traders and a Roman knight, C. Fusius Cita, whom Caesar had commissioned to buy corn there. In less than twenty-four hours the signal of insurrection against Rome was borne across the country as far as the Arvernians, amongst whom conspiracy had long ago been waiting and paving the way for insurrection. Amongst them lived a young Gaul whose real name has remained unknown, and whom history has called Vercingetorix, that is, chief over a hundred heads, chief-in-general. He came of an ancient and powerful family of Arvernians, and his father had been put to death in his own city for attempting to make himself king. Caesar knew him, and had taken some pains to attach him to himself. It does not appear that the Arvernian aristocrat had absolutely declined the overtures; but when the hope of national independence was aroused, Vercingetorix was its representative and chief. He descended with his followers from the mountain, and seized Gergovia, the capital of his nation. Thence his messengers spread over the centre, north-west, and west of Gaul; the greater part of the peoplets and cities of those regions pronounced from the first moment for insurrection; the same sentiment was working amongst others more compromised with Rome, who waited only for a breath of success to break out. Vercingetorix was immediately invested with the chief command, and he made use of it with all the passion engendered by patriotism and the possession of power; he regulated the movement, demanded hostages, fixed the contingents of troops, imposed taxes, inflicted summary punishment on the traitors, the dastards, and the indifferent, and subjected those who turned a deaf ear to the appeal of their common country to the same pains and the same mutilations that Caesar inflicted on those who obstinately resisted the Roman yoke.
At the news of this great movement Caesar immediately left Italy, and returned to Gaul. He had one quality, rare even amongst the greatest men: he remained cool amidst the very hottest alarms; necessity never hurried him into precipitation, and he prepared for the struggle as if he were always sure of arriving on the spot in time to sustain it. He was always quick, but never hasty; and his activity and patience were equally admirable and efficacious. Starting from Italy at the beginning of 702 A. U. C., he passed two months in traversing within Gaul the Roman province and its neighborhood, in visiting the points threatened by the insurrection, and the openings by which he might get at it, in assembling his troops, in confirming his wavering allies; and it was not before the early part of March that he moved with his whole army to Agendicum (Sens), the very centre of revolt, and started thence to push on the war with vigor. In less than three months he had spread devastation throughout the insurgent country; he had attacked and taken its principal cities, Vellaunodunum (Trigueres), Genabum (Gien), Noviodunum (Sancerre), and Avaricum (Bourges), delivering up everywhere country and city, lands and inhabitants, to the rage of the Roman soldiery, maddened at having again to conquer enemies so often conquered. To strike a decisive blow, he penetrated at last to the heart of the country of the Arvernians, and laid siege to Gergovia, their capital and the birthplace of Vercingetorix.
The firmness and the ability of the Gallic chieftain were not inferior to such a struggle. He understood from the outset that he could not cope in the open field with Caesar and the Roman legions; he therefore exerted himself in getting together a body of cavalry numerous enough to harass the Romans during their movements, to attack their scattered detachments, to bear his orders swiftly to all quarters, and to keep up the excitement amongst the different peoplets with some hope of success. His plan of campaign, his repeated instructions, his passionate entreaties to the confederates were to avoid any general action, to anticipate by their own ravages those of the Romans, to destroy everywhere, at the approach of the enemy, stores, springs, bridges, trees, and habitations: he wanted Caesar to find in his front nothing but ruins and clouds of warriors relentless in pursuing him without getting within reach. Frequently he succeeded in obtaining from the people those painful sacrifices in the interest of the common safety; as when the Biturigians (inhabitants of the district of Bourges) burned in one day twenty of their towns or villages. Vercingetorix adjured them also to burn Avaricum (Bourges), their capital; but they refused, and the capture of Avaricum, though gallantly defended, justified the urgency of Vercingetorix, seeing that it was an important success for Caesar and a serious blow for the Gauls. Out of forty thousand combatants within the walls, it is said, scarcely eight hundred escaped the slaughter and succeeded in joining Vercingetorix, who had hovered continually in the neighborhood without being able to offer the besieged any effectual assistance. Nor was it only against the Romans that he had to struggle; he had to fight amongst his own people, against rivalry, mistrust, impatience, and discouragement; he was accused of desiring, beyond everything, the mastery; he was even suspected of keeping up, with the view of assuring his own future, secret relations with Caesar; he was called upon to attack the enemy in front, and so bring the war to a decisive issue. It is all very fine to be summoned by the popular voice to accomplish a great and arduous work; but you cannot be, with impunity, the most far-sighted, the most able, and the most in danger, because the most devoted. Vercingetorix was bearing the burden of his superiority and influence, until he should suffer the penalty and pay with his life for his patriotism and his glory. He was approaching the happiest moment of his enterprise and his destiny. In spite of reverses, in spite of Caesar’s presence and activity, the insurrection was gaining ground and strength; in the north, west, south-west, on the banks of the Rhine, the Seine, and the Loire, the idea of Gallic nationality and the hope of independence were spreading amongst people far removed from the centre of the movement, and were bringing to Vercingetorix declarations of sympathy or material re-enforcements. An event of more importance took place in the centre itself. The AEduans, the most ancient allies and clients the Romans had in Gaul, being divided amongst themselves, and feeling, besides, the national instinct, ended, after much hesitation, by taking part in the uprising. Caesar, for all his care, could neither prevent nor stifle this defection, which threatened to become contagious, and detach from Rome the neighboring peoplets that were still faithful. Caesar, engaged upon the siege of Gergovia, encountered an obstinate resistance; whilst Vercingetorix, encamped on the heights which surrounded his birthplace, everywhere embarrassed, sometimes attacked, and incessantly threatened the Romans. The eighth legion, drawn on one day to make an imprudent assault, was repulsed, and lost forty-six of its bravest centurions. Caesar determined to raise the siege, and to transfer the struggle to places where the population could be more safely depended upon. It was the first decisive check he had experienced in Gaul, the first Gallic town he had been unable to take, the first retrograde movement he had executed in the face of the Gallic insurgents and their chieftain. Vercingetorix could not and would not restrain his joy; it seemed to him that the day had dawned and an excellent chance arrived for attempting a decisive blow. He had under his orders, it is said, eighty thousand men, mostly his own Arvernians, and a numerous cavalry furnished by the different peoplets his allies. He followed all Caesar’s movements in retreat towards the Saone, and, on arriving at Longeau not far from Langres, near a little river called the Vingeanne, he halted, pitched his camp about nine miles from the Romans, and assembling the chiefs of his cavalry, said, “Now is the hour of victory; the Romans are flying to their province and leaving Gaul; that is enough for our liberty to-day, but too little for the peace and repose of the future; for they will return with greater armies, and the war will be without end. Attack we them amid the difficulties of their march; if their foot support the cavalry, they will not be able to pursue their route; if, as I fully trust, they leave their baggage, to provide for their safety, they will lose both their honor and the supplies whereof they have need. None of the enemy’s horse will dare to come forth from their lines. To give ye courage and aid, I will order forth from the camp and place in battle array all our troops, and they will strike the enemy with terror.” The Gallic horsemen cried out that they must all bind themselves by the most sacred of oaths, and swear that none of them would come again under roof, or see again wife, or children, or parent, unless he had twice pierced through the ranks of the enemy. And all did take this oath, and so prepared for the attack. Vercingetorix knew not that Caesar, with his usual foresight, had summoned and joined to his legions a great number of horsemen from the German tribes roving over the banks of the Rhine, with which he had taken care to keep up friendly relations. Not only had he promised them pay, plunder, and lands, but, finding their horses ill-trained, he had taken those of his officers, even those of the Roman knights and veterans, and distributed them amongst his barbaric auxiliaries. The action began between the cavalry on both sides; a portion of the Gallic had taken up position on the road followed by the Roman army, to bar its passage; but whilst the fighting at this point was getting more and more obstinate, the German horse in Caesar’s service gained a neighboring height, drove off the Gallic horse that were in occupation, and pursued them as far as the river, near which was Vercingetorix with his infantry. Disorder took place amongst this infantry so unexpectedly attacked. Caesar launched his legions at them, and there was a general panic and rout among the Gauls. Vercingetorix had great trouble in rallying them, and he rallied them only to order a general retreat, for which they clamored. Hurriedly striking his camp, he made for Alesia (Semur in Auxois), a neighboring town and the capital of the Mandubians, a peoplet in clientship to the AEduans. Caesar immediately went in pursuit of the Gauls; killed, he says, three thousand, made important prisoners, and encamped with his legions before Alesia the day but one after Vercingetorix, with his fugitive army, had occupied the place as well as the neighboring hills, and was hard at work intrenching himself, probably without any clear idea as yet of what he should do to continue the struggle.
Caesar at once took a resolution as unexpected as it was discreetly bold. Here was the whole Gallic insurrection, chieftain and soldiery, united together within or beneath the walls of a town of moderate extent. He undertook to keep it there and destroy it on the spot, instead of having to pursue it everywhere without ever being sure of getting at it. He had at his disposal eleven legions, about fifty thousand strong, and five or six thousand cavalry, of which two thousand were Germans. He placed them round about Alesia and the Gallic camp, caused to be dug a circuit of deep ditches, some filled with water, others bristling with palisades and snares, and added, from interval to interval, twenty-three little forts, occupied or guarded night and day by detachments. The result was a line of investment about ten miles in extent. To the rear of the Roman camp, and for defence against attacks from without, Caesar caused to be dug similar intrenchments, which formed a line of circumvallation of about thirteen miles. The troops had provisions and forage for thirty days. Vercingetorix made frequent sallies to stop or destroy these works; but they were repulsed, and only resulted in getting his army more closely cooped up within the place. Eighty thousand Gallic insurgents were, as it were, in prison, guarded by fifty thousand Roman soldiers. Vercingetorix was one of those who persevere and act in the days of distress just as in the spring-tide of their hopes. Before the works of the Romans were finished, he assembled his horsemen, and ordered them to sally briskly from Alesia, return each to his own land, and summon the whole population to arms. He was obeyed; the Gallic horsemen made their way, during the night, through the intervals left by the Romans’ still imperfect lines of investment, and dispersed themselves amongst their various peoplets. Nearly everywhere irritation and zeal were at their height. An assemblage of delegates met at Bibracte (Autun), and fixed the amount of the contingent to be furnished by each nation, and a point was assigned at which all those contingents should unite for the purpose of marching together towards Alesia, and attacking the besiegers. The total of the contingents thus levied on forty-three Gallic peoplets amounted, according to Caesar, to two hundred and eighty-three thousand men; and two hundred and forty thousand men, it is said, did actually hurry up to the appointed place. Mistrust of such enormous numbers has already been expressed by one who has lived through the greatest European wars, and has heard the ablest generals reduce to their real strength the largest armies. We find in M. Thiers’ _History of the Consulate_ and Empire, that at Austerlitz, on the 2d of December, 1805, Napoleon had but from sixty-five to seventy thousand men, and the combined Austrians and Russians but ninety thousand. At Leipzig, the biggest of modern battles, when all the French forces on the one side, and the Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and Swedish on the other, were face to face on the 18th of October, 1813, they made all together about five hundred thousand men. How can we believe, then, that nineteen centuries ago, Gaul, so weakly populated and so slightly organized, suddenly sent two hundred and forty thousand men to the assistance of eighty thousand Gauls besieged in the little town of Alesia by fifty or sixty thousand Romans? But whatever may be the case with the figures, it is certain that at the very first moment the national impulse answered the appeal of Vercingetorix, and that the besiegers of Alesia, Caesar and his legions, found that they were themselves all at once besieged in their intrenchments by a cloud of Gauls hurrying up to the defence of their compatriots. The struggle was fierce, but short. Every time that the fresh Gallic army attacked the besiegers, Vercingetorix and the Gauls of Alesia sallied forth, and joined in the attack. Caesar and his legions, on their side, at one time repulsed these double attacks, at another themselves took the initiative, and assailed at one and the same time the besieged and the auxiliaries Gaul had sent them. The feeling was passionate on both sides: Roman pride was pitted against Gallic patriotism. But in four or five days the strong organization, the disciplined valor of the Roman legions, and the genius of Caesar carried the day. The Gallic re-enforcements, beaten and slaughtered without mercy, dispersed; and Vercingetorix and the besieged were crowded back within their walls without hope of escape. We have two accounts of the last moments of this great Gallic insurrection and its chief; one, written by Caesar himself, plain, cold, and harsh as its author; the other, by two later historians, who were neither statesmen nor warriors, Plutarch and Dion Cassius, has more detail and more ornament, following either popular tradition or the imagination of the writers. It may be well to give both. “The day after the defeat,” says Caesar, “Vercingetorix convokes the assembly, and shows that he did not undertake the war for his own personal advantage, but for the general freedom. Since submission must be made to fortune, he offers to satisfy the Romans either by instant death or by being delivered to them alive. A deputation there anent is sent to Caesar, who orders the arms to be given up and the chiefs brought to him. He seats himself on his tribunal, in the front of his camp. The chiefs are brought, Vercingetorix is delivered over; the arms are cast at Caesar’s feet. Except the AEduans and Arvernians, whom Caesar kept for the purpose of trying to regain their people, he had the prisoners distributed, head by head, to his army as booty of war.”
