208
ARBIVAL OF VESPASIAN IN ROME.
on his personal enemies, rather than to punish any real offences.
You may read all these occurrences in Tacitus1, whose account
of them is the most perfect that one can wish for ; but, unfor-
tunately, it does not extend beyond the first year of Vespasian’s
reign. Vespasian had much in his character that was good, but
the moral depravation was as great among his partizaɪis as
among those of Vitellius; just as, during the latter period of
the Thirty-Years’ war, when the Swedish generals, such as
Banner and Torstenson, were no better than the French com-
manders or those of the imperial armies. The sad deeds of
those small men are excellently described by Tacitus, who does
not make any one of them his hero; whereas many historians
allow themselves to be led away by the interest they take in a
particular person.
Vespasian did not arrive at Rome till about the end of the
summer a.d. 70: though Vitellius had been killed in the pre-
vious December, a circumstance which was not without unfor-
tunate consequences. Rome was governed, during that time,
by a dissolute and tyrannical young man; for Domitianalready
displayed the vices and passions which characterise his later
years. Some of the senators, especially Helvidius Priscus, a
man who was ill-suited to the age in which he lived, allowed
themselves to be drawn into an improper opposition to the
government®, which was unfortunate, no less for them and for
Vespasian, than for the empire.
While the armies were advancing from the frontiers to Italy,
a state of feeling became developed in Gaul, of which some
symptoms had appeared as early as the reign of Tiberius, when
the Aedui had attempted a perfectly senseless revolt under
Julius Sacrovir. What Gaul wanted was perfectly impractica-
ble. Traces of this national Gallic feeling, which was now
spreading, may be discerned even in the insurrection of Julius
Vindex. People may praise Virginius Rufus as much as they
like; but J believe that the thought of murdering Vindex arose
from the knowledge that he was a Gaul, which places the act
in a morally bad light. His death, far from pacifying the
national feeling of the Gauls, was a fresh stimulus to it. The
prosperity of Gaul must have been increasing ever since the
time of Julius Caesar, especially in the south, as we may gather
from Pliny’s account of Gallia Narbonensis; and the same was
l Hist iii. 86, ɪv. I, foil. 2 Tacitus, Hist. iv. 5, foil.
CONDITION OF GAUL.
209
probably the case in the northern parts of the country. We
have certainly no adequate notion of the state of Gaul under
the Romans; for all our knowledge of it is confined to what
we learn from Strabo and Pliny, who speak only of single
cioitates, small towns not being mentioned at all; and the in-
ternal condition of the country is nowhere described. In his-
tory, Gaul is not mentioned, except by Tacitus at the beginning
of the insurrection of Claudius Civilis. After that event, it
a"ain disappears from history until the end of the third century,
when all we learn of it is contained in the meagre accounts of
the writers of the “ Historia Augusta,” and the Itineraries,
which are mostly confined to a few places on some high roads.
Hence D’Anville’s map of Gaul, which is otherwise most ex-
cellent, looks like a map of a country which has only just re-
ceived some settlements, and is beginning to be brought into
cultivation.3 But this is the consequence merely of the scanti-
ness of our information. Gau], under the Romans, was a well-
cultivated country, Withaverylargepopulation; for, in many
parts of France, we find most extensive ruins of towns which
we cannot identify, except in a few instances by means of
Itineraries. For instance, splendid ruins of a town with theatres
and the like, were laid open a short time ago, in the neighbour-
hood of Montpellier; and there is only one Itinerary in which
we find a badly-written name that may be applied to the place.
Many accidental discoveries, which have been made in Valen-
ciennes and Normandy, shew that there once existed in them
towns of great extent and large population. In order to obtain
a somewhat complete geography of Gaul, the documents of the
Merovingian and Carlovingian periods ought to be carefully
studied ; and any one who would undertake such a work, would
be well rewarded for his trouble. The towns, of which we now
find the ruins, were certainly not built after the period of the
Roman dominion; that was an age of destruction. They must
have been founded at a much earlier time; and their names, so
far as we can discover them, are ancient Latin or Gallic. Pre-
viously to the time of Julius Caesar, the prosperity of Gaul had
been nearly destroyed in the Cimbrian war ; and in the wars of
Caesar, the country was again fearfully ravaged. But after them
3 Hismaps Ofeasterncountries are quite different; for Ilierehepossessed a
very minute knowledge of some districts, from the Macedonian time down to
the fifth and sixth century; whence the maps of Asia Minor and Syria are full
of to Wij s.—N.
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