Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge Read Online Free PDF Page A

towns walled in square-cut stone, crowned with towers, containing rectangular houses arranged in paved streets. Further inland were earthen forts of Celtic tradition, enclosing settlements of thatched roundhouses; some crowning hills, spurs or other defensible positions. To meet the threat of Roman expansion, many had been refurbished with massively wide, dry-stone ramparts, braced with long beams. These impressive works of earth or stone were most numerous in a long arc, from western and central Gaul, round the north of the Alps, to the middle Danube; with clusters on the Seine and Somme, as well as in Britanny and Britain. The Belgic Gauls, whose way of life was largely pastoral, proved to be among Rome’s toughest resisters. They favoured oval enclosures in low-lying situations, fitted into river bends or protected by marsh.
    Prompted by Caesar, who called all larger, northern European defended settlements oppida (towns), archaeologists sometimes describe the 2nd and 1st centuries BC as the period of the ‘ oppidum culture’, signifying acceptance of the widespread urbanization then emerging in barbarian Europe. This phenomenon is an important measure of advance; and there can be little doubt that the major centres, particularly the tribal capitals, contained those skills and services deserving the name of town; such as trade and manufacture, organization and administration. Some would become Roman (and in due course modern) cities. The army’s practice of deductio in plana, the ‘leading down’ of hostile tribes to resettlement areas ‘on the plane’, meant that Roman cities would tend to be founded on flat land, sometimes in proximity to former forts.
    On the Continent, the definitive phase of Celtic prehistory known as La Tène (after a site on Lake Neuchâtel) was now in flower. Society was dominated by military families. ‘The common people’, wrote Caesar, ‘are regarded as little more than slaves.’ 12 Control of trade with the Roman world enhanced princely power and gave spur to the arts. Bards were employed to celebrate the feats of the mighty. Artistry, decorative metalwork and jewellery were superb. Carpentry was advanced. Carts, agricultural vehicles and (in Britain) splendid war chariots were constructed; and a network of unpaved roads and inland waterways developed to assist trade. There were substantial corn surpluses. Tribal coinages were minted. By the eve of conquest, descent from the forts and establishment of towns in road, waterway or seaport locations suggests the triumph of trade over fear. Those strongholds would, however, be reoccupied as trouble approached. Mimicking Rome, the Gauls had begun to elect annual magistrates, and in the face of Roman invasion the tribes proved capable of forming alliances with unified leadership and concerted action. There is no knowing how far this swiftly advancing civilization might have gone had not Rome’s shadow fallen across its formative years. Certainly modernity would not classify the Celts as ‘barbarian’ at all, but rather as an emergent group of nation states, some of which had already left the equivalent of what might today be described as a Third World condition.

    Attribution of the term ‘civilized’ to the Iron Age must be qualified by the fact of human sacrifice, forbidden under Roman law but familiar to all who lived outside the empire’s European frontiers. In the Celtic instance we have a description by the poet Lucan of a shrine near Marseilles, demolished by Caesar in 49 BC . Though poetic licence and sensational reporting must be allowed for, it indicates the luckless though perhaps occasional fate of captives:
    A grove there was, untouched since ancient time,
    Whose overarching boughs made roof of gloom
    And chill shadow. The gods with gory rites
    Were worshipped, altars heaped with grisly
    Relics and every tree trunk blotched with human
    Blood. Here were gods’