[Illustration: Vercingetorix surrenders to Caesar—-81]
The account of Dion Cassius is more varied and dramatic. “After the defeat,” says he, “Vercingetorix, who was neither captured nor wounded, might have fled; but, hoping that the friendship that had once bound him to Caesar might gain him grace, he repaired to the Roman without previous demand of peace by the voice of a herald, and appeared suddenly in his presence, just as Caesar was seating himself upon his tribunal. The apparition of the Gallic chieftain inspired no little terror, for he was of lofty stature, and had an imposing appearance in arms. There was a deep silence. Vercingetorix fell at Caesar’s feet, and made supplication by touch of hand without speaking a word. The scene moved those present with pity, remembering the ancient fortunes of Vercingetorix and comparing them with his present disaster. Caesar, on the contrary, found proof of criminality in the very memories relied upon for salvation, contrasted the late struggle with the friendship appealed to by Vercingetorix, and so put in a more hideous light the odiousness of his conduct. And thus, far from being moved by his misfortunes at the moment, he threw him in chains forthwith, and subsequently had him put to death, after keeping him to adorn his triumph.”
Another historian, contemporary with Plutarch, Florus, attributes to Vercingetorix, as he fell down and cast his arms at Caesar’s feet, these words: “Bravest of men, thou hast conquered a brave man.” It is not necessary to have faith in the rhetorical compliment, or to likewise reject the mixture of pride and weakness attributed to Vercingetorix in the account of Dion Cassius. It would not be the only example of a hero seeking yet some chance of safety in the extremity of defeat, and abasing himself for the sake of preserving at any price a life on which fortune might still smile. However it be, Vercingetorix vanquished, dragged out, after ten years’ imprisonment, to grace Caesar’s triumph, and put to death immediately afterwards, lives as a glorious patriot in the pages of that history in which Caesar appears, on this occasion, as a peevish conqueror who took pleasure in crushing, with cruel disdain, the enemy he had been at so much pains to conquer.
Alesia taken, and Vercingetorix a prisoner, Gaul was subdued. Caesar, however, had in the following year (A. U. C. 703) a campaign to make to subjugate some peoplets who tried to maintain their local independence. A year afterwards, again, attempts at insurrection took place in Belgica, and towards the mouth of the Loire; but they were easily repressed; they had no national or formidable characteristics; Caesar and his lieutenants willingly contented themselves with an apparent submission, and in the year 705 A. U. C. the Roman legions, after nine years’ occupation in the conquest of Gaul, were able to depart therefrom to Italy and the East for a plunge into civil war.
CHAPTER V.—-GAUL UNDER ROMAN DOMINION.
From the conquest of Gaul by Caesar, to the establishment there of the Franks under Clovis, she remained for more than five centuries under Roman dominion; first under the pagan, afterwards under the Christian empire. In her primitive state of independence she had struggled for ten years against the best armies and the greatest man of Rome; after five centuries of Roman dominion she opposed no resistance to the invasion of the barbarians, Germans, Goths, Alans, Burgundians, and Franks, who destroyed bit by bit the Roman empire. In this humiliation and, one might say, annihilation of a population so independent, so active, and so valiant at its first appearance in history, is to be seen the characteristic of this long epoch. It is worth while to learn and to understand how it was.
[Illustration: Gaul subjugated by the Romans—-83]
Gaul lived, during those five centuries, under very different rules and rulers. They may be summed up under five names, which correspond with governments very unequal in merit and defect, in good and evil wrought for their epoch:
1st, the Caesars from Julius to Nero (from 49 B.C. to A.D. 68); 2d, the Flavians, from Vespasian to Domitian (from A.D. 69 to 95); 3d, the Antonines, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius (from A.D. 96 to 180); 4th, the imperial anarchy, or the thirty-nine emperors and the thirty-one tyrants, from Commodus to Carinus and Numerian (from A.D. 180 to 284); 5th, Diocletian (from A.D. 284 to 305).
Through all these governments, and in spite of their different results for their contemporary subjects, the fact already pointed out as the general and definitive characteristic of that long epoch, to wit, the moral and social decadence of Gaul as well as of the Roman empire, never ceased to continue and spread.
On quitting conquered Gaul to become master at Rome, Caesar neglected nothing to assure his conquest and make it conducive to the establishment of his empire. He formed, of all the Gallic districts that he had subjugated, a special province which received the name of Gallia Comata (Gaul of the long-hair), whilst the old province was called Gallia Toyata (Gaul of the toga). Caesar caused to be enrolled amongst his troops a multitude of Gauls, Belgians, Arvernians, and Aquitanians, of whose bravery he had made proof. He even formed, almost entirely of Gauls, a special legion called Alauda (lark), because it bore on the helmets a lark with outspread wings, the symbol of wakefulness. At the same time he gave in Gallia Comata, to the towns and families that declared for him, all kinds of favors, the rights of Roman citizenship, the title of allies, clients, and friends, even to the extent of the Julian name, a sign of the most powerful Roman patronage. He had, however, in the old Roman province, formidable enemies, especially the town of Marseilles, which declared against him and for Pompey. Caesar had the place besieged by one of his lieutenants, got possession of it, caused to be delivered over to him its vessels and treasure, and left in it a garrison of two legions. He established at Narbonne, Arles, Biterrce (Beziers) three colonies of veteran legionaries devoted to his cause, and near Antipolis (Antibes) a maritime colony called Forum Julii, nowadays Frejus, of which he proposed to make a rival to Marseilles. Much money was necessary to meet the expenses of such patronage and to satisfy the troops, old and new, of the conqueror of Gaul and Rome. Now there was at Rome an ancient treasure, founded more than four centuries previously by the Dictator Camillus, when he had delivered Rome from the Gauls–a treasure reserved for the expenses of Gallic wars, and guarded with religious respect as sacred money. In the midst of all discords and disorders at Rome, none had touched it. After his return from Gaul, Caesar one day ascended the Capitol with his soldiers, and finding, in the temple of Saturn, the door closed of the place where the treasure was deposited, ordered it to be forced. L. Metellus, tribune of the people, made strong opposition, conjuring Caesar not to bring on the Republic the penalty of such sacrilege: but “the Republic has nothing to fear,” said Caesar; “I have released it from its oaths by subjugating Gaul. There are no more Gauls.” He caused the door to be forced, and the treasure was abstracted and distributed to the troops, Gallic and Roman. Whatever Caesar may have said, there were still Gauls, for at the same time that he was distributing to such of them as he had turned into his own soldiers the money reserved for the expense of fighting them, he was imposing upon Gallia Comata, under the name of stipendium (soldier’s pay), a levy of forty millions of sesterces–a considerable amount for a devastated country which, according to Plutarch, did not contain at that time more than three millions of inhabitants, and almost equal to that of the levies paid by the rest of the Roman provinces.
After Caesar, Augustus, left sole master of the Roman world, assumed in Gaul, as elsewhere, the part of pacificator, repairer, conservator, and organizer, whilst taking care, with all his moderation, to remain always the master. He divided the provinces into imperial and senatorial, reserving to himself the entire government of the former, and leaving the latter under the authority of the senate. Gaul “of the long hair,” all that Caesar had conquered, was imperial province. Augustus divided it into three provinces, Lugdunensian (Lyonese), Belgian, and Aquitanian. He recognized therein sixty nations or distinct cityships which continued to have themselves the government of their own affairs, according to their traditions and manners, whilst conforming to the general laws of the empire, and abiding under the supervision of imperial governors, charged with maintaining everywhere, in the words of Pliny the Younger, “the majesty of Roman peace.” Luydunum (Lyons), which had been up to that time of small importance and obscure, became the great town, the favorite cityship and ordinary abiding-place of the emperors when they visited Gaul. After having held at Narbonne (27 B.C.) a meeting of representatives from the different Gallic nations, Augustus went several times to Lyons, and even lived there, as it appears, a pretty long while, to superintend, no doubt, from thence, and to get into working order the new government of Gaul. After the departure of Augustus, his adopted son Drusus, who had just fulfilled, in Belgica and on the Rhine, a mission at the same time military and administrative, called together at Lyons delegates from the sixty Gallic cityships, to take part (B.C.12 or 10) in the inauguration of a magnificent monument raised, at the confluence of the Rhone and Saone, in honor of Rome and Augustus as the tutelary deities of Gaul. In the middle of a vast enclosure was placed a huge altar of white marble, on which were engraved the names of the sixty cityships “of the long hair.” A colossal statue of the Gauls and sixty statues of the Gallic cityships occupied the enclosure. Two columns of granite, twenty-five feet high, stood close by the altar, and were surmounted by two colossal Victories, in white marble, ten feet high. Solemn festivals, gymnastic games, and oratorical and literary exercitations accompanied the inauguration; and during the ceremony it was announced, amidst popular acclamation, that a son had just been born to Drusus at Lyons itself, in the palace of the emperor, where the child’s mother, Antonia, daughter of Marc Antony and Octavia (sister of Augustus), had been staying for some months. This child was one day to be the emperor Claudius.
[Illustration: FROM LA CROIX ROUSSE—-86]
The administrative energy of Augustus was not confined to the erection of monuments and to festivals; he applied himself to the development in Gaul of the material elements of civilization and social order. His most intimate and able adviser, Agrippa, being settled at Lyons as governor of the Gauls, caused to be opened four great roads, starting from a milestone placed in the middle of the Lyonnese forum, and going, one centrewards to Saintes and the ocean, another southwards to Narbonne and the Pyrenees, the third north-westwards and towards the Channel by Amiens and Boulogne, and the fourth north-westwards and towards the Rhine. Agrippa founded several colonies, amongst others Cologne, which bore his name; and he admitted to Gallic territory bands of Germans who asked for an establishment there. Thanks to public security, Romans became proprietors in the Gallic provinces and introduced to them Italian cultivation. The Gallic chieftains, on their side, began to cultivate lands which had become their personal property. Towns were built or grew apace and became encircled by ramparts, under protection of which the populations came and placed themselves. The most learned and attentive observer of nature and Roman society, Pliny the Elder, attests that under Augustus Gallic agriculture and industry made vast progress.
But side by side with this work in the cause of civilization and organization, Augustus and his Roman agents were pursuing a work of quite a contrary tendency. They labored to extirpate from Gaul the spirit of nationality, independence, and freedom; they took every pains to efface everywhere Gallic memories and sentiments. Gallic towns were losing their old and receiving Roman names: Augustonemetum, Augusta, and Augustodunum took the place of Gergovia, Noviodunum, and Bibracte. The national Gallic religion, which was Druidism, was attacked as well as the Gallic fatherland, with the same design and by the same means; at one time Augustus prohibited this worship amongst the Gauls converted into Roman citizens, as being contrary to Roman belief; at another Roman Paganism and Gallic Druidism were fused together in the same temples and at the same altars, as if to fuse them in the same common indifference; Roman and Gallic names became applied to the same religious personification of such and such a fact or such and such an idea; Mars and Camul were equally the god of war; Belen and Apollo the god of light and healing; Diana and Arduinna the goddess of the chase. Everywhere, whether it was a question of the terrestrial fatherland or of religious faith, the old moral machinery of the Gauls was broken up or condemned to rust, and no new moral machinery was allowed to replace it; it was everywhere Roman and imperial authority that was substituted for the free, national action of the Gauls.
