The Historians' History of the World 06

The art and literature which flourished in this soil during the days of empire are, with insignificant exceptions, as Greek in form and substance as in the preceding centuries. In the great centres of culture in the East, in Antioch and Alexandria, the Roman government and the Roman army have left visible traces, but there is nothing to lead us to suppose that they profoundly affected, far less metamorphosed, the Græco-Oriental character of those cities. Ephesus, the capital of Asia and the seat of the Roman government, was no more Romanised than Ancyra or Pergamus. The only exception is Berytus, “the Latin island in the sea of Oriental Hellenism”; there, in the Colonia Julia Augusta Felix, where the colonists were Roman legionaries, grew up the famous school of jurisprudence, where Ulpian, the great jurist of Syrian descent, may have had his training; a school which ministered abundant material to the editors of the Codex Theodosianus, and whence professors were summoned by Justinian to co-operate with him in the compilation of the code which cast Roman law into its final shape. In general, the Roman Empire received much from the East both of good and evil, but gave it practically no fresh intellectual impulse; its chief contribution to Græco-Oriental civilisation was the establishment of order, the guarantee of personal safety, and the advancement of material prosperity.

ROMAN INFLUENCE IN THE WEST

The case was very different in the West, where Rome was called upon to accomplish a great civilising mission, and where the ground had been prepared for her in very few places by an indigenous civilisation. In the south of Gaul, indeed, the Greek colony of Massilia had for six centuries been spreading the Greek language and character, Greek coinage and customs, by means of its factories, which extended as far as to Spain, and a home had thus been won for Hellenism on this favoured coast, as in southern Italy. Cæsar, with the far-seeing policy that no sentimental considerations were suffered to confuse, was the first to break the dominion of the Greek city, which had so long been in close alliance with Rome, and so to point the way to the systematic Romanisation of southern Gaul.

The Phœnician and Iberian civilisation of Africa and Spain was even less capable of withstanding the irresistible advance of Rome. The names of cities and individuals have indeed survived there as witnesses to the past, and the Phœnician language held its ground in private life for centuries, but the Roman language and Roman customs made a conquest of both Africa and Spain in the course of the period of imperial rule. The same holds good, and in the same degree, of Dalmatia and Noricum, less decidedly of Rætia and the Alpine provinces. In Mœsia, where a vigorous Greek civilisation had made itself at home in the trading stations on the Black Sea, the process of Romanisation was not completely successful, and in the northeastern parts of Pannonia it was never seriously taken in hand. But even Dacia, though occupied at so late a date, and though the colonists settled there after the extermination or expulsion of its previous inhabitants were not Italians, but settlers from the most diverse parts of the Roman Empire, was permeated with Roman civilisation to an extent which is positively astonishing under the circumstances.

In Britain alone the Romanising process proved altogether futile, in spite of the exertions of Agricola, and the country remained permanently a great military camp, in which the development of town life never advanced beyond the rudimentary stage. Even in Gaul, which had been conquered by Cæsar, it proceeded with varying success in the various parts of the country, making most headway in Aquitaine, though not till late, and less even in middle Gaul, where the Roman colony of Lugdunum, the metropolis of the three Gallic provinces, alone reflected the image of Rome in the north. But even at Augustodunum (Autun), which was a centre of learning in the early days of the empire no less than at the point of transition from the third century to the fourth, Roman civilisation reached the lower ranks of the population as little as in other parts of Gaul. Moreover, in the Gallic provinces, which were conquered by Cæsar but not organised by his far-seeing political genius, the old civitates and pagi were not superseded, as in the Narbonensis, by the Italian municipal system, and the Celtic language did not wholly die out in middle Gaul till the time of the Franks.

The civilisation of western Belgica was even more meagre; while in the eastern portions of the country, in the fertile valleys of the Moselle and Saar, thickly studded with villas, we come upon a curious mixed Gallico-Roman civilisation of which the graceful descriptions of Ausonius and the lifelike sculptures of the Igel column, and the Neumagen bas-relief afford us a lively picture.