The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
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Название: The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition)

Автор: Theodor Mommsen

Издательство: Bookwire

Жанр: Документальная литература

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isbn: 9788027244126

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СКАЧАТЬ The natives of Corduba, Marcus Porcius Latro, the teacher and the model of Ovid, and his countryman and friend in youth, Annaeus Seneca,—both only about a decade younger than Horace, but for a considerable time employed in their native town as teachers of eloquence, before they transferred their activity in that character to Rome—were the true and proper representatives of the school–rhetoric that took the place of the republican freedom and sauciness of speech. Once, when the former could not avoid appearing in a real process, he came to a stand–still in his address, and only recovered his fluency when, to please the famous man, the court was transferred from the tribunal to the school–hall. Seneca’s son, the minister of Nero and the fashionable philosopher of the epoch, and his grandson, the poet of the sentimental opposition to the principate, Lucanus, have an importance, as doubtful in literature as it is indisputable in history, which may in a certain sense be put to the account of Spain. In the early times of the empire, likewise, two other provincials from Baetica, Mela under Claudius, Columella under Nero, gained a place among the recognised didactic authors who cultivated style—the former by his short description of the earth, the latter by a thorough, in part poetical, picture of agriculture. If, in the time of Domitian, the poet Canius Rufus from Gades, the philosopher Decianus from Emerita, and the orator Valerius Licinianus from Bilbilis (Calatayud not far from Saragossa) are celebrated as literary notabilities by the side of Virgil and Catullus and by the side of the three stars of Corduba, this is certainly the fortune also of one likewise a native of Bilbilis, Valerius Martialis,37 who himself yields to none among the poets of this epoch in elegance and plastic power, or yet in venality and emptiness, and we are justified in taking into account withal the fact of their being fellow–countrymen; yet the mere possibility of weaving such a garland of poets shows the importance of the Spanish element in the literature of the time. But the pearl of Spanish–Latin authorship is Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35–95) from Calagurris on the Ebro. His father had already acted as a teacher of eloquence in Rome; he himself was brought to Rome by Galba, and occupied, especially under Domitian, a distinguished position as tutor of the emperor’s nephews. His textbook of rhetoric and, in some degree, of the history of Roman literature, is one of the most excellent which we possess from Roman antiquity, pervaded by fine taste and sure judgment, simple in feeling as in presentation, instructive without weariness, pleasing without effort, contrasting sharply and designedly with the fashionable literature that was so rich in phrases and so empty of ideas. It was in no small degree due to him that the tendency became changed at any rate, if not improved. Subsequently, amidst the general emptiness the influence of the Spaniards comes no further into prominence. What is, historically, of special moment in their Latin authorship is the complete clinging of these provincials to the literary development of the mother–country. Cicero, indeed, scoffs at the clumsiness and the provincialisms of the Spanish votaries of poetry; and even Latro’s Latin did not meet the approval of the equally genteel and correct Roman by birth, Messalla Corvinus. But after the Augustan age nothing similar is again heard of. The Gallic rhetors, the great African ecclesiastical authors have, as Latin writers, retained in some measure a foreign complexion; no one would recognise the Senecas and Martial by their manner and style as belonging to one or to another land; in hearty love to his own literature and in subtle understanding of it never has any Italian surpassed the teacher of languages from Calagurris.

      Chapter III.

       The Gallic Provinces

       Table of Contents

      Like Spain, southern Gaul had already in the time of the republic become a part of the Roman empire, yet neither so early nor so completely as the former country. The two Spanish provinces were instituted in the age of Hannibal, the province Narbo in that of the Gracchi; and, while in the former case Rome took to itself the whole Peninsula, in the latter it was not merely content, down to the last age of the republic, with the possession of the coast, but even of this it directly took only the smaller and the more remote half. The republic was not wrong in designating what it so possessed as the town–domain of Narbo (Narbonne); the greater part of the coast, nearly from Montpellier to Nice, belonged to the city of Massilia. This Greek community was more a state than a city, and through its powerful position the equal alliance subsisting from of old with Rome obtained a real significance, such as had no parallel in any second allied city. It is true, nevertheless, that the Romans were for these neighbouring Greeks, still more than for the more remote Greeks of the East, shield as well as sword. The Massaliots had probably the lower Rhone as far up as Avignon in their possession; but the Ligurian and the Celtic cantons of the interior were by no means subject to them, and the Roman standing camp at Aquae Sextiae (Aix) a day’s march to the north of Massilia, was, quite in the true and proper sense, instituted for the permanent protection of the wealthy Greek mercantile city. It was one of the most momentous consequences of the Roman civil war, that along with the legitimate republic its most faithful ally, the city of Massilia, was politically annihilated, was converted from a state sharing rule into a community which continued free of the empire and Greek, but preserved its independence and its Hellenism in the modest proportions of a provincial middle–sized town. In a political aspect there is nothing more to be said of Massilia after its capture in the civil war; the town was thenceforth for Gaul only what Neapolis was for Italy—the centre of Greek culture and Greek learning. Inasmuch as the greater part of the later province of Narbo only at that time came under direct Roman administration, it is to this epoch in particular that the erection of it in a certain measure belongs.

      Last conflicts in the three Gauls.

      How the rest of Gaul came into the power of Rome has been already narrated (iv. 240 ff.)[iv. 230 f.] Before Caesar’s Gallic war the rule of the Romans extended approximately as far as Toulouse, Vienne, and Geneva; after it, as far as the Rhine throughout its course, and the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean on the north as on the west. This subjugation, it is true, was probably not complete, in the north–west perhaps not much less superficial than that of Britain (iv. 296)[iv. 283.]. Yet we are informed of supplemental wars, in the main, merely as regards the districts of Iberian nationality. To the Iberians belonged not merely the southern but also the northern slope of the Pyrenees, with the country lying in front, Bearn, Gascony, and western Languedoc38; and it has already been mentioned (p. 63) that when north–western Spain was sustaining the last conflicts with the Romans, there was also on the north side of the Pyrenees, and beyond doubt in connection therewith, serious fighting, at first on the part of Agrippa in the year 716[38.], then on the part of Marcus Valerius Messalla, the well–known patron of the Roman poets, who in the year 726 or 727[28 or 27.], and thus nearly at the same time with the Cantabrian war, vanquished the Aquitanians in a pitched battle in the old Roman territory not far from Narbonne. In respect of the Celts nothing further is mentioned than that, shortly before the battle of Actium, the Morini in Picardy were overthrown; and, although during the twenty years of almost uninterrupted civil war our reporters may have lost sight of the comparatively insignificant affairs of Gaul, the silence of the list of triumphs—here complete—shows at any rate that no further military undertakings of importance took place in the land of the Celts during this period.

      Insurrections.

      Subsequently, during the long reign of Augustus, and amidst all the crises—some of them very hazardous—of the Germanic wars, the Gallic provinces remained obedient. No doubt the Roman government, as well as the Germanic patriot party, as we have seen, constantly had it in view that a decisive success of the Germans and their advance into Gaul would be followed by a rising of the Gauls against Rome; the foreign rule cannot therefore at that time have stood by any means secure. Matters came to a real insurrection in the year 21 under Tiberius. There was formed among the Celtic nobility a widely–ramified conspiracy to overthrow the Roman government.

      Under Tiberius.

      It broke out prematurely in the far from important cantons of the Turones and the Andecavi on the lower Loire, and not merely the small garrison of Lyons, but also a part of the army of the Rhine at once took the field against the insurgents. Nevertheless СКАЧАТЬ