It is incredible that this hostility on the part of the powers that be towards moral sentiments, and this absence of freedom, should not have gravely compromised the material interest of the Gallic population. Public administration, however extensive its organization and energy, if it be not under the superintendence and restraint of public freedom and morality, soon falls into monstrous abuses, which itself is either ignorant of or wittingly suffers. Examples of this evil, inherent in despotism, abound even under the intelligent and watchful sway of Augustus. Here is a case in point. He had appointed as procurator, that is, financial commissioner, in “long-haired” Gaul, a native who, having been originally a slave and afterwards set free by Julius Caesar, had taken the Roman name of Licinius. This man gave himself up, during his administration, to a course of the most shameless extortion. The taxes were collected monthly; and so, taking advantage of the change of name which flattery had caused in the two months of July and August, sacred to Julius Caesar and Augustus respectively, he made his year consist of fourteen months, so that he might squeeze out fourteen contributions instead of twelve. “December,” said he, “is surely, as its name indicates, the tenth month of the year,” and he added thereto, in honor of the emperor, two others which he called the eleventh and twelfth. During one of the trips which Augustus made into Gaul, strong complaints were made against Licinius, and his robberies were denounced to the emperor. Augustus dared not support him, and seemed upon the point of deciding to bring him to justice, when Licinius conducted him to the place where was deposited all the treasure he had extorted, and, “See, my lord,” said he, “what I have laid up for thee and for the Roman people, for fear lest the Gauls possessing so much gold should employ it against you both; for thee I have kept it, and to thee I deliver it.” (Thierry, _Histoire des Gaulois,_ t. iii. p. 295; Clerjon, _Histoire de Lyon,_ t. i. p. 178-180.) Augustus accepted the treasure, and Licinius remained unpunished. In the case of financial abuses or other acts, absolute power seldom resists such temptations.
We may hear it said, and we may read in the writings of certain modern philosophers and scholars, that the victorious despotism of the Roman empire was a necessary and salutary step in advance, and that it brought about the unity and enfranchisement of the human race. Believe it not. There is mingled good and evil in all the events and governments of this world, and good often arises side by side with or in the wake of evil, but it is never from the evil that the good comes; injustice and tyranny have never produced good fruits. Be assured that whenever they have the dominion, whenever the moral rights and personal liberties of men are trodden under foot by material force, be it barbaric or be it scientific, there can result only prolonged evils and deplorable obstacles to the return of moral right and moral force, which, God be thanked, can never he obliterated from the nature and the history of man. The despotic imperial administration upheld for a long while the Roman empire, and not without renown; but it corrupted, enervated, and impoverished the Roman populations, and left them, after five centuries, as incapable of defending themselves as they were of governing.
Tiberius pursued in Gaul, but with less energy and less care for the provincial administration, the pacific and moderate policy of Augustus. He had to extinguish in Belgica, and even in the Lyonnese province, two insurrections kindled by the sparks that remained of national and Druidic spirit. He repressed them effectually, and without any violent display of vengeance. He made a trip to Gaul, took measures, quite insufficient, however, for defending the Rhine frontier from the incessantly repeated incursions of the Germans, and hastened back to Italy to resume the course of suspicion, perfidy, and cruelty which he pursued against the republican pride and moral dignity remaining amongst a few remnants of the Roman senate. He was succeeded by Germanicus’ unworthy son, Caligula. After a few days of hypocrisy on the part of the emperor, and credulous hope on that of the people, they found a madman let loose to take the place of an unfathomable and gloomy tyrant. Caligula was much taken up with Gaul, plundering it and giving free rein in it to his frenzies, by turns disgusting or ridiculous. In a short and fruitless campaign on the banks of the Rhine, he had made too few prisoners for the pomp of a triumph; he therefore took some Gauls, the tallest he could find, of triumphal size, as he said, put them in German clothes, made them learn some Teutonic words, and sent them away to Rome to await in prison his return and his ovation. Lyons, where he staid some time, was the scene of his extortions and strangest freaks. He was playing at dice one day with some of his courtiers, and lost; he rose, sent for the tax-list of the province, marked down for death and confiscation some of those who were most highly rated, and said to the company, “You people, you play for a few drachmas; but as for me, I have just won by a single throw one hundred and fifty millions.” At the rumor of a plot hatched against him in Italy, by some Roman nobles, he sent for and sold, publicly, their furniture, jewels, and slaves. As the sale was a success, he extended it to the old furniture of his own palaces in Italy: “I wish to fit out the Gauls,” said he; “it is a mark of friendship I owe to the brave performed the part Roman people.” He himself, at these sales, performed the part of salesman and auctioneer, telling the history of each article to enhance the price. “This belonged to my father, Germanicus; that comes to me from Agrippa; this vase is Egyptian, it was Antony’s, Augustus took it at the battle of Actium.” The imperial sales were succeeded by literary games, at which the losers had to pay the expenses of the prizes, and celebrate, in verse or prose, the praises of the winners; and if their compositions were pronounced bad, they were bound to wipe them out with a sponge or even with their tongues, unless they preferred to be beaten with a rod or soused in the Rhone. One day, when Caligula, in the character of Jupiter, was seated at his tribunal and delivering oracles in the middle of the public thoroughfare, a man of the people remained motionless in front of him, with eyes of astonishment fixed upon him. “What seem I to thee?” asked the emperor, flattered, no doubt, by this attention of the mob. “A great monstrosity,” answered the Gaul. And that, at the end of about four years, was the universal cry: and against a mad emperor the only resource of the Roman world was at that time assassination. The captain of Caligula’s guards rid Rome and the provinces of him.
He did just one sensible and useful thing during the whole of his stay in Gaul: he had a light-house constructed to illumine the passage between Gaul and Great Britain. Some traces of it, they say, have been discovered.
His successor, Claudius, brother of the great Germanicus, and married to his own niece, the second Agrippina, was, as has been already stated, born at Lyons, at the very moment when his father, Drusus, was celebrating there the erection of an altar to Augustus. During his whole reign he showed to the city of his birth the most lively good-will, and the constant aim as well as principal result of this good-will was to render the city of Lyons more and more Roman by effacing all Gallic characteristics and memories. She was endowed with Roman rights, monuments, and names, the most important or the most ostentatious; she became the colony supereminently, the great municipal town of the Gauls, the Claudian town; but she lost what had remained of her old municipal government, that is of her administrative and commercial independence. Nor was she the only one in Gaul to experience the good-will of Claudius. This emperor, the mark of scorn from his infancy, whom his mother, Antonia, called “a shadow of a man, an unfinished sketch of nature’s drawing,” and of whom his grand-uncle, Augustus, used to say, “We shall be forever in doubt, without any certainty of knowing whether he be or be not equal to public duties,” Claudius, the most feeble indeed of the Caesars, in body, mind, and character, was nevertheless he who had intermittent glimpses of the most elevated ideas and the most righteous sentiments, and who strove the most sincerely to make them take the form of deeds. He undertook to assure to all free men of “long-haired” Gaul the same Roman privileges that were enjoyed by the inhabitants of Lyons; and amongst others, that of entering the senate of Rome and holding the great public offices. He made a formal proposal to that effect to the senate, and succeeded, not without difficulty, in getting it adopted. The speech that he delivered on this occasion has been to a great extent preserved to us, not only in the summary given by Tacitus, but also in an inscription on a bronze tablet, which split into many fragments at the time of the destruction of the building in which it was placed. The two principal fragments were discovered at Lyons, in 1528, and they are now deposited in the Museum of that city. They fully confirm the most equitable, and, it may be readily allowed, the most liberal act of policy that emanated from the earlier Roman emperors. “Claudius had taken it into his head,” says Seneca, “to see all Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards, and Britons clad in the toga.” But at the same time he took great care to spread everywhere the Latin tongue, and to make it take the place of the different national idioms. A Roman citizen, originally of Asia Minor, and sent on a deputation to Rome by his compatriots, could not answer in Latin the emperor’s questions. Claudius took away his privileges, saying, “He is no Roman citizen who is ignorant of the language of Rome.”
Claudius, however, was neither liberal nor humane towards a notable portion of the Gallic populations, to wit, the Druids. During his stay in Gaul he proscribed them and persecuted them without intermission; forbidding, under pain of death, their form of worship and every exterior sign of their ceremonies. He drove them away and pursued them even into Great Britain, whither he conducted, A.D. 43, a military expedition, almost the only one of his reign, save the continued struggle of his lieutenants on the Rhine against the Germans. It was evidently amongst the corporation of Druids and under the influence of religious creeds and traditions, that there was still pursued and harbored some of the old Gallic spirit, some passion for national independence, and some hatred of the Roman yoke. In proportion as Claudius had been popular in Gaul did his adopted son and successor, Nero, quickly become hated. There is nothing to show that he even went thither, either on the business of government or to obtain the momentary access of favor always excited in the mob by the presence and prestige of power. It was towards Greece and the East that a tendency was shown in the tastes and trips of Nero, imperial poet, musician, and actor. L. Verus, one of the military commandants in Belgica, had conceived a project of a canal to unite the Moselle to the Saone, and so the Mediterranean to the ocean; but intrigues in the province and the palace prevented its execution, and in the place of public works useful to Gaul, Nero caused a new census to be made of the population whom he required to squeeze to pay for his extravagance. It was in his reign, as is well known, that a fierce fire consumed a great part of Rome and her monuments. The majority of historians accuse Nero of having himself been the cause of it; but at any rate he looked on with cynical indifference, as if amused at so grand a spectacle, and taking pleasure in comparing it to the burning of Troy. He did more: he profited by it so far as to have built for himself, free of expense, that magnificent palace called “The Palace of Gold,” of which he said, when he saw it completed, “At last I am going to be housed as a man should be.” Five years before the burning of Rome, Lyons had been a prey to a similar scourge, and Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius, “Lugdunum, which was one of the show-places of Gaul, is sought for in vain to-day; a single night sufficed for the disappearance of a vast city; it perished in less time than I take to tell the tale.” Nero gave upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars towards the reconstruction of Lyons, a gift that gained him the city’s gratitude, which was manifested, it is said, when his fall became imminent. It was, however, J. Vindex, a Gaul of Vienne, governor of the Lyonnese province, who was the instigator of the insurrection which was fatal to Nero, and which put Galba in his place.
When Nero was dead there was no other Caesar, no naturally indicated successor to the empire. The influence of the name of Caesar had spent itself in the crimes, madnesses, and incapacity of his descendants. Then began a general search for emperors; and the ambition to be created spread abroad amongst the men of note in the Roman world. During the eighteen months that followed the death of Nero, three pretenders–Galba, Otho, and Vitellius–ran this formidable risk. Galba was a worthy old Roman senator, who frankly said, “If the vast body of the empire could be kept standing in equilibrium without a head, I were worthy of the chief place in the state.” Otho and Vitellius were two epicures, both indolent and debauched, the former after an elegant, and the latter after a beastly fashion. Galba was raised to the purple by the Lyonnese and Narbonnese provinces, Vitellius by the legions cantoned in the Belgic province: to such an extent did Gaul already influence the destinies of Rome. All three met disgrace and death within the space of eighteen months; and the search for an emperor took a turn towards the East, where the command was held by Vespasian (Titus Flavius Vespasianus, of Rieti in the duchy of Spoleto), a general sprung from a humble Italian family, who had won great military distinction, and who, having been proclaimed first at Alexandria, in Judea, and at Antioch, did not arrive until many months afterwards at Rome, where he commenced the twenty-six years’ reign of the Flavian family.
