In fact, Trier and its environs have thrown up a whole host of villas, many only marginally less grand (the majority were of private, not imperial, construction), strung out in desirable locations along the river banks. All combined, in addition to the barns and storage facilities appropriate to working estates, the classic mixture of public and private rooms held to be necessary for living a civilized Roman life in the countryside: bath suite, audience hall, mosaics and central heating, plus shady porticoed courtyards, elegant gardens and fountains. And, again, there is nothing exceptional in the fact that such gems of Roman elegance should be found this far outside Italy. The proximity of Trier and the spending power of the imperial court undoubtedly made the fourth-century villas of the Moselle region larger and more magnificent than they might otherwise have been. But villas weren’t a new phenomenon here. They had begun to appear by AD 100, and had been a constant feature ever since. The only standard Italo-Roman practice that the northern ones didn’t emulate, because of disparities in rainfall and temperature, was the installation of an open roof in the middle the house to feed a pool of cooling water. And, just as outside Trier, Roman villas dotted the countryside around all the other new Roman towns, in areas that had fallen under imperial control. There were variations in their density, in the speed with which they appeared, and in grandeur. In Britain – the mid-first-century palace of Fishbourne apart – villas began a little later and developed more slowly. In the fourth century, after 200 years during which black and white geometric patterns had been the norm, full-colour picture mosaics finally reached the provinces north of the Channel. Countryside and town alike had evolved to conform with standard Roman patterns in the four centuries separating Caesar from Symmachus.41
The transformation extended to people as well as to buildings. Symmachus made, and exploited, many contacts during his year at court in Trier, and the most important among them was a fellow specialist in Latin language and literature, Decimius Magnus Ausonius, perhaps as much as thirty years older than Symmachus. After a distinguished academic career, he was engaged by the emperor Valentinian to act as tutor for his son, the future emperor Gratian. Symmachus’ initial letter of approach to Ausonius, couched in highly flattering terms, has recently been identified among the anonymous letters in the collection.42 Two points of particular interest emerge. First, a perceived superiority in Latin could override social inferiority. Ausonius, though numbered among the educated Roman elite, came from nothing like so distinguished a background as Symmachus. Second, and for present purposes much more important, Ausonius had made his name as a self-employed teacher of Latin rhetoric operating under the auspices of the university of Bordeaux, near the Atlantic coast of Gaul. By the fourth century, Bordeaux had emerged as one of the major centres of Latin excellence in the Empire. Not only does this show us expertise in Latin flourishing well beyond the confines of Italy, but Ausonius himself was not from Rome, nor even from Italy, but of Gallic background.43 Yet here we have one of the blue-blooded Romans of Rome approaching him with deference, and seeking his good graces in matters to do with Latin literature. Furthermore, in his opening epistolary gambit, Symmachus had been able to use the fact that he himself had been taught Latin rhetoric in Rome by a tutor from Gaul.
The case of Ausonius demonstrates, again, how far the Roman world had changed. Like the town and the villas of Trier, he is representative of broad patterns of transformation. In Caesar’s day there were certainly Gauls who had a good knowledge of Latin, especially in the towns of Gallia Narbonensis, the Roman province of Mediterranean Gaul. But the idea that a Rome-trained Latin expert of senatorial status might approach a Gaul as his superior in the Latin tradition could only have struck Caesar as preposterous.
Shortly after the establishment of the Empire, the two imperial languages – Latin in the west supplemented to some extent by Greek in the east – began to be acquired in addition to their native tongues by Rome’s new subjects, and particularly by those from wealthier backgrounds. This happened at first on a fairly ad hoc basis, but, remarkably quickly, Latin grammarians started to operate in many of the towns of the Empire. Schools had already been set up in Autun in central France – the original hometown of Ausonius’ family – by AD 21. And once such schools were in operation, the same kind of intensive training in language and literature was being offered throughout the Empire. By the fourth century, a good Latin education at the hands of a grammarian could be had anywhere. The language of the surviving letters of St Patrick, from a fairly minor landowning family in northwest Britain, shows that you could still get such an education at that extreme point of the Empire as late as AD 400, while North Africa, at another, was famous for its educational tradition, producing in St Augustine of Hippo one of the best-educated late Romans of all. Vergil had triumphed over all his non-Latin, pre-Roman cultural rivals.
