United States or South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This work of Theophrastus became the great authority for all subsequent writers on this question. ATHENÆUS quotes it , and adds the further testimony of POLYBIUS, that in Gallia Narbonensis fish are similarly dug out of the ground. STRABO repeats the story , and the Greek naturalists one and all received the statement as founded on reliable authority. Not so the Romans.
Roman bricks were exported to all the shores of the Mediterranean; they have been found in the Riviera, on the coasts of Benetia, of Narbonensis, of Spain and Africa, and in the island of Sardinia. The brick-making business must have been very remunerative, if we judge from the rank and wealth of many personages who had an interest in it.
The province so named, possessed at the time by the Romans, was called "Narbonensis," a country comparatively insignificant, running from the Alps to the Pyrenees along the Mediterranean. The Gaul or Gallia of which Cæsar speaks when, in the opening words of his Commentary, he tells us that it was divided into three parts, was altogether beyond the Roman province which was assigned to him.
To them this region, although ultimately included in the larger Narbonensis, always was simply Provincia the Province: a distinguishing indistinction which exalted it above all the other dependencies of Rome. Constantine, indeed, was for fixing the very seat of the Empire here; and he did build, and for a time live in, the palace at Arles of which a stately fragment still remains.
The private arrangement, however, in order that they should not be thought to be appropriating the entire sovereignty, was that both Libyas, Sardinia, and Sicily should be given to Caesar, all of Spain and Gallia Narbonensis to Lepidus, and the rest of Gaul south and north of the Alps to Antony to rule.
After the battle of Vouillé he had sent his eldest son, Theodoric, in command of a division, with orders to cross Central Gaul from west to east, to go and join the Burgundians of Gondebaud, who had promised his assistance, and in conjunction with them to attack the Visigoths on the banks of the Rhone and in Narbonensis.
No later than A.D. 412 two German nations, the Visigoths and the Burgundians, took their stand definitively in Gaul, and founded there two new kingdoms: the Visigoths, under their kings Ataulph and Wallia, in Aquitania and Narbonensis; the Burgundians, under their kings Gundichaire and Gundioch, in Lyonnais, from the southern point of Alsatia right into Provence, along the two banks of the Saône and the left bank of the Rhone, and also in Switzerland.
Salluvii, Sallyes, a people of Gallia Narbonensis, about where Aix now is Savus, the Save, a large river which rises in Upper Carniola, and falls into the Danube at Belgrade Scaeva, one of Caesar's centurions, displays remarkable valour, C. iii. 5 3; his shield is pierced in two hundred and thirty places Its whole course does not exceed a hundred and twenty miles. G. vi. 33
Without doubt, one of the greatest works of Rome was the conquest and Romanisation of Gaul: indeed that conquest and Romanisation of Gaul is the beginning of European civilisation; for before the Græco-Latin civilisation reached the Rhine over the ways opened by the Roman sword, the continent of Europe had centres of civilisation on the coast or in its projecting extremities, like Italy, Bætica, Narbonensis; but the interior was still entirely in the power of a turbulent and restless barbarism, like the African continent to-day.
But just there an inscription has come to light, the only one of its kind in the Roman world, which proves that one at least of the 'coloniae' of Gallia Narbonensis was laid out in rectangular oblong plots. It is clear enough that this town-plan was one of the forms through which the Italian civilization diffused itself over the western provinces.
Word Of The Day