Neither Vespasian nor his sons, Titus and Domitian, visited Gaul, as their predecessors had. Domitian alone put in a short appearance. The eastern provinces of the empire and the wars on the frontier of the Danube, towards which the invasions of the Germans were at that time beginning to be directed, absorbed the attention of the new emperors. Gaul was far, however, from remaining docile and peaceful at this epoch. At the vacancy that occurred after Nero and amid the claims of various pretenders, the authority of the Roman name and the pressure of the imperial power diminished rapidly; and the memory and desire of independence were reawakened. In Belgica the German peoplets, who had been allowed to settle on the left bank of the Rhine, were very imperfectly subdued, and kept up close communication with the independent peoplets of the right bank. The eight Roman legions cantoned in that province were themselves much changed; many barbarians had been enlisted amongst them, and did gallant service; but they were indifferent, and always ready for a new master and a new country. There were not wanting symptoms, soon followed by opportunities for action, of this change in sentiment and fact. In the very centre of Gaul, between the Loire and the Allier, a peasant, who has kept in history his Gallic name of Marie or Maricus, formed a band, and scoured the country, proclaiming national independence. He was arrested by the local authorities and handed over to Vitellius, who had him thrown to the beasts. But in the northern part of Belgica, towards the mouths of the Rhine, where a Batavian peoplet lived, a man of note amongst his compatriots and in the service of the Romans, amongst whom he had received the name of Claudius Civilis, embraced first secretly, and afterwards openly, the cause of insurrection. He had vengeance to take for Nero’s treatment, who had caused his brother, Julius Paulus, to be beheaded, and himself to be put in prison, whence he had been liberated by Galba. He made a vow to let his hair grow until he was revenged. He had but one eye, and gloried in the fact, saying that it had been so with Hannibal and with Sertorius, and that his highest aspiration was to be like them. He pronounced first for Vitellius against Otho, then for Vespasian against Vitellius, and then for the complete independence of his nation against Vespasian. He soon had, amongst the Germans on the two banks of the Rhine and amongst the Gauls themselves, secret or declared allies. He was joined by a young Gaul from the district of Langres, Julius Sabinus, who boasted that, during the great war with the Gauls, his great-grandmother had taken the fancy of Julius Caesar, and that he owed his name to him. News had just reached Gaul of the burning down, for the second time, of the Capitol during the disturbances at Rome on the death of Nero. The Druids came forth from the retreats where they had hidden since Claudius’ proscription, and reappeared in the towns and country-places, proclaiming that “the Roman empire was at an end, that the Gallic empire was beginning, and that the day had come when the possession of all the world should pass into the hands of the Transalpine nations.” The insurgents rose in the name of the Gallic empire, and Julius Sabinus assumed the title of Caesar. War commenced. Confusion, hesitation, and actual desertion reached the colonies and extended positively to the Roman legions. Several towns, even Troves and Cologne, submitted or fell into the hands of the insurgents. Several legions, yielding to bribery, persuasion, or intimidation, went over to them, some with a bad grace, others with the blood of their officers on their hands. The gravity of the situation was not misunderstood at Rome. Petilius Cerealis, a commander of renown for his campaigns on the Rhine, was sent off to Belgica with seven fresh legions. He was as skilful in negotiation and persuasion as he was in battle. The struggle that ensued was fierce, but brief; and nearly all the towns and legions that had been guilty of defection returned to their Roman allegiance. Civilis, though not more than half vanquished, himself asked leave to surrender. The Batavian might, as was said at the time, have inundated the country, and drowned the Roman armies. Vespasian, therefore, not being inclined to drive men or matters to extremity, gave Civilis leave to go into retirement and live in peace amongst the marshes of his own land. The Gallic chieftains alone, the projectors of a Gallic empire, were rigorously pursued and chastised. There was especially one, Julius Sabinus, the pretended descendant of Julius Caesar, whose capture was heartily desired. After the ruin of his hopes he took refuge in some vaults connected with one of his country houses. The way in was known only to two devoted freedmen of his, who set fire to the buildings, and spread a report that Sabinus had poisoned himself, and that his dead body had been devoured by the flames. He had a wife, a young Gaul named Eponina, who was in frantic despair at the rumor; but he had her informed, by the mouth of one of his freedmen, of his place of concealment, begging her at the same time to keep up a show of widowhood and mourning, in order to confirm the report already in circulation. “Well did she play her part,” to use Plutarch’s expression, “in her tragedy of woe.” She went at night to visit her husband in his retreat, and departed at break of day; and at last would not depart at all. At the end of seven months, hearing great talk of Vespasian’s clemency, she set out for Rome, taking with her her husband, disguised as a slave, with shaven head and a dress that made him unrecognizable. But the friends who were in their confidence advised them not to risk as yet the chance of imperial clemency, and to return to their secret asylum. There they lived for nine years, during which “as a lioness in her den, neither more nor less,” says Plutarch, “Eponina gave birth to two young whelps, and suckled them herself at her teat.” At last they were discovered and brought before Vespasian at Rome: “Caesar,” said Eponina, showing him her children, “I conceived them and suckled them in a tomb, that there might be more of us to ask thy mercy.”
[Illustration: Eponina and Sabinus hidden in a Vault—-97]
But Vespasian was merciful only from prudence, and not by nature or from magnanimity; and he sent Sabinus to execution. Eponina asked that she might die with her husband, saying, “Caesar, do me this grace; for I have lived more happily beneath the earth and in the darkness than thou in the splendor of thy empire.” Vespasian fulfilled her desire by sending her also to execution; and Plutarch, their contemporary, undoubtedly expressed the general feeling, when he ended his tale with the words, “In all the long reign of this emperor there was no deed so cruel or so piteous to see; and he was afterwards punished for it, for in a short time all his posterity was extinct.”
In fact the Caesars and the Flavians met the same fate; the two lines began and ended alike; the former with Augustus and Nero, the latter with Vespasian and Domitian; first a despot, able, cold, and as capable of cruelty as of moderation, then a tyrant, atrocious and detested. And both were extinguished without a descendant. Then a rare piece of good fortune befell the Roman world. Domitian, two years before he was assassinated by some of his servants whom he was about to put to death, grew suspicious of an aged and honorable senator, Cocceius Nerva, who had been twice consul, and whom he had sent into exile, first to Tarenturn, and then in Gaul, preparatory, probably, to a worse fate. To this victim of proscription application was made by the conspirators who had just got rid of Domitian, and had to get another emperor. Nerva accepted, but not without hesitation, for he was sixty-four years old; he had witnessed the violent death of six emperors, and his grandfather, a celebrated jurist, and for a long while a friend of Tiberius, had killed himself, it is said, for grief at the iniquitous and cruel government of his friend. The short reign of Nerva was a wise, a just, and a humane, but a sad one, not for the people, but for himself. He maintained peace and order, recalled exiles, suppressed informers, re-established respect for laws and morals, turned a deaf ear to self-interested suggestions of vengeance, spoliation, and injustice, proceeding at one time from those who had made him emperor, at another from the Praetorian soldiers and the Roman mob, who regretted Domitian just as they had Nero. But Nerva did not succeed in putting a stop to mob-violence or murders prompted by cupidity or hatred. Finding his authority insulted and his life threatened, he formed a resolution which has been described and explained by a learned and temperate historian of the last century, Lenain de Tillemont (_Histoire des Empereurs,_ &c., t. ii. p. 59), with so much justice and precision that it is a pleasure to quote his own words. “Seeing,” says he, “that his age was despised, and that the empire required some one who combined strength of mind and body, Nerva, being free from that blindness which prevents one from discussing and measuring one’s own powers, and from that thirst for dominion which often prevails over even those who are nearest to the grave, resolved to take a partner in the sovereign power, and showed his wisdom by making choice of Trajan.” By this choice, indeed, Nerva commenced and inaugurated the finest period of the Roman empire, the period that contemporaries entitled the golden age, and that history has named the age of the Antonines. It is desirable to become acquainted with the real character of this period, for to it belong the two greatest historical events–the dissolution of ancient pagan, and the birth of modern Christian society.
Five notable sovereigns, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius swayed the Roman empire during this period (A.D. 96-150). What Nerva was has just been described; and he made no mistake in adopting Trajan as his successor. Trajan, unconnected by origin, as Nerva also had been, with old Rome, was born in Spain, near Seville, and by military service in the East had made his first steps towards fortune and renown. He was essentially a soldier–a moral and a modest soldier; a friend to justice and the public weal; grand in what he undertook for the empire he governed; simple and modest on his own score; respectful towards the civil authority and the laws; untiring and equitable in the work of provincial administration; without any philosophical system or pretensions; full of energy and boldness, honesty and good sense. He stoutly defended the empire against the Germans on the banks of the Danube, won for it the province of Dacia, and, being more taken up with the East than the West, made many Asiatic conquests, of which his successor, Hadrian, lost no time in abandoning, wisely no doubt, a portion. Hadrian, adopted by Trajan, and a Spaniard too, was intellectually superior and morally very inferior to him. He was full of ambition, vanity, invention, and restlessness; he was sceptical in thought and cynical in manners; and he was overflowing with political, philosophical, and literary views and pretensions. He passed the twenty-one years of his reign chiefly in travelling about the empire, in Asia, Africa, Greece, Spain, Gaul, and Great Britain, opening roads, raising ramparts and monuments, founding schools of learning and museums, and encouraging among the provinces, as well as at Rome, the march of administration, legislation, and intellect, more for his own pleasure and his own glorification than in the interest of his country and of society. At the close of this active career, when he was ill and felt that he was dying, he did the best deed of his life. He had proved, in the discharge of high offices, the calm and clear-sighted wisdom of Titus Antoninus, a Gaul, whose family came originally from Nimes; he had seen him one day coming to the senate and respectfully supporting the tottering steps of his aged father (or father-in-law, according to Aurelius Victor); and he adopted him as his successor. Antoninus Pius, as a civilian, was just what Trajan had been as a warrior–moral and modest; just and frugal; attentive to the public weal; gentle towards individuals; full of respect for laws and rights; scrupulous in justifying his deeds before the senate and making them known to the populations by carefully posted edicts; and more anxious to do no wrong or harm to anybody than to gain lustre from brilliant or popular deeds. “He surpasses all men in goodness,” said his contemporaries, and he conferred on the empire the best of gifts, for he gave it Marcus Aurelius for its ruler.
It has been said that Marcus Aurelius was philosophy enthroned. Without any desire to contest or detract from that compliment, let it be added that he was conscientiousness enthroned. It is his grand and original characteristic that he governed the Roman empire and himself with a constant moral solicitude, ever anxious to realize that ideal of personal virtue and general justice which he had conceived, and to which he aspired. His conception, indeed, of virtue and justice was incomplete, and even false in certain cases; and in more than one instance, such as the persecution of the Christians, he committed acts quite contrary to the moral law which he intended to put in practice towards all men; but his respect for the moral law was profound, and his intention to shape his acts according to it, serious and sincere. Let us cull a few phrases from that collection of his private thoughts, which he entitled _For Self,_ and which is really the most faithful picture man ever left of himself and the pains he took with himself. “There is,” says he, “relationship between all beings endowed with reason. The world is like a superior city within which the other cities are but families. . . . I have conceived the idea of a government founded on laws of general and equal application. Beware lest thou Caesarze thyself, for it is what happens only too often. Keep thyself simple, good, unaltered, worthy, grave, a friend to justice, pious, kindly disposed, courageous enough for any duty. . . . Reverence the gods, preserve mankind. Life is short; the only possible good fruit of our earthly existence is holiness of intention and deeds that tend to the common weal. . . . My soul, be thou covered with shame! Thy life is well nigh gone, and thou hast not yet learned how to live.” Amongst men who have ruled great states, it is not easy to mention more than two, Marcus Aurelius and Saint Louis, who have been thus passionately concerned about the moral condition of their souls and the moral conduct of their lives. The mind of Marcus Aurelius was superior to that of Saint Louis; but Saint Louis was a Christian, and his moral ideal was more pure, more complete, more satisfying, and more strengthening for the soul than the philosophical ideal of Marcus Aurelius. And so Saint Louis was serene and confident as to his fate and that of the human race, whilst Marcus Aurelius was disquieted and sad– sad for himself and also for humanity, for his country and for his times: “O, my sole,” was his cry, “wherefore art thou troubled, and why am I so vexed?”
