In 664 Gaius Caelius had fought with the Salyes about Aquae Sextiae, and in 674 Gaius Flaccus[2], on his march to Spain, with other Celtic nations. When in the Sertorian war the governor Lucius Manlius, compelled to hasten to the aid of his colleagues beyond the Pyrenees, returned defeated from Ilerda (Lerida) and on his way home was vanquished a second time by the western neighbours of the Roman province, the Aquitani (about 676[3]), this seems to have provoked a general rising of the provincials between the Pyrenees and the Rhone, perhaps even of those between the Rhone and Alps. Pompeius had to make his way with the sword through the insurgent Gaul to Spain[4], and by way of penalty for their rebellion gave the territories of the Volcae-Arecomici and the Helvii (dep. Gard and Ardeche) over to the Massiliots; the governor Manius Fonteius (678-680) carried out these arrangements and restored tranquillity in the province by subduing the Vocontii (dep. Drome), protecting Massilia from the insurgents, and liberating the Roman capital Narbo which they invested. Despair, however, and the financial embarrassment which the participation in the sufferings of the Spanish war[5] and generally the official and non-official exactions of the Romans brought upon the Gallic provinces, did not allow them to be tranquil; and in particular the canton of the Allobroges, the most remote from Narbo, was in a perpetual ferment, which was attested by the "pacificatio" that Gaius Piso undertook there in 688 as well as by the behaviour of the Allobrogian embassy in Rome on occasion of the anarchist plot in 691[6], and which soon afterwards (693) broke into open revolt Catugnatus the leader of the Allobroges in this war of despair, who had at first fought not unsuccessfully, was conquered at Solonium after a glorious resistance by the governor Gaius Pomptinus.
Notwithstanding all these conflicts the bounds of the Roman territory were not materially advanced; Lugudunum Convenarum, where Pompeius had settled the remnant of the Sertorian army[7], Tolosa, Vienna and Genava were still the most remote Roman townships towards the west and north. But at the same time the importance of these Gallic possessions for the mother country was continually on the increase. The glorious climate, akin to that of Italy, the favourable nature of the soil, the large and rich region lying behind so advantageous for commerce with its mercantile routes reaching as far as Britain, the easy intercourse by land and sea with the mother country, rapidly gave to southern Gaul an economic importance for Italy, which much older possessions, such as those in Spain, had not acquired in the course of centuries; and as the Romans who had suffered political shipwreck at this period sought an asylum especially in Massilia, and there found once more Italian culture and Italian luxury, voluntary emigrants from Italy also were attracted more and more to the Rhone and the Garonne.
"The province of Gaul", it was said in a sketch drawn ten years before Caesar's arrival, "is full of merchants; it swarms with Roman burgesses. No native of Gaul transacts a piece of business without the intervention of a Roman; every penny, that passes from one hand to another in Gaul, goes through the account books of the Roman burgesses". From the same description it appears that in addition to the colonists of Narbo there were Romans cultivating land and rearing cattle, resident in great numbers in Gaul; as to which, however, it must not be overlooked that most of the provincial land possessed by Romans, just like the greater part of the English possessions in the earliest times in America, was in the hands of the high nobility living in Italy, and those farmers and graziers consisted for the most part of their stewards - slaves or freedmen.
It is easy to understand how under such circumstances civilization and Romanizing rapidly spread among the natives. These Celts were not fond of agriculture; but their new masters compelled them to exchange the sword for the plough, and it is very credible that the embittered resistance of the Allobroges was provoked in part by some such injunctions. In earlier times Hellenism had also to a certain degree dominated those regions; the elements of a higher culture, the stimulus to the cultivation of the vine and the olive[8], to the use of writing[9] and to the coining of money, came to them from Massilia. The Hellenic culture was in this case far from being set aside by the Romans; Massilia gained through them more influence than it lost; and even in the Roman period Greek physicians and rhetoricians were publicly employed in the Gallic cantons. But, as may readily be conceived, Hellenism in southern Gaul acquired through the agency of the Romans the same character as in Italy; the distinctively Hellenic civilization gave place to the Latino-Greek mixed culture, which soon made proselytes here in great numbers. The "Gauls in the breeches", as the inhabitants of southern Gaul were called by way of contrast to the "Gauls in the tog" of northern Italy, were not indeed like the latter already completely Romanized, but they were even now very perceptibly distinguished from the "longhaired Gaul" of the northern regions still unsubdued. The semiculture becoming naturalized among them furnished, doubtless, materials enough for ridicule of their barbarous Latin, and people did not fail to suggest to any one suspected of Celtic descent his "relationship with the breeche"; but this bad Latin was yet sufficient to enable even the remote Allobroges to transact business with the Roman authorities, and even to give testimony in the Roman courts without an interpreter.
