The Provinces of the Roman Empire 46

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 46

Beyond the limit of fixed settlement herewith indicated,--the line of

frontier tolls and of frontier posts--and in various non-civilised

districts enclosed by it, the land in the two Mauretanias during the

Roman times remained doubtless with the natives, but they came under

Roman supremacy; there would be claimed from them, as far as possible,

taxes and war-services, but the regular forms of taxation and of levy

would not be applied in their case. For example, the tribe of Zimizes,

which was settled on the rocky coast to the west of Igilgili (Jijeli)

in eastern Mauretania, and so in the heart of the domain of the Roman

power, had assigned to it a fortress designed to cover the town of

Igilgili, to be occupied on such a footing that the troops were not

allowed to pass beyond the radius of 500 paces round the fort.[284]

They thus employed these subject Berbers in the Roman interest, but did

not organise them in the Roman fashion, and hence did not treat them

as soldiers of the imperial army. Even beyond their own province the

irregulars from Mauretania were employed in great numbers, particularly

as horsemen in the later period,[285] while the same did not hold of

the Numidians.

 

How far the field of the Roman power went beyond the Roman towns and

garrisons and the end of the imperial roads, we are not able to say.

The broad steppe-land round the salt-lakes to the west of Lambaesis,

the mountain-region from Tlemsen till towards Fez, including the coast

of the Riff, the fine corn-country on the Atlantic Ocean southward

from Sala as far as the high Atlas, the civilisation of which in the

flourishing time of the Arabs vied with the Andalusian, lastly, the

Atlas range in the south of Algeria and Morocco and its southern

slopes, which afforded for pastoral people abundant provision in the

alternation of mountain and steppe pastures, and developed the most

luxuriant fertility in the numerous oases--all these regions remained

essentially untouched by the Roman civilisation; but from this it does

not follow that they were in the Roman time independent, and still

less that they were not at least reckoned as belonging to the imperial

domain. Tradition gives us but slight information in this respect. We

have already mentioned (p. 313) that the proconsuls of Africa helped to

make the Gaetulians--that is, the tribes in southern Algeria--subject

to king Juba; and the latter constructed purple dyeworks at Madeira

(p. 338, note). After the end of the Mauretanian dynasty and the

introduction of the immediate Roman administration, Suetonius Paullinus

crossed, as the first Roman general, the Atlas (p. 313), and carried

his arms as far as the desert-river Ger, which still bears the same

name, in the south-east of Morocco. His successor, Gnaeus Hosidius

Geta, continued this enterprise, and emphatically defeated the leader

of the Mauri Salabus. Subsequently several enterprising governors of

the Mauretanian provinces traversed these remote regions, and the

same holds true of the Numidian, under whose command, not under the

Mauretanian, was placed the frontier-range stretching southward behind

the province of Caesarea;[286] yet nothing is mentioned from later

times of war-expeditions proper in the south of Mauretania or Numidia.

The Romans can scarcely have taken over the empire of the Mauretanian

kings in quite the same extent as these had possessed it; but yet the

expeditions that were undertaken after the annexation of the country

were probably not without lasting consequences. At least a portion

of the Gaetulians submitted, as the auxiliary troops levied there

prove, even to the regular conscription during the imperial period;

and, if the native tribes in the south of the Roman provinces had

given serious trouble to the Romans, the traces of it would not have

been wholly wanting.[287] Probably the whole south as far as the great

desert passed as imperial land,[288] and even the effective dependence

extended far beyond the domain of Roman civilisation, which, it is

true, does not exclude frequent levying of contributions and pillaging

raids on the one side or the other.

 

[Sidenote: Incursions of the Moors into Spain.]

 

[Sidenote: Quinquegentiani.]

 

The pacified territory experienced attack, properly so called, chiefly

from the inhabitants of the shore settled around and along the Riff,

the Mazices, and the Baquates; and this indeed took place, as a rule,

by sea, and was directed chiefly against the Spanish coast (I. 67).

Accounts of inroads of the Moors into Baetica run through the whole

imperial period,[289] and show that the Romans, in consequence of the

absence of energetic offensive, found themselves here permanently

on a defensive, which indeed did not involve a vital danger for the

empire, but yet brought constant insecurity and often sore harm over

rich and peaceful regions. The civilised territories of Africa appear

to have suffered less under the Moorish attacks, probably because the

headquarters of Numidia, immediately on the Mauretanian frontier, and

the strong garrisons on the west side of the Aures, did their duty. But

on the collapse of the imperial power in the third century the invasion

here also began; the feud of Five Peoples, as it was called, which

broke out about the time of Gallienus, and on account of which twenty

years later the emperor Maximianus went personally to Africa, arose

from the tribes beyond the Shott on the Numido-Mauretanian frontier,

and affected particularly the towns of Eastern Mauretania and of

Western Numidia, such as Auzia and Mileu.[290]

 

[Sidenote: Continuance of the Berber language.]