We are here brought closer to the fact which has already been foreshadowed, and which characterizes the moral and social condition of the Roman world at this period. It would be a great error to take the five emperors just spoken of–Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius–as representatives of the society amidst which they lived, and as giving in a certain degree the measure of its enlightenment, its morality, its prosperity, its disposition, and condition in general. Those five princes were not only picked men, superior in mind and character to the majority of their contemporaries, but they were men almost isolated in their generation; in them there was a resumption of all that had been acquired by Greek and Roman antiquity of enlightenment and virtue, practical wisdom and philosophical morality: they were the heirs and the survivors of the great minds and the great politicians of Athens and Rome, of the Areopagus and the Senate. They were not in intellectual and moral harmony with the society they governed, and their action upon it served hardly to preserve it partially and temporarily from the evils to which it was committed by its own vices and to break its fall. When they were thoughtful and modest as Marcus Aurelius was, they were gloomy and disposed to discouragement, for they had a secret foreboding of the uselessness of their efforts.
Nor was their gloom groundless: in spite of their honest plans and of brilliant appearances, the degradation, material as well as moral, of Roman society went on increasing. The wars, the luxury, the dilapidations, and the disturbances of the empire always raised its expenses much above its receipts. The rough miserliness of Vespasian and the wise economy of Antoninus Pius were far from sufficient to restore the balance; the aggravation of imposts was incessant; and the population, especially the agricultural population, dwindled away more and more, in Italy itself, the centre of the state. This evil disquieted the emperors, when they were neither idiots nor madmen; Claudius, Vespasian, Nerva, and Trajan labored to supply a remedy, and Augustus himself had set them the example. They established in Italy colonies of veterans to whom they assigned lands; they made gifts thereof to indigent Roman citizens; they attracted by the title of senator rich citizens from the provinces, and when they had once installed them as landholders in Italy, they did not permit them to depart without authorization. Trajan decreed that every candidate for the Roman magistracies should be bound to have a third of his fortune invested in Italian land, “in order,” says Pliny the Younger, “that those who sought the public dignities should regard Rome and Italy not as an inn to put up at in travelling, but as their home.” And Pliny the Elder, going as a philosophical observer to the very root of the evil, says, in his pompous manner, “In former times our generals tilled their fields with their own hands; the earth, we may suppose, opened graciously beneath a plough crowned with laurels and held by triumphal hands, maybe because those great men gave to tillage the same care that they gave to war, and that they sowed seed with the same attention with which they pitched a camp; or maybe, also, because everything fructifies best in honorable hands, because everything is done with the most scrupulous exactitude. . . . Nowadays these same fields are given over to slaves in chains, to malefactors who are condemned to penal servitude, and on whose brow there is a brand. Earth is not deaf to our prayers; we give her the name of mother; culture is what we call the pains we bestow on her . . . but can we be surprised if she render not to slaves the recompense she paid to generals?”
What must have been the decay of population and of agriculture in the provinces, when even in Italy there was need of such strong protective efforts, which were nevertheless so slightly successful?
Pliny had seen what was the fatal canker of the Roman empire in the country as well as in the towns: slavery or semi-slavery.
Landed property was overwhelmed with taxes, was subject to conditions which branded it with a sort of servitude, and was cultivated by a servile population, in whose hands it became almost barren. The large holders were thus disgusted, and the small ruined or reduced to a condition more and more degraded. Add to this state of things in the civil department a complete absence of freedom and vitality in the political; no elections, no discussion, no public responsibility; characters weakened by indolence and silence, or destroyed by despotic power, or corrupted by the intrigues of court or army. Take a step farther; cast a glance over the moral department; no religious creeds and nothing left of even Paganism but its festivals and frivolous or shameful superstitions. The philosophy of Greece and the old Roman manner of life had raised up, it is true, in the higher ranks of society Stoics and jurists, the former the last champions of morality and the dignity of human nature, the latter the last enlightened servants of the civil community. But neither the doctrines of the Stoics nor the science and able reasoning of the jurists were lights and guides within the reach and for the use of the populace, who remained a prey to the vices and miseries of servitude or public disorders, oscillating between the wearisomeness of barren ignorance and the corruptiveness of a life of adventure. All the causes of decay were at this time spreading throughout Roman society; not a single preservative or regenerative principle of national life was in any force or any esteem.
After the death of Marcus Aurelius the decay manifested and developed itself, almost without interruption, for the space of a century, the outward and visible sign of it being the disorganization and repeated falls of the government itself. The series of emperors given to the Roman world by heirship or adoption, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, was succeeded by what may be termed an imperial anarchy; in the course of one hundred and thirty-two years the sceptre passed into the hands of thirty-nine sovereigns with the title of _emperor (Augustus)_, and was clutched at by thirty-one pretenders, whom history has dubbed tyrants, without other claim than their fiery ambition and their trials of strength, supported at one time in such and such a province of the empire by certain legions or some local uprising, at another, and most frequently in Italy itself, by the Praetorian guards, who had at their disposal the name of Rome and the shadow of a senate. There were Italians, Africans, Spaniards, Gauls, Britons, Illyrians, and Asiatics; and amongst the number were to be met with some cases of eminence in war and politics, and some even of rare virtue and patriotism, such as Pertinax, Septimius Severus, Alexander Severus, Deeius, Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, Tacitus, and Probus. They made great efforts, some to protect the empire against the barbarians, growing day by day more aggressive, others to re-establish within it some sort of order, and to restore to the laws some sort of force. All failed, and nearly all died a violent death, after a short-lived guardianship of a fabric that was crumbling to pieces in every part, but still under the grand name of Roman Empire. Gaul had her share in this series of ephemeral emperors and tyrants; one of the most wicked and most insane, though issue of one of the most valorous and able, Caracalla, son of Septimius Severus, was born at Lyons, four years after the death of Marcus Aurelius. A hundred years later Narbonne gave in two years to the Roman world three emperors, Carus and his two sons, Carinus and Numerian. Amongst the thirty-one tyrants who did not attain to the title of Augustus, six were Gauls; and the last two, Amandus and AElianus, were, A.D. 285, the chiefs of that great insurrection of peasants, slaves or half-slaves, who, under the name of Bagaudians (signifying, according to Ducange, a wandering troop of insurgents from field and forest), spread themselves over the north of Gaul, between the Rhine and the Loire, pillaging and ravaging in all directions, after having themselves endured the pillaging and ravages of the fiscal agents and soldiers of the empire. A contemporary witness, Lactantius, describes the causes of this popular outbreak in the following words: “So enormous had the imposts become, that the tillers’ strength was exhausted; fields became deserts and farms were changed into forests. The fiscal agents measured the land by the clod; trees, vinestalks, were all counted. The cattle were marked; the people registered. Old age or sickness was no excuse; the sick and the infirm were brought up; every one’s age was put down; a few years were added on to the children’s, and taken off from the old men’s. Meanwhile the cattle decreased, the people died, and there was no deduction made for the dead.”
It is said that to excite the confidence and zeal of their bands, the two chiefs of the Bagaudians had medals struck, and that one exhibited the head of Amandus, “Emperor, Caesar, Augustus, pious and prosperous,” with the word “Hope” on the other side.
When public evils have reached such a pitch, and nevertheless the day has not yet arrived for the entire disappearance of the system that causes them, there arises nearly always a new power which, in the name of necessity, applies some remedy to an intolerable condition. A legion cantoned amongst the Tungrians (Tongres), in Belgica, had on its muster-roll a Dalmatian named Diocletian, not yet very high in rank, but already much looked up to by his comrades on account of his intelligence and his bravery. He lodged at a woman’s, who was, they said, a Druidess, and had the prophetic faculty. One day when he was settling his account with her, she complained of his extreme parsimony: “Thou’rt too stingy, Diocletian,” said she; and he answered laughing, “I’ll be prodigal when I’m emperor.” “Laugh not,” rejoined she: “thou’lt be emperor when thou hast slain a wild boar” (aper). The conversation got about amongst Diocletian’s comrades. He made his way in the army, showing continual ability and valor, and several times during his changes of quarters and frequent hunting expeditions he found occasion to kill wild boars; but he did not immediately become emperor, and several of his contemporaries, Aurelian, Tacitus, Probus, Carus, and Numerian, reached the goal before him. “I kill the wild boars,” said he to one of his friends, “and another eats them.” The last mentioned of these ephemeral emperors, Numerian, had for his father-in-law and inseparable comrade a Praetorian prefect named Arrius Aper. During a campaign in Mesopotamia Numerian was assassinated, and the voice of the army pronounced Aper guilty. The legions assembled to deliberate about Numerian’s death and to choose his successor. Aper was brought before the assembly under a guard of soldiers. Through the exertions of zealous friends the candidature of Diocletian found great favor. At the first words pronounced by him from a raised platform in the presence of the troops, cries of “Diocletian Augustus “were raised in every quarter. Other voices called on him to express his feelings about Numerian’s murderers. Drawing his sword, Diocletian declared on oath that he was innocent of the emperor’s death, but that he knew who was guilty and would find means to punish him. Descending suddenly from the platform, he made straight for the Praetorian prefect, and saying, “Aper, be comforted; thou shalt not die by vulgar hands; by the right hand of great AEneas thou fallest,” he gave him his death-wound. “I have killed the prophetic wild boar,” said he in the evening to his confidants; and soon afterwards, in spite of the efforts of certain rivals, he was emperor.
“Nothing is more difficult than to govern,” was a remark his comrades had often heard made by him amidst so many imperial catastrophes. Emperor in his turn, Diocletian treasured up this profound idea of the difficulty of government, and he set to work, ably, if not successfully, to master it. Convinced that the empire was too vast, and that a single man did not suffice to make head against the two evils that were destroying it,–war against barbarians on the frontiers, and anarchy within,–he divided the Roman world into two portions, gave the West to Maximian, one of his comrades, a coarse but valiant soldier, and kept the East himself. To the anarchy that reigned within he opposed a general despotic administrative organization, a vast hierarchy of civil and military agents, everywhere present, everywhere masters, and dependent upon the emperor alone. By his incontestable and admitted superiority, Diocletian remained the soul of these two bodies. At the end of eight years he saw that the two empires were still too vast; and to each Augustus he added a Caesar,–Galerius and Constantius Chlorus,–who, save a nominal, rather than real, subordination to the two emperors, had, each in his own state, the imperial power with the same administrative system. In this partition of the Roman world, Gaul had the best of it: she had for master, Constantius Chlorus, a tried warrior, but just, gentle, and disposed to temper the exercise of absolute power with moderation and equity. He had a son, Constantine, at this time eighteen years of age, whom he was educating carefully for government as well as for war. This system of the Roman empire, thus divided between four masters, lasted thirteen years; still fruitful in wars and in troubles at home, but without victories, and with somewhat less of anarchy. In spite of this appearance of success and durability, absolute power failed to perform its task; and, weary of his burden and disgusted with the imperfection of his work, Diocletian abdicated A.D. 303. No event, no solicitations of his old comrades in arms and empire, could draw him from his retreat on his native soil of Salona, in Dalmatia. “If you could see the vegetables planted by these hands,” said he to Maximian and Galerius, “you would not make the attempt.” He had persuaded or rather dragged his first colleague, Maximian, into abdication after him; and so Galerius in the East, and Constantius Chlorus in the West, remained sole emperors. After the retirement of Diocletian, ambitions, rivalries, and intrigues were not slow to make head; Maximian reappeared on the scene of empire, but only to speedily disappear (A.D. 310), leaving in his place his son Maxentius. Constantius Chlorus had died A.D. 306, and his son, Constantine, had immediately been proclaimed by his army Caesar and Augustus. Galerius died A.D. 311 and Constantine remained to dispute the mastery with Maxentius in the West, and in the East with Maximinus and Licinius, the last colleagues taken by Diocletian and Galerius. On the 29th of October, A.D. 312, after having gained several battles against Maxentius in Italy, at Milan, Brescia, and Verona, Constantine pursued and defeated him before Rome, on the borders of the Tiber, at the foot of the Milvian bridge; and the son of Maximian, drowned in the Tiber, left to the son of Constantins Chlorus the Empire of the West, to which that of the East was destined to be in a few years added, by the defeat and death of Licinius. Constantine, more clear-sighted and more fortunate than any of his predecessors, had understood his era, and opened his eyes to the new light which was rising upon the world. Far from persecuting the Christians, as Diocletian and Galerius had done, he had given them protection, countenance, and audience; and towards him turned all their hopes. He had even, it is said, in his last battle against Maxentius, displayed the Christian banner, the cross, with this inscription: Hoc signo vinces (“with this device thou shalt conquer “). There is no knowing what was at that time the state of his soul, and to what extent it was penetrated by the first rays of Christian faith; but it is certain that he was the first amongst the masters of the Roman world to perceive and accept its influence. With him Paganism fell, and Christianity mounted the throne. With him the decay of Roman society stops, and the era of modern society commences.
