Pépite

France · The foundations

Roman Gaul, five centuries under our feet

Between Vercingetorix and Clovis lie five centuries of towns, roads and citizens. Roman Gaul never vanished: it is under your feet, and every building site brings a piece of it back up.

The start of the lesson

The next 6 cards, the four questions and the review are in the app.

Vercingetorix loses, turn the page, here comes Clovis. In between, a gap: five centuries nobody tells. In 52 BC, Gaul is not a country — some sixty peoples, fortified towns, roads, and a south Roman since 120 BC.

0 years
from Caesar’s conquest to Clovis
From 52 BC to AD 486, the year Clovis beats Syagrius, a Roman general, at Soissons. For scale: from Joan of Arc to you is barely sixty years more.
Lugdunum, capital of the GaulsEvery 1 August

Delegates from sixty cités climb up to defend their interests before Rome.

How do you hold sixty peoples? Not a legion per village: scissors. Augustus has the inhabitants counted, then cuts four provinces — Narbonensis, Aquitania, Lugdunensis, Belgica — and inside them some sixty cités. No longer a conquest: an administration.

Rome pushes, and the Gaulish elites with it. Every chief town gets its set of monuments: a straight grid, two main streets crossing, and at the crossroads the forum. The same kit everywhere? Almost — depending on the territory, it goes fast or it drags.

  • The forum and the temples
    At the crossing of the two main axes, the cardo and the decumanus: the forum, the offices, and the temples where the emperor is honoured.
  • The shows
    A theatre, an amphitheatre — and a local invention, the two-in-one: the theatre-amphitheatre, as at Lutèce.
  • Water
    Aqueducts, fountains, sewers, baths: water comes in, moves around, goes out. It becomes everybody’s business.
  • Roads
    New roads, Gaulish tracks rebuilt, from the towns out to the villae.

The next 6 cards, the four questions and the review are in the app.

What you will be able to answer

  • In AD 48, what do the notables of the Gaule chevelue come to Rome to ask for?
  • The Table claudienne preserves Claudius’s speech in full.
  • Put these four steps in order.
  • In Lyon, on place Benoît-Crépu, the ___ bank sleeps under the medieval bank and the 19th-century infill.

Sources

Every date, every figure and every quote in this lesson was verified in these sources.

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