This brings us face to face with the most fundamental change of all, the dimension of imperial evolution that underlies all the others: the creation of Roman rural and urban landscapes outside of Italy, and the widening of political community that sidelined Rome and her Senate. Latin language and literature spread across the Roman world because people who had originally been conquered by Caesar’s legions came to buy into the Roman ethos and adopt it as their own. This was far more than learning a little Latin for pragmatic reasons, like selling the odd cow or pig to a conquering Roman soldier (though this certainly also happened). Accepting the grammarian and the kind of education he offered meant accepting the whole value system which, as we have seen, reckoned that only this kind of education could create properly developed – and therefore superior – human beings.
It was the same process of buying into Roman values that created Roman towns and villas in those parts of the Empire where such phenomena had been completely unknown before the arrival of the legions. All the models for Trier’s urban life originated in the Mediterranean, and in a number of newly conquered territories settlements of Roman veterans were established, to give the natives a close-up view of Roman urban life as led by ‘proper’ Romans. Roman Trier, however, had different origins. The official title of the city (whose modern French name is Trèves) gives the game away: Augusta Treverorum, ‘Augusta of the Treveri’. This indicates that the city had been legally constituted under the emperor Augustus for the tribesmen of the Treveri – the group, of course, that had produced Indutiomarus, ultimately responsible for the deaths of Cotta and his legionaries. Firstand second-century Trier was built by members of the Treveri who wanted their own Roman city. Its extensive corpus of dedicatory inscriptions confirms the point, as for so many other Roman cities of the type. The majority of such cities’ public buildings were financed by local donations and subscriptions. Such was their enthusiasm for showing how Roman they were that former (Gallic, British, Iberian, whatever) tribesmen would borrow heavily from Italian moneylenders to fund their projects, and occasionally got themselves into severe financial trouble. The first Roman settlement at Trier may have been a military fort, but the Roman city of Trier, like the other towns of the Empire, was built not by immigrants from Italy but by the indigenous people. From the second century onwards, likewise it is impossible to tell a villa built by an Italian Roman from a villa built by a provincial.
The buildings characteristic of a Roman town – the baths, the temples, the council house, the amphitheatre – were all purpose-built spaces for particular functions and events, and you didn’t bother to build them unless you intended to hold those events. Roman bathing was public, the religious cults involved ceremonies in which the entire urban population participated, the council house and its courtyard was the place to debate local issues, the forum in every sense for local selfgovernment. And in the Roman ideology of civilization, descended directly from that of the classical Greeks, local self-government was seen to be an important vehicle for generating civilized human beings. In the act of debating local issues in front of one’s discerning peers, it was held, rational faculties were developed to
a level that would otherwise have been impossible.44 Thus, the founding of a Roman town did not just consist in putting up an identikit collection of Roman buildings, but also in reforming local political life after a very particular, Roman pattern.