[Illustration: Knights returning from Foray—-311]
CHAPTER VI.—-ESTABLISHMENT OF CHRISTIANITY IN GAUL.
When Christianity began to penetrate into Gaul, it encountered there two religions very different one from the other, and infinitely more different from the Christian religion; these were Druidism and Paganism– hostile one to the other, but with a hostility political only, and unconnected with those really religious questions that Christianity was coming to raise.
[Illustration: Christianity established in Gaul—-111]
Druidism, considered as a religion, was a mass of confusion, wherein the instinctive notions of the human race concerning the origin and destiny of the world and of mankind were mingled with the Oriental dreams of metempsychosis–that pretended transmigration, at successive periods, of immortal souls into divers creatures. This confusion was worse confounded by traditions borrowed from the mythologies of the East and the North, by shadowy remnants of a symbolical worship paid to the material forces of nature, and by barbaric practices, such as human sacrifices, in honor of the gods or of the dead. People who are without the scientific development of language and the art of writing do not attain to systematic and productive religious creeds. There is nothing to show that, from the first appearance of the Gauls in history to their struggle with victorious Rome, the religious influence of Druidism had caused any notable progress to be made in Gallic manners and civilization. A general and strong, but vague and incoherent, belief in the immortality of the soul was its noblest characteristic. But with the religious elements, at the same time coarse and mystical, were united two facts of importance: the Druids formed a veritable ecclesiastical corporation, which had, throughout Gallic society, fixed attributes, special manners and customs, an existence at the same time distinct and national; and in the wars with Rome this corporation became the most faithful representatives and the most persistent defenders of Gallic independence and nationality. The Druids were far more a clergy than Druidism was a religion; but it was an organized and a patriotic clergy. It was especially on this account that they exercised in Gaul an influence which was still existent, particularly in north-western Gaul, at the time when Christianity reached the Gallic provinces of the south and centre.
[Illustration: Druids offering Human Sacrifices—-111]
The Greco-Roman Paganism was, at this time, far more powerful than Druidism in Gaul, and yet more lukewarm and destitute of all religious vitality. It was the religion of the conquerors and of the state, and was invested, in that quality, with real power; but, beyond that, it had but the power derived from popular customs and superstitions. As a religious creed, the Latin Paganism was at bottom empty, indifferent, and inclined to tolerate all religions in the state, provided only that they, in their turn, were indifferent at any rate towards itself, and that they did not come troubling the state, either by disobeying her rulers or by attacking her old deities, dead and buried beneath their own still standing altars.
Such were the two religions with which, in Gaul, nascent Christianity had to contend. Compared with them it was, to all appearance, very small and very weak; but it was provided with the most efficient weapons for fighting and beating them, for it had exactly the moral forces which they lacked. Christianity, instead of being, like Druidism, a religion exclusively national and hostile to all that was foreign, proclaimed a universal religion, free from all local and national partiality, addressing itself to all men in the name of the same God, and offering to all the same salvation. It is one of the strangest and most significant facts in history, that the religion most universally human, most dissociated from every consideration but that of the rights and well-being of the human race in its entirety–that such a religion, be it repeated, should have come forth from the womb of the most exclusive, most rigorously and obstinately national religion that ever appeared in the world, that is, Judaism. Such, nevertheless, was the birth of Christianity; and this wonderful contrast between the essence and the earthly origin of Christianity was without doubt one of its most powerful attractions and most efficacious means of success.
Against Paganism Christianity was armed with moral forces not a whit less great. Confronting mythological traditions and poetical or philosophical allegories, appeared a religion truly religious, concerned solely with the relations of mankind to God and with their eternal future. To the pagan indifference of the Roman world the Christians opposed the profound conviction of their faith, and not only their firmness in defending it against all powers and all dangers, but also their ardent passion for propagating it without any motive but the yearning to make their fellows share in its benefits and its hopes. They confronted, nay, they welcomed martyrdom, at one time to maintain their own Christianity, at another to make others Christians around them; propagandism was for them a duty almost as imperative as fidelity. And it was not in memory of old and obsolete mythologies, but in the name of recent deeds and persons, in obedience to laws proceeding from God, One and Universal, in fulfilment and continuation of a contemporary and superhuman history,–that of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man,–that the Christians of the first two centuries labored to convert to their faith the whole Roman world. Marcus Aurelius was contemptuously astonished at what he called the obstinacy of the Christians; he knew not from what source these nameless heroes drew a strength superior to his own, though he was at the same time emperor and sage. It is impossible to assign with exactness the date of the first footprints and first labors of Christianity in Gaul. It was not, however, from Italy, nor in the Latin tongue and through Latin writers, but from the East and through the Greeks, that it first came and began to spread. Marseilles–and the different Greek colonies, originally from Asia Minor and settled upon the shores of the Mediterranean or along the Rhone, mark the route and were the places whither the first Christian missionaries carried their teaching: on this point the letters of the Apostles and the writings of the first two generations of their disciples are clear and abiding proof. In the west of the empire, especially in Italy, the Christians at their first appearance were confounded with the Jews, and comprehended under the same name: “The Emperor Claudius,” says Suetonius, “drove from Rome (A.D. 52) the Jews who, at the instigation of Christus, were in continual commotion.” After the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (A.D. 71), the Jews, Christian or not, dispersed throughout the Empire; but the Christians were not slow to signalize themselves by their religious fervor, and to come forward everywhere under their own true name. Lyons became the chief centre of Christian preaching and association in Gaul. As early as the first half of the second century there existed there a Christian congregation, regularly organized as a church, and already sufficiently important to be in intimate and frequent communication with the Christian Churches of the East and West. There is a tradition, generally admitted, that St. Pothinus, the first Bishop of Lyons, was sent thither from the East by the Bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp, himself a disciple of St. John. One thing is certain, that the Christian Church of Lyons produced Gaul’s first martyrs, amongst whom was the Bishop, St. Pothinus.
It was under Marcus Aurelius, the most philosophical and most conscientious of the emperors, that there was enacted for the first time in Gaul, against nascent Christianity, that scene of tyranny and barbarity which was to be renewed so often and during so many centuries in the midst of Christendom itself. In the eastern provinces of the Empire and in Italy the Christians had already been several times persecuted, now with cold-blooded cruelty, now with some slight hesitation and irresolution. Nero had caused them to be burned in the streets of Rome, accusing them of the conflagration himself had kindled, and, a few months before his fall, St. Peter and St. Paul had undergone martyrdom at Rome. Domitian had persecuted and put to death Christians even in his own family, and though invested with the honors of the consulate. Righteous Trajan, when consulted by Pliny the Younger on the conduct he should adopt in Bithynia towards the Christians, had answered, “It is impossible, in this sort of matter, to establish any certain general rule; there must be no quest set on foot against them, and no unsigned indictment must be accepted; but if they be accused and convicted, they must be punished.” To be punished, it sufficed that they were convicted of being Christians; and it was Trajan himself who condemned St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, to be brought to Rome and thrown to the beasts, for the simple reason that he was highly Christian. Marcus Aurelius, not only by virtue of his philosophical conscientiousness, but by reason of an incident in his history, seemed bound to be farther than any other from persecuting the Christians. During one of his campaigns on the Danube, A.D. 174, his army was suffering cruelly from fatigue and thirst; and at the very moment when they were on the point of engaging in a great battle against the barbarians, the rain fell in abundance, refreshed the Roman soldiers, and conduced to their victory. There was in the Roman army a legion, the twelfth, called the _Melitine_ or the _Thundering,_ which bore on its roll many Christian soldiers. They gave thanks for the rain and the victory to the one omnipotent God who had heard their prayers, whilst the pagans rendered like honor to Jupiter, the rain-giver and the thunderer. The report about these Christians got spread abroad and gained credit in the Empire, so much so that there was attributed to Marcus Aurelius a letter, in which, by reason, no doubt, of this incident, he forbade persecution of the Christians. Tertullian, a contemporary witness, speaks of this letter in perfect confidence; and the Christian writers of the following century did not hesitate to regard it as authentic. Nowadays a strict examination of its existing text does not allow such a character to be attributed to it. At any rate the persecutions of the Christians were not forbidden, for in the year 177, that is, only three years after the victory of Marcus Aurelius over the Germans, there took place, undoubtedly by his orders, the persecution which caused at Lyons the first Gallic martyrdom. This was the fourth, or, according to others, the fifth great imperial persecution of the Christians.
Most tales of the martyrs were written long after the event, and came to be nothing more than legends laden with details often utterly puerile or devoid of proof. The martyrs of Lyons in the second century wrote, so to speak, their own history; for it was their comrades, eye-witnesses of their sufferings and their virtue, who gave an account of them in a long letter addressed to their friends in Asia Minor, and written with passionate sympathy and pious prolixity, but bearing all the, characteristics of truth. It seems desirable to submit for perusal that document, which has been preserved almost entire in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in the third century, and which will exhibit, better than any modern representations, the state of facts and of souls in the midst of the imperial persecutions, and the mighty faith, devotion, and courage with which the early Christians faced the most cruel trials.
“The servants of Christ, dwelling at Vienne and Lyons in Gaul, to the brethren settled in Asia and Phrygia, who have the same faith and hope of redemption that we have, peace, grace, and glory from God the Father and Jesus Christ our Lord!
“None can tell to you in speech or fully set forth to you in writing the weight of our misery, the madness and rage of the Gentiles against the saints, and all that hath been suffered by the blessed martyrs. Our enemy doth rush upon us with all the fury of his powers, and already giveth us a foretaste and the first-fruits of all the license with which he doth intend to set upon us. He hath omitted nothing for the training of his agents against us, and he doth exercise them in a sort of preparatory work against the servants of the Lord. Not only are we driven from the public buildings, from the baths, and from the forum, but it is forbidden to all our people to appear publicly in any place whatsoever.
“The grace of God hath striven for us against the devil: at the same time that it hath sustained the weak, it hath opposed to the Evil One, as it were, pillars of strength–men strong and valiant, ready to draw on themselves all his attacks. They have had to bear all manner of insult; they have deemed but a small matter that which others find hard and terrible; and they have thought only of going to Christ, proving by their example that the sufferings of this world are not worthy to be put in the balance with the glory which is to be manifested in us. They have endured, in the first place, all the outrages that could be heaped upon them by the multitude, outcries, blows, thefts, spoliation, stoning, imprisonment, all that the fury of the people could devise against hated enemies. Then, dragged to the forum by the military tribune and the magistrates of the city, they have been questioned before the people and cast into prison until the coming of the governor. He, from the moment our people appeared before him, committed all manner of violence against them. Then stood forth one of our brethren, Vettius Epagathus, full of love towards God and his neighbor, living a life so pure and strict that, young as he was, men held him to be the equal of the aged Zacharias.– He could not bear that judgment so unjust should go forth against us, and, moved with indignation, he asked leave to defend his brethren, and to prove that there was in them no kind of irreligion or impiety. Those present at the tribunal, amongst whom he was known and celebrated, cried out against him, and the governor himself, enraged at so just a demand, asked him no more than this question, ‘Art thou a Christian?’ Straightway with a loud voice, he declared himself a Christian, and was placed amongst the number of the martyrs. . . .
