Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Map 1 Modern regions and river names
- Map 2 Provincial boundaries c. ad 100
- Map 3 Major peoples of Roman Gaul
- 1 On Romanization
- 2 Roman power and the Gauls
- 3 The civilizing ethos
- 4 Mapping cultural change
- 5 Urbanizing the Gauls
- 6 The culture of the countryside
- 7 Consuming Rome
- 8 Keeping faith?
- 9 Being Roman in Gaul
- List of works cited
- Index
9 - Being Roman in Gaul
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Map 1 Modern regions and river names
- Map 2 Provincial boundaries c. ad 100
- Map 3 Major peoples of Roman Gaul
- 1 On Romanization
- 2 Roman power and the Gauls
- 3 The civilizing ethos
- 4 Mapping cultural change
- 5 Urbanizing the Gauls
- 6 The culture of the countryside
- 7 Consuming Rome
- 8 Keeping faith?
- 9 Being Roman in Gaul
- List of works cited
- Index
Summary
Becoming Roman
The culture of Roman Gaul had its origin in a single historical moment, a formative period shared with other provincial cultures in the East and the West, itself one aspect of a much broader reconfiguration of Roman power and culture. That formative period lasted a short century that spanned the turn of the millenia and centred around the principate of Augustus, although the shift to autocracy was only one component of these transformations. The life and manners of the south of Gaul, conquered at the end of the second century bc, were thus transformed at much the same time as those of the interior which Caesar added to the Roman empire almost seventy years later. Naturally it took the Gauls some time to satisfy the new cultural aspirations learnt in that period. The technology gap was formidable, and the cost of building a new civilization ruinous. But little by little imported wine and marble were replaced by local products, and stop-gap solutions like wooden fora and imitation sigillata were replaced with the real thing. Eventually, distinctively Gallo-Roman cultural forms appeared, some, like villae and fana, the results of Mediterranean technology applied to traditional structures, others simply local creations, like Gallo-Roman theatre-amphitheatres and the Jupiter columns of the north-east, that developed within the increasingly loose complex that formed Roman imperial culture. That increasing looseness is also evident in the appearance of regional traditions in everything from burial rites to ceramic tablewares.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Becoming RomanThe Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul, pp. 238 - 249Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998