 

We come to the internal organisation of the country. In respect of

language, that which belonged properly to the people was treated

like the Celtic in Gaul and the Iberian in Spain; here in Africa all

the more, as the earlier foreign rule had already set the example in

that respect, and certainly no Roman understood this popular idiom.

The Berber tribes had not merely a national language, but also a

national writing (p. 305); but never, so far as we see, was use made

of it in official intercourse, at least it was never put upon the

coins. Even the native Berber dynasties formed no exception to this,

whether because in their kingdoms the more considerable towns were

more Phoenician than Libyan, or because the Phoenician civilisation

prevailed so far generally. The language was written indeed also

under Roman rule, in fact most of the Berber votive or sepulchral

inscriptions proceed certainly from the imperial period; but their

rarity proves that it attained only to limited written use in the

sphere of the Roman rule. It maintained itself as a popular language

above all naturally in the districts, to which the Romans came little

or not at all, as in the Sahara, in the mountains of the Riff of

Morocco, in the two Kabylias; but even the fertile and early cultivated

island of the Tripolis, Girba (Jerba), the seat of the Carthaginian

purple manufacture, still at the present day speaks Libyan. Taken on

the whole, the old popular idiom in Africa defended itself better than

among the Celts and the Iberians.

 

[Sidenote: Continuance of the Phoenician language.]

 

The language which prevailed in North Africa, when it became Roman,

was that of the foreign rule which preceded the Roman. Leptis,

probably not the Tripolitan, but that near Hadrumetum, was the only

African town which marked its coins with a Greek legend, and thus

conceded to this language an at least secondary position in public

intercourse. The Phoenician language prevailed at that time so far as

there was a civilisation in North Africa, from Great Leptis to Tingi,

most thoroughly in and around Carthage, but not less in Numidia and

Mauretania.[291] To this language of a highly developed although

foreign culture certain concessions were made on the change in the

system of administration. Perhaps already under Caesar, certainly under

Augustus and Tiberius, as well the towns of the Roman province, such as

Great Leptis and Oea, as those of the Mauretanian kingdom, like Tingi

and Lix, employed in official use the Phoenician language, even those

which like Tingi had become Roman burgess-communities. Nevertheless

they did not go so far in Africa as in the Greek half of the empire. In

the Greek provinces of the empire the Greek language prevailed, as in

business intercourse generally, so particularly in direct intercourse

with the imperial government and its officials; the coin of the city

organised after the Greek fashion names also the emperor in Greek. But

in the African the coin, even if it speaks in another language, names

the emperor or the imperial official always in Latin. Even on the coins

of the kings of Mauretania the name of the Greek queen stands possibly

in Greek, but that of the king--also an imperial official--uniformly in

Latin, even where the queen is named beside him. That is to say, even

the government did not admit the Phoenician in its intercourse with the

communities and individuals in Africa, but it allowed it for internal

intercourse; it was not a third imperial language, but a language of

culture recognised in its own sphere.

 

But this limited recognition of the Phoenician language did not long

subsist. There is no document for the public use of Phoenician from

the time after Tiberius, and it hardly survived the time of the first

dynasty.[292] How and when the change set in we do not know; probably

the government, perhaps Tiberius or Claudius, spoke the decisive word

and accomplished the linguistic and national annexation of the African

Phoenicians as far as it could be done by state authority. In private

intercourse the Phoenician held its ground still for a long time in

Africa, longer apparently than in the motherland; at the beginning

of the third century ladies of genteel houses in Great Leptis spoke

so little Latin or Greek, that there was no place for them in Roman

society; even at the end of the fourth there was a reluctance to

appoint clergymen in the environs of Hippo Regius (Bona), who could

not make themselves intelligible in Punic to their countrymen; these

termed themselves at that time still Canaanites, and Punic names

and Punic phrases were still current. But the language was banished

from the school[293] and even from written use, and had become a

popular dialect; and even this probably only in the region of the old

Phoenician civilisation, particularly the old Phoenician places on the

coast that stood aloof from intercourse on a large scale.[294] When the

Arabs came to Africa they found as language of the country doubtless

that of the Berbers, but no longer that of the Poeni;[295] with the

Carthagino-Roman civilisation the two foreign languages disappeared,

while the old native one still lives in the present day. The civilised

foreign dominions changed; the Berbers remained like the palm of the

oasis and the sand of the desert.

 

[Sidenote: The Latin language.]

 

The heritage of the Phoenician language fell not to Greek, but to

Latin. This was not involved in the natural development. In Caesar’s

time the Latin and the Greek were alike in North Africa foreign

languages, but as the coins of Leptis already show, the latter by

far more diffused than the former; Latin was spoken then only by the

officials, the soldiers, and the Italian merchants. It would have at

that time been probably easier to introduce the Hellenising of Africa

than the Latinising of it. But it was the converse that took place.

Here the same will prevailed, which did not allow the Hellenic germs to

spring up in Gaul, and which incorporated Greek Sicily into the domain

of Latin speech; the same will, which drew the boundaries between the

Latin West and the Greek East, assigned Africa to the former.