While the Celtic and Ligurian population of these regions was thus in the course of losing its nationality, and was languishing and pining withal under a political and economic oppression, the intolerable nature of which is sufficiently attested by their hopeless insurrections, the decline of the native population here went hand in hand with the naturalizing of the same higher culture which we find at this period in Italy. Aquae Sextiae and still more Narbo were considerable townships, which might probably be named by the side of Beneventum and Capua; and Massilia, the best organized, most free, most capable of self-defence, and most powerful of all the Greek cities dependent on Rome, under its rigorous aristocratic government to which the Roman conservatives probably pointed as the model of a good urban constitution, in possession of an important territory which had been considerably enlarged by the Romans and of an extensive trade, stood by the side of those Latin towns as Rhegium and Neapolis stood in Italy by the side of Beneventum and Capua.
Matters wore a different aspect, when one crossed the Roman frontier. The great Celtic nation, which in the southern districts already began to be crushed by the Italian immigration, still moved to the north of the Cevennes in its time-hallowed freedom. It is not the first time that we meet it: the Italians had already fought with the offsets and advanced posts of this vast stock on the Tiber and on the Po, in the mountains of Castile and Carinthia, and even in the heart of Asia Minor; but it was here that the main stock was first assailed at its very core by their attacks. The Celtic race had on its settlement in central Europe diffused itself chiefly over the rich river-valleys and the pleasant hill-country of the present France, including the western districts of Germany and Switzerland, and from thence had occupied at least the southern part of England, perhaps even at this time all Great Britain and Ireland[10]; it formed here more than anywhere else a broad, geographically compact, mass of peoples. In spite of the differences in language and manners which naturally were to be found within this wide territory, a close mutual intercourse, an innate sense of fellowship, seems to have knit together the tribes from the Rhone and Garonne to the Rhine and the Thames; whereas, although these doubtless were in a certain measure locally connected with the Celts in Spain and in the modern Austria, the mighty mountain barriers of the Pyrenees and the Alps on the one hand, and the encroachments of the Romans and the Germans which also operated here on the other, interrupted the intercourse and the intrinsic connection of the cognate peoples far otherwise than the narrow arm of the sea interrupted the relations of the continental and the British Celts. Unhappily we are not permitted to trace stage by stage the history of the internal development of this remarkable people in these its chief seats; we must be content with presenting at least some outline of its historical culture and political condition, as it here meets us in the time of Caesar.
2. IV. IX. Spain.
3. V. I. Renewed Outbreak of the Spanish Insurrection.
4. V. I. Pompeius in Gaul.
5. V. I. Indefinite and Perilous Character of the Sertorian War.
6. V. V. Conviction and Arrest of the Conspirators in the Capital.
7. V. I. Pompeius Puts and End to the Insurrection.
8. IV. II. Scipio Aemilianus.
9. There was found, for instance, at Vaison in the Vocontian canton an inscription written in the Celtic language with the ordinary Greek alphabet. It runs thus:
10. An immigration of Belgic Celts to Britain continuing for a considerable time seems indicated by the names of English tribes on both banks of the Thames borrowed from Belgic cantons; such as the Atrebates, the Belgae, and even the Britanni themselves, which word appears to have been transferred from the Brittones settled on the Somme below Amiens first to an English canton and then to the whole island. The English gold coinage was also derived from the Belgic and originally identical with it.