“Afterwards the rest began to be examined and classed. The first, firm and well prepared, made hearty and solemn confession of their faith. Others, ill prepared and with little firmness, showed that they lacked strength for such a fight. About ten of them fell away, which caused us incredible pain and mourning. Their example broke down the courage of others, who, not being yet in bonds, though they had already had much to suffer, kept close to the martyrs, and withdrew not out of their sight. Then were we all stricken with dread for the issue of the trial: not that we had great fear of the torments inflicted, but because, prophesying the result according to the degree of courage of the accused, we feared much falling away. They took, day by day, those of our brethren who were worthy to replace the weak; so that all the best of the two churches, those whose care and zeal had founded them, were taken and confined. They took, likewise, some of our slaves, for the governor had ordered that they should be all summoned to attend in public; and they, fearing the torments they saw the saints undergo, and instigated by the soldiers, accused us falsely of odious deeds, such as the banquet of Thyestes, the incest of OEdipus, and other crimes which must not be named or even thought of, and which we cannot bring ourselves to believe that men were ever guilty of. These reports having once spread amongst the people, even those persons who had hitherto, by reason, perhaps, of relationship, shown moderation towards us, burst forth into bitter indignation against our people. Thus was fulfilled that which had been prophesied by the Lord: ‘The time cometh when whosoever shall kill you shall think that he doeth God service.’ Since that day the holy martyrs have suffered tortures that no words can express.
“The fury of the multitude, of the governor, and of the soldiers, fell chiefly upon Sanctus, a deacon of Vienne; upon Maturus, a neophyte still, but already a valiant champion of Christ; upon Attalus also, born at Pergamus, but who hath ever been one of the pillars of our Church; upon Blandina, lastly, in whom Christ hath made it appear that persons who seem vile and despised of men are just those whom God holds in the highest honor by reason of the excellent love they bear Him, which is manifested in their firm virtue, and not in vain show. All of us, and even Blandina’s mistress here below, who fought valiantly with the other martyrs, feared that this poor slave, so weak of body, would not be in a condition to freely confess her faith; but she was sustained by such vigor of soul that the executioners, who from morn till eve put her to all manner of torture, failed in their efforts, and declared themselves beaten, not knowing what further punishment to inflict, and marvelling that she still lived, with her body pierced through and through, and torn piecemeal by so many tortures, of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her. But that blessed saint, like a valiant athlete, took fresh courage and strength from the confession of her faith; all feeling of pain vanished, and ease returned to her at the mere utterance of the words, ‘I am a Christian, and no evil is wrought amongst us.’
“As for Sanctus, the executioners hoped that in the midst of the tortures inflicted upon him–the most atrocious which man could devise–they would hear him say something unseemly or unlawful; but so firmly did he resist them, that, without even saying his name, or that of his nation or city, or whether he was bond or free, he only replied in the Roman tongue, to all questions, ‘I am a Christian.’ Therein was, for him, his name, his country, his condition, his whole being; and never could the Gentiles wrest from him another word. The fury of the governor and the executioners was redoubled against him; and, not knowing how to torment him further, they applied to his most tender members bars of red-hot iron. His members burned; but he, upright and immovable, persisted in his profession of faith, as if living waters from the bosom of Christ flowed over him and refreshed him. . . . Some days after, these infidels began again to torture him, believing that if they inflicted upon his blistering wounds the same agonies, they would triumph over him, who seemed unable to bear the mere touch of their hands; and they hoped, also, that the sight of this torturing alive would terrify his comrades. But, contrary to general expectation, the body of Sanctus, rising suddenly up, stood erect and firm amidst these repeated torments, and recovered its old appearance and the use of its members, as if, by Divine grace, this second laceration of his flesh had caused healing rather than suffering. . . .
“When the tyrants had thus expended and exhausted their tortures against the firmness of the martyrs sustained by Christ, the devil devised other contrivances. They were cast into the darkest and most unendurable place in their prison; their feet were dragged out and compressed to the utmost tension of the muscles; the jailers, as if instigated by a demon, tried every sort of torture, insomuch that several of them, for whom God willed such an end, died of suffocation in prison. Others, who had been tortured in such a manner that it was thought impossible they should long survive, deprived as they were of every remedy and aid from men, but supported nevertheless by the grace of God, remained sound and strong in body as in soul, and comforted and reanimated their brethren. . . .
“The blessed Pothinus, who held at that time the bishopric of Lyons, being upwards of ninety, and so weak in body that he could hardly breathe, was himself brought before the tribunal, so worn with old age and sickness that he seemed nigh to extinction; but he still possessed his soul, wherewith to subserve the triumph of Christ. Being brought by the soldiers before the tribunal, whither he was accompanied by all the magistrates of the city and the whole populace, that pursued him with hootings, he offered, as if he had been the very Christ, the most glorious testimony. At a question from the governor, who asked what the God of the Christians was, he answered, ‘If thou be worthy, thou shalt know.’ He was immediately raised up, without any respect or humanity, and blows were showered upon him; those who happened to be nearest to him assaulted him grievously with foot and fist, without the slightest regard for his age; those who were farther off cast at him whatever was to their hand; they would all have thought themselves guilty of the greatest default if they had not done their best, each on his own score, to insult him brutally. They believed they were avenging the wrongs of their gods. Pothinus, still breathing, was cast again into prison, and two days after yielded up his spirit.
“Then were manifested a singular dispensation of God and the immeasurable compassion of Jesus Christ; an example rare amongst brethren, but in accord with the intentions and the justice of the Lord. All those who, at their first arrest, had denied their faith, were themselves cast into prison and given over to the same sufferings as the other martyrs, for their denial did not serve them at all. Those who had made profession of being what they really were–that is, Christians–were imprisoned without being accused of other crimes. The former, on the contrary, were confined as homicides and wretches, thus suffering a double punishment. The one sort found repose in the honorable joys of martyrdom, in the hope of promised blessedness, in the love of Christ, and in the spirit of God the Father; the other were a prey to the reproaches of conscience. It was easy to distinguish the one from the other by their looks. The one walked joyously, bearing on their faces a majesty mingled with sweetness, and their very bonds seemed unto them an ornament, even as the broidery that decks a bride . . . the other, with downcast eyes and humble and dejected air, were an object of contempt to the Gentiles themselves, who regarded them as cowards who had forfeited the glorious and saving name of Christians. And so they who were present at this double spectacle were thereby signally strengthened, and whoever amongst them chanced to be arrested confessed the faith without doubt or hesitation. . . .
“Things having come to this pass, different kinds of death were inflicted on the martyrs, and they offered to God a crown of divers flowers. It was but right that the most valiant champions, those who had sustained a double assault and gained a signal victory, should receive a splendid crown of immortality. The neophyte Maturus and the deacon Sanctus, with Blandina and Attalus, then, were led into the amphitheatre, and thrown to the beasts, as a sight to please the inhumanity of the Gentiles. . . . Maturus and Sanctus there underwent all kinds of tortures, as if they had hitherto suffered nothing; or, rather, like athletes who had already been several times victorious, and were contending for the crown of crowns, they braved the stripes with which they were beaten, the bites of the beasts that dragged them to and fro, and all that was demanded by the outcries of an insensate mob, so much the more furious, because it could by no means overcome the firmness of the martyrs or extort from Sanctus any other speech than that which, on the first day, he had uttered: ‘I am a Christian.’
“After this fearful contest, as life was not extinct, their throats were at last cut, when they alone had thus been offered as a spectacle to the public instead of the variety displayed in the combat of gladiators. Blandina, in her turn, tied to a stake, was given to the beasts: she was seen hanging, as it were, on a sort of cross, calling upon God with trustful fervor, and the brethren present were reminded, in the person of a sister, of Him who had been crucified for their salvation. . . . As none of the beasts would touch the body of Blandina, she was released from the stake, taken back to prison, and reserved for another occasion. . . . Attalus, whose execution, seeing that he was a man of mark, was furiously demanded by the people, came forward ready to brave everything, as a man deriving confidence from the memory of his life, for he had courageously trained himself to discipline, and had always amongst us borne witness for the truth. He was led all round the amphitheatre, preceded by a board bearing this inscription in Latin: ‘This is Attalus the Christian.’ The people pursued him with the most furious hootings; but the governor, having learnt that he was a Roman citizen, had him taken back to prison with the rest. Having subsequently written to Caesar, he waited for his decision as to those who were thus detained.
“This delay was neither useless nor unprofitable, for then shone forth the boundless compassion of Christ. Those of the brethren who had been but dead members of the Church, were recalled to life by the pains and help of the living; the martyrs obtained grace for those who had fallen away; and great was the joy in the Church, at the same time virgin and mother, for she once more found living those whom she had given up for dead. Thus revived and strengthened by the goodness of God, who willeth not the death of the sinner, but rather inviteth him to repentance, they presented themselves before the tribunal, to be questioned afresh by the governor. Caesar had replied that they who confessed themselves to be Christians should be put to the sword, and they who denied sent away safe and sound. When the time for the great market had fully come, there assembled a numerous multitude from every nation and every province. The governor had the blessed martyrs brought up before his judgment-seat, showing them before the people with all the pomp of a theatre. He questioned them afresh; and those who were discovered to be Roman citizens were beheaded, the rest were thrown to the beasts.
“Great glory was gained for Christ by means of those who had at first denied their faith, and who now confessed it contrary to the expectation of the Gentiles. Those who, having been privately questioned, declared themselves Christians were added to the number of the martyrs. Those in whom appeared no vestige of faith, and no fear of God, remained without the pale of the Church. When they were dealing with those who had been reunited to it, one Alexander, a Phrygian by nation, a physician by profession, who had for many years been dwelling in Gaul, a man well known to all for his love of God and open preaching of the faith, took his place in the hall of judgment, exhorting by signs all who filled it to confess their faith, even as if he had been called in to deliver them of it. The multitude, enraged to see that those who had at first denied, turned round and proclaimed their faith, cried out against Alexander, whom they accused of the conversion. The governor forthwith asked him what he was, and at the answer, ‘I am a Christian,’ condemned him to the beasts. On the morrow Alexander was again brought up, together with Attalus, whom the governor, to please the people, had once more condemned to the beasts. After they had both suffered in the amphitheatre all the torments that could be devised, they were put to the sword. Alexander uttered not a complaint, not a word; he had the air of one who was talking inwardly with God. Attalus, seated on an iron seat, and waiting for the fire to consume his body, said, in Latin, to the people, ‘See what ye are doing; it is in truth devouring men; as for us, we devour not men, and we do no evil at all.’ He was asked what was the name of God: ‘God,’ said he, ‘is not like us mortals; He hath no name.’
“After all these martyrs, on the last day of the shows, Blandina was again brought up, together with a young lad, named Ponticus, about fifteen years old. They had been brought up every day before that they might see the tortures of their brethren. When they were called upon to swear by the altars of the Gentiles, they remained firm in their faith, making no account of those pretended gods, and so great was the fury of the multitude against them, that no pity was shown for the age of the child or the sex of the woman. Tortures were heaped upon them; they were made to pass through every kind of torment, but the desired end was not gained. Supported by the exhortations of his sister, who was seen and heard by the Gentiles, Ponticus, after having endured all magnanimously, gave up the ghost. Blandina, last of all,–like a noble mother that hath roused the courage of her sons for the fight, and sent them forth to conquer for their king,–passed once more through all the tortures they had suffered, anxious to go and rejoin them, and rejoicing at each step towards death. At length, after she had undergone fire, the talons of beasts, and agonizing aspersion, she was wrapped in a network and thrown to a bull that tossed her in the air; she was already unconscious of all that befell her, and seemed altogether taken up with watching for the blessings that Christ had in store for her. Even the Gentiles allowed that never a woman had suffered so much or so long.
“Still their fury and their cruelty towards the saints were not appeased. They devised another way of raging against them; they cast to the dogs the bodies of those who had died of suffocation in prison, and watched night and day that none of our brethren might come and bury them. As for what remained of the martyrs’ half-mangled or devoured corpses, they left them exposed under a guard of soldiers, coming to look on them with insulting eyes, and saying, ‘Where is now their God? Of what use to them was this religion for which they laid down their lives?’ We were overcome with grief that we were not able to bury these poor corpses; nor the darkness of night, nor gold, nor prayers could help us to succeed therein. After being thus exposed for six days in the open air, given over to all manner of outrage, the corpses of the martyrs were at last burned, reduced to ashes, and cast hither and thither by the infidels upon the waters of the Rhone, that there might be left no trace of them on earth. They acted as if they had been more mighty than God, and could rob our brethren of their resurrection: ”Tis in that hope,’ said they, ‘that these folk bring amongst us a new and strange religion, that they set at nought the most painful torments, and that they go joyfully to face death: let us see if they will rise again, if their God will come to their aid and will be able to tear them from our hands.'”
