14 - Gaul

Summary

Camille Jullian, the greatest historian of Roman Gaul, wrote in 1920 of the reign of Vespasian, ‘Silence fell everywhere, a good omen for a new age of toil and energy.’ In fact, apart from a few brief references in the Historia Augusta to Hadrian's travels there in a.d. 121–2, the only texts which mention the Gallic provinces between a.d. 70 and 192 deal with just two events; the persecution of the Christians of Lyons in 177, and the banditry of Maternus and his followers in the reign of Commodus. This is little enough. The creation of the Germanies in the course of Domitian's provincial reorganization did, to be sure, place the Gallic provinces well behind the frontier zone, and so protected them from becoming involved in Rome's defence strategy, in the development of the limes, or in the disturbances which took place in that region in Marcus Aurelius' reign. At all events, the Tres Galliae and Narbonensis remained for over a hundred and twenty years outside the mainstream of political history. In the absence of texts, we are dependent for evidence on history's auxiliary disciplines, that is to say epigraphy and archaeology. It is important not to forget their limitations.

Latin inscriptions are very unevenly distributed. Not only do more than half of them come from Narbonensis, but many of the cities and small towns of the Tres Galliae have produced barely twenty or thirty examples. What hope is there of recovering worthwhile information from samples of such low statistical significance? Besides, these inscriptions are heavily biased towards official acts such as dedications, and so are representative of only the uppermost social strata.