The exact nature of these reforms has been illustrated by a series of stunning finds from the southern coastal hinterland of Mediterranean Spain. After the Roman conquest of this region, a number of local communities here too reconstituted themselves over time as Roman towns, but, for some reason, they chose to inscribe their new constitutions on bronze tablets. The most complete set of these was found in the spring of 1981 on an obscure hill called Molino del Postero in the province of Seville. The finds originally comprised ten bronze tablets about 58 centimetres high by 90 wide, on which was inscribed – in three columns per tablet – the Lex Irnitana: the constitution of the Roman town of Irni. Comparing this set of tablets with extant fragments from other places has shown that there was one basic constitution, composed in Rome, which all these towns adopted, changing just a few of the details to suit their own circumstances. The laws are massively detailed; one composite text created by combining fragments from different settlements runs to eighteen dense pages in its English translation.45 Amongst other things, the laws laid down who should qualify for the local council, and how the magistrates (executive officers, normally duumviri, ‘two men’) should be chosen from it; which legal cases could be handled locally, and how financial affairs were to be managed and audited. It was only such details as the number of councillors appointed that varied from place to place, according to the size and wealth of the community. Likewise with that very particular form of country dwelling, the villa: the design reflected canonical Graeco-Roman notions of how to live a civilized life out of town.46
Mediterranean values crept into life in the provinces in many other ways too. Roman religious cults insisted on separating the living from the dead, for instance, so that cemeteries for the new towns were never established inside urban boundaries. This custom quickly became part and parcel of the new model of urban living. Much more mundanely, the habit of turning staple grains into bread rather than porridge, with all the changes in cooking equipment and techniques that this required, likewise spread northwards with the adoption of Roman patterns of living.
The transformation of life in the conquered provinces thus led provincials everywhere to remake their lives after Roman patterns and value systems. Within a century or two of conquest, the whole of the Empire had become properly Roman. The old Ladybird Book of British History had a vivid picture of Roman Britain coming to an abrupt end in the fifth century with the legions marching off and the Roman names for places being superseded (a composite image of departing soldiers and broken signposts, as I recall it). But this is a mistaken view of what happened. By the late Empire, the Romans of Roman Britain were not immigrants from Italy but locals who had adopted the Roman lifestyle and everything that came with it. A bunch of legionaries departing the island would not bring Roman life to an end. Britain, as everywhere else between Hadrian’s Wall and the Euphrates, was no longer Roman merely by ‘occupation’.
Count Third-Class
SYMMACHUS EVENTUALLY turned homewards early in the year 369. He had seen the flourishing Romanness of the Moselle valley at first hand. The senatorial mission had completed its purpose, and he had been extensively entertained by the emperor and many of his notables. Carrying out successful embassies for your city was recorded as a distinction on your CV, and so it was with Symmachus, who also returned to Rome with a court title: at some point during the visit, Valentinian made him comes ordinis tertii – literally ‘count third-class’. The counts (comites) were an order of imperial companions created by the emperor Constantine primarily as an honorific mark of personal favour, although some real posts carried the title as well. All in all, it was a job well done, and Symmachus’ letters show how well he exploited in subsequent years the connections he had made at Valentinian’s court. Knowing so many of the great and the good meant that he was especially sought after by young men just finishing their higher education in Rome and seeking letters of introduction. The senator made a career out of obliging them.
Not the least important of his court contacts was the Gallic rhetor Ausonius. But preserved in their otherwise amicable correspondence is one discordant letter. Shortly after returning to Rome, Symmachus wrote to his friend:
Your Mosella – that poem which has immortalized a river in heavenly verse – flits from hand to hand [in Rome] and from bosom to bosom of many: I can only watch it gliding past. Please tell me, why did you choose to deny me part or share in that little book? You thought me either too uncultivated to be able to appreciate it, or at all events too grudging to praise it, and thereby have offered the greatest possible affront to my head or my heart.47
The Mosella survives and is generally reckoned Ausonius’ greatest work. It follows an established poetic tradition in using a major river as a vehicle on which to hang praise for an entire region. So, while the river itself comes in for extensive treatment, it is scarcely a poem about natural beauty at all, but about the deeper beauty that man’s interaction with the natural environment has created there: an appropriate vision for a society which, as we’ve seen, regarded all truly civilized qualities as the products of careful cultivation rather than of natural talent. After dwelling in a famous passage on all the fish in the river, Ausonius then pictures the valley as a whole:48
From the topmost ridge to the foot of the slope, the river-side is thickly planted with green vines. The people, happy in their toil, and the restless husbandmen are busy, now on the hill-top, now on the slope exchanging shouts in boisterous rivalry. Here the wayfarer tramping along the low-lying bank, and there the bargeman floating by, shout their rude jokes at the loitering vinedressers.