It is not without a painful effort that, even after so many centuries, we can resign ourselves to be witnesses, in imagination only, of such a spectacle. We can scarce believe that amongst men of the same period and the same city so much ferocity could be displayed in opposition to so much courage, the passion for barbarity against the passion for virtue. Nevertheless, such is history; and it should be represented as it really was: first of all, for truth’s sake; then for the due appreciation of virtue and all it costs of effort and sacrifice; and, lastly, for the purpose of showing what obstacles have to be surmounted, what struggles endured, and what sufferings borne, when the question is the accomplishment of great moral and social reforms. Marcus Aurelius was, without any doubt, a virtuous ruler, and one who had it in his heart to be just and humane; but he was an absolute ruler, that is to say, one fed entirely on his owns ideas, very ill-informed about the facts on which he had to decide, and without a free public to warn him of the errors of his ideas or the practical results of his decrees. He ordered the persecution of the Christians without knowing what the Christians were, or what the persecution would be, and this conscientious philosopher let loose at Lyons, against the most conscientious of subjects, the zealous servility of his agents, and the atrocious passions of the mob.
The persecution of the Christians did not stop at Lyons, or with Marcus Aurelius; it became, during the third century, the common practice of the emperors in all parts of the Empire: from A.D. 202 to 312, under the reigns of Septimius Severus, Maximinus the First, Decius, Valerian, Aurelian, Diocletian, Maximian, and Galerius, there are reckoned six great general persecutions, without counting others more circumscribed or less severe. The Emperors Alexander Severns, Philip the Arabian, and Constantius Chlorus were almost the only exceptions to this cruel system; and nearly always, wherever it was in force, the Pagan mob, in its brutality or fanatical superstition, added to imperial rigor its own atrocious and cynical excesses.
But Christian zeal was superior in perseverance and efficacy to Pagan persecution. St. Pothinus the Martyr was succeeded as bishop at Lyons by St. Irenaeus, the most learned, most judicious, and most illustrious of the early heads of the Church in Gaul. Originally from Asia Minor, probably from Smyrna, he had migrated to Gaul, at what particular date is not known, and had settled as a simple priest in the diocese of Lyons, where it was not long before he exercised vast influence, as well on the spot as also during certain missions intrusted to him, and amongst them one, they say, to the Pope St. Eleutherius at Rome. Whilst Bishop of Lyons, from A.D. 177 to 202, he employed the five and twenty years in propagating the Christian faith in Gaul, and in defending, by his writings, the Christian doctrines against the discord to which they had already been subjected in the East, and which was beginning to penetrate to the West. In 202, during the persecution instituted by Septimius Severus, St. Irenaeus crowned by martyrdom his active and influential life. It was in his episcopate that there began what may be called the swarm of Christian missionaries who, towards the end of the second and during the third centuries, spread over the whole of Gaul, preaching the faith and forming churches. Some went from Lyons at the instigation of St. Irenaeus; others from Rome, especially under the pontificate of Pope St. Fabian, himself martyred in 219; St. Felix and St. Fortunatus to Valence, St. Ferreol to Besancon, St. Marcellus to Chalons-sur-Saone, St. Benignus to Dijon, St. Trophimus to Arles, St. Paul to Narbonne, St. Saturninus to Toulouse, St. Martial to Limoges, St. Andeol and St. Privatus to the Cevennes, St. Austremoine to Clermont-Ferrand, St. Gatian to Tours, St. Denis to Paris, and so many others that their names are scarcely known beyond the pages of erudite historians, or the very spots where they preached, struggled, and conquered, often at the price of their lives. Such were the founders of the faith and of the Christian Church in France. At the commencement of the fourth century their work was, if not accomplished, at any rate triumphant; and when, A.D. 312, Constantine declared himself a Christian, he confirmed the fact of the conquest of the Roman world, and of Gaul in particular, by Christianity. No doubt the majority of the inhabitants were not as yet Christians; but it was clear that the Christians were in the ascendant and had command of the future. Of the two grand elements which were to meet together, on the ruins of Roman society, for the formation of modern society, the moral element, the Christian religion, had already taken possession of souls; the devastated territory awaited the coming of new peoples, known to history under the general name of Germans, whom the Romans called the barbarians.
CHAPTER VII.—-THE GERMANS IN GAUL.–THE FRANKS AND CLOVIS.
About A.D. 241 or 242 the sixth Roman legion, commanded by Aurelian, at that time military tribune, and thirty years later, emperor, had just finished a campaign on the Rhine, undertaken for the purpose of driving the Germans from Gaul, and was preparing for Eastern service, to make war on the Persians. The soldiers sang,–
We have slain a thousand Franks and a thousand Sarmatians; we want a thousand, thousand, Thousand Persians.
[Illustration: Germans invading Gaul—-129]
That was, apparently, a popular burden at the time, for on the days of military festivals, at Rome and in Gaul, the children sang, as they danced,–
We have cut off the heads of a thousand, thousand, thousand, Thousand;
One man hath cut off the heads of a thousand, thousand, thousand, Thousand, thousand;
May he live a thousand, thousand years, he who hath slain a thousand, thousand!
Nobody hath so much of wine as he hath of blood poured out.
Aurelian, the hero of these ditties, was indeed much given to the pouring out of blood, for at the approach of a fresh war he wrote to the senate,–
“I marvel, Conscript Fathers, that ye have so much misgiving about opening the Sibylline books, as if ye were deliberating in an assembly of Christians, and not in the temple of all the gods. . . . Let inquiry be made of the sacred books, and let celebration take place of the ceremonies that ought to be fulfilled. Far from refusing, I offer, with zeal, to satisfy all expenditure required, with captives of every nationality, victims of royal rank. It is no shame to conquer with the aid of the gods; it is thus that our ancestors began and ended many a war.”
Human sacrifices, then, were not yet foreign to Pagan festivals, and probably the blood of more than one Frankish captive on that occasion flowed in the temple of all the gods.
It is the first time the name of _Franks_ appears in history; and it indicated no particular, single people, but a confederation of Germanic peoplets, settled or roving on the right bank of the Rhine, from the Mayn to the ocean. The number and the names of the tribes united in this confederation are uncertain. A chart of the Roman empire, prepared apparently at the end of the fourth century, in the reign of the Emperor Honorius (which chart, called _tabula Peutingeri,_ was found amongst the ancient MSS. collected by Conrad Peutinger, a learned German philosopher, in the fifteenth century), bears over a large territory on the right bank of the Rhine, the word _Francia,_ and the following enumeration: “The Chaucians, the Ampsuarians, the Cheruscans, and the Chamavians, who are also called Franks;” and to these tribes divers chroniclers added several others, “the Attuarians, the Bructerians, the Cattians, and the Sicambrians.” Whatever may have been the specific names of these peoplets, they were all of German race, called themselves Franks, that is, “free-men,” and made, sometimes separately, sometimes collectively, continued incursions into Gaul,–especially Belgica and the northern portions of Lyonness,–at one time plundering and ravaging, at another occupying forcibly, or demanding of the Roman emperors lands whereon to settle. From the middle of the third to the beginning of the fifth century, the history of the Western empire presents an almost uninterrupted series of these invasions on the part of the Franks, together with the different relationships established between them and the Imperial government. At one time whole tribes settled on Roman soil, submitted to the emperors, entered their service, and fought for them, even against their own German compatriots. At another, isolated individuals, such and such warriors of German race, put themselves at the command of the emperors, and became of importance. At the middle of the third century, the Emperor Valerian, on committing a command to Aurelian, wrote, “Thou wilt have with thee Hartmund, Haldegast, Hildmund, and Carioviscus.” Some Frankish tribes allied themselves more or less fleetingly with the Imperial government, at the same time that they preserved their independence; others pursued, throughout the Empire, their life of incursion and adventure. From A.D. 260 to 268, under the reign of Gallienus, a band of Franks threw itself upon Gaul, scoured it from north-east to south-east, plundering and devastating on its way; then it passed from Aquitania into Spain, took and burned Tarragona, gained possession of certain vessels, sailed away, and disappeared in Africa, after having wandered about for twelve years at its own will and pleasure. There was no lack of valiant emperors, precarious and ephemeral as their power may have been, to defend the Empire, and especially Gaul, against those enemies, themselves ephemeral, but forever recurring; Decius, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, and Probus gallantly withstood those repeated attacks of German hordes. Sometimes they flattered themselves they had gained a definitive victory, and then the old Roman pride exhibited itself in their patriotic confidence. About A.D. 278, the Emperor Probes, after gaining several victories in Gaul over the Franks, wrote to the senate,–
“I render thanks to the immortal gods, Conscript Fathers, for that they have confirmed your judgment as regards me. Germany is subdued throughout its whole extent; nine kings of different nations have come and cast themselves at my feet, or rather at yours, as suppliants, with their foreheads in the dust. Already all those barbarians are tilling for you, sowing for you, and fighting for you against the most distant nations.
“Order ye, therefore, according to your custom, prayers of thanksgiving, for we have slain four thousand of the enemy; we have had offered to us sixteen thousand men ready armed; and we have wrested from the enemy the seventy most important towns. The Gauls, in fact, are completely delivered. The crowns offered to me by all the cities of Gaul I have submitted, Conscript Fathers, to your grace; dedicate ye them with your own hands to Jupiter, all-bountiful, all-powerful, and to the other immortal gods and goddesses. All the booty is re-taken, and, further, we have made fresh captures, more considerable than our first losses; the fields of Gaul are tilled by the oxen of the barbarians, and German teams bend their necks in slavery to our husbandmen; divers nations raise cattle for our consumption, and horses to remount our cavalry; our stores are full of the corn of the barbarians–in one word, we have left to the vanquished nought but the soil; all their other possessions are ours. We had at first thought it necessary, Conscript Fathers, to appoint a new Governor of Germany; but we have put off this measure to the time when our ambition shall be more completely satisfied, which will be, as it seems to us, when it shall have pleased Divine Providence to increase and multiply the forces of our armies.”
Probus had good reason to wish that “Divine Providence might be pleased to increase the forces of the Roman armies,” for even after his victories, exaggerated as they probably were, they did not suffice for their task, and it was not long before the vanquished recommenced war. He had dispersed over the territory of the Empire the majority of the prisoners he had taken. A band of Franks, who had been transported and established as a military colony on the European shore of the Black Sea, could not make up their minds to remain there. They obtained possession of some vessels, traversed the Propontis, the Hellespont, and the Archipelago, ravaged the coasts of Greece, Asia Minor, and Africa, plundered Syracuse, scoured the whole of the Mediterranean, entered the ocean by the Straits of Gibraltar, and, making their way up again along the coasts of Gaul, arrived at last at the mouths of the Rhine, where they once more found themselves at home amongst the vines which Probus, in his victorious progress, had been the first to have planted, and with probably their old taste for adventure and plunder.
After the commencement of the fifth century, from A.D. 406 to 409, it was no longer by incursions limited to certain points, and sometimes repelled with success, that the Germans harassed the Roman provinces: a veritable deluge of divers nations, forced one upon another, from Asia into Europe, by wars and migration in mass, inundated the Empire and gave the decisive signal for its fall. St. Jerome did not exaggerate when he wrote to Ageruchia, “Nations, countless in number and exceeding fierce, have occupied all the Gauls; Quadians, Vandals, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Saxons, Burgundians, Allemannians, Pannonians, and even Assyrians have laid waste all that there is between the Alps and the Pyrenees, the ocean and the Rhine. Sad destiny of the commonwealth! Mayence, once a noble city, hath been taken and destroyed; thousands of men were slaughtered in the church. Worms hath fallen after a long siege. The inhabitants of Rheims, a powerful city, and those of Amiens, Arras, Terouanne, at the extremity of Gaul, Tournay, Spires, and Strasburg have been carried away to Germany. All hath been ravaged in Aquitania (Novempopulania), Lyonness, and Narbonness; the towns, save a