Amongst the Roman sculpture of Trier survives a beautifully carved wine barge on the Moselle, complete with rowers and casks.
Ausonius then moves on to the elegant villas that lined the river’s banks:
What need to mention their courtyards set beside lush meadows, or their neat roofs resting upon countless pillars? What of their baths, built low down on the edge of the bank? . . . But if a stranger were to arrive here from the shores of Cumae, he would believe that Euboean Baiae had bestowed on this region a miniature copy of its own delights: so great is the charm of its refinement and distinction, while its pleasures breed no excess.
Cumae and Baiae, the latter a renowned spa, were watering-holes of the Roman rich and famous on the Bay of Naples (both founded by Greek colonists from Euboea in the eighth century BC), so Ausonius was stressing that the Moselle could match the best that the rest of the Empire had to offer in terms of civilized Roman country life. Note too that, according to him, rural life around Trier had not slipped into the characteristic – from the Roman point of view – Greek vice of selfindulgence.
After our trip through the countryside, we reach the city of Trier itself:
I shall mention your peaceful peasantry, your skilful lawyers, and your powerful barristers, the great defence of the accused; those in whom the Council of the townsmen has seen its chief leaders and a Senate of its own, those whose famed eloquence in the schools of youth has raised them to the height of old Quintilian’s renown.
Quintilian (who was active about AD 35–95) was a famous lawyer who systematized many of the rules of rhetoric by which the educated Latin of Symmachus and Ausonius was defined.49 What Ausonius is telling us, of course, is that Trier was rich in those essential Roman virtues whose widespread adoption lay at the heart of the revolution we have been surveying: educated speech and morals, the rule of law, and local self-government by peers. In short, in its agriculture, in its country seats and in its capital city, the Moselle region was completely civilized in the proper Roman manner.
We don’t know for certain why Ausonius didn’t send Symmachus a copy of the Mosella, but I can hazard a guess. During his stay in the Rhine frontier r
egion, Symmachus gave a number of set-piece orations in front of the emperor and his court, of which fragments of three are preserved in the one surviving (damaged) manuscript of his speeches. The fragments present an interesting picture of Symmachus’ notion of how the city of Rome perceived the Rhine frontier. In Oration 1, he sums it up: ‘If you’re interested in letters, said Cicero, for Greek you go to Athens not Libya, and for Latin you go to Rome and not Sicily.’ Or, more generally: ‘Leaving the East to your undefeated brother [Valens], you [Valentinian] swiftly took the path to the semi-barbarian banks of the unsubdued Rhine . . . you revert to the old model of an Empire created for military endeavours.’
For Symmachus, Rome was the hub of Roman civilization as encapsulated in the Latin language, and it was the job of the ‘semibarbarian’ frontier provinces to protect it at all costs. One can well imagine what Valentinian’s court made of the stuck-up young senator who’d come north to lecture them on what a good job they were doing for Roman Romanness. I strongly suspect, therefore, that Ausonius didn’t send Symmachus a copy of the Mosella because it was a deliberate rebuttal of the attitude Symmachus had adopted in his year at the ‘front’. Trier and its environs were not, as Symmachus would have it, semi-barbarian, but the domain of real Roman civilization. It is also particularly striking that Ausonius compared the villas on the banks of the Moselle with those of the resort of Baiae – Symmachus’ letters regularly dwell on the particular pleasures of one of his own houses there.50 He must have driven the locals of Trier to distraction with his praise of the beauties of Baiae. If Ausonius did decide to have some fun at his expense, once he had safely departed for Rome, then the passage may also be accusing Symmachus himself, and all the other Roman bigwigs whose names no doubt peppered his conversation, of Greek self-indulgence.
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History Page 5