A Short History of France | Page 4

the
resources of Rome. Caesar conceived the audacious idea of stopping
them at their source--in fact, of making Gaul a Roman province.
It was a marvellous exhibition, not simply of force, but of force
wielded by supreme intelligence and craft. He had lived many years
among this people and knew their sources of weakness, their internal
jealousies and rivalries, their incohesiveness. When they hurled
themselves against Rome, it was as a mass of sharp fragments. When
the Goths did the same, it was as one solid, indivisible body. Caesar
saw that by adroit management he could disintegrate this people while
conquering them.
By forcibly maintaining in power those who submitted to him, being by
turns gentle and severe, ingratiating here, terrifying there, he
established a tremendous personal force; and during nine years carried
on eight campaigns, marvels in the art of war, as well as in the subtler
methods of negotiation and intrigue. He had successively dealt with all
the Keltic tribes, even including Great Britain, subjugating either
through their own rivalries, or by his invincible arm.
Equally able to charm and to terrify, he had all the gifts, all the means
to success and empire, that can be possessed by man. Great in politics
as in war, as full of resource in the forum as on the battle-field, he was
by nature called to dominion.
It was not as a patriot, simply intent upon freeing Rome of an harassing

enemy, that he endured those nine years in Gaul; not as a great leader
burning with military ardor that he conducted those eight campaigns.
The conquest of Gaul meant the greater conquest of Rome. The one
was accomplished; he now turned his back upon the devastated country,
and prepared to complete his great project of human ascendency.
Rome was mistress of the world; he--would be master of Rome.
In the early days of the conquest of Gaul a small island lying in the
river Seine was chosen for the residence of the Roman Governors, and
called Lutetia. The residence soon grew into the Palace of the Caesars;
and then bridges spanned the river, and roads and aqueducts and
faubourgs sprang into existence across the Seine, and Lutetia was
swallowed up in Paris--so named for a Gallic tribe, the Parisii, which
had once encamped there. Standing within the Palais de Justice on this
island to-day, one is in direct touch with Rome when she was mistress
of the world. The feet of the Caesars have pressed those stones. Those
vaulted ceilings have looked down upon Julian the Apostate; he who
upon his throne in the far East sighed for "Lutetia"--his "dear Lutetia."
At Passy and Montmartre, and where stands the Palais Royal, rich
Romans had their suburban homes, and Roman legions were encamped
where are now the Palais de Luxembourg and the Sorbonne. And with a
mingling of Keltic and Latin, there had commenced a new form of
human speech.
Not Paris alone, but all of Gaul felt the awakening touch of a great
civilization, and with improved ideals in living there came another
great advance. The human sacrifices and abhorrent practices of the
Druidical faith were abandoned, and Jupiter and Minerva and the gods
of Parnassus supplanted the grim deities of a more ancient mythology.
But while Rome was a powerful teacher, she was a cruel mistress--and
shackles were galling to these free barbarians. In the midst of universal
misery there came tidings of something better than the gods of
Parnassus, when in A.D. 160 Irenaeus came to Lyons and there
established the first Church of Christ; and here it was that Marcus
Aurelius ordered the persecution which was intended to stamp out the
new and fanatical heresy.

CHAPTER III.
While the Star of Empire was thus moving toward the West, another
and brighter star had arisen in the East. So accustomed are we to the
story, that we lose all sense of wonder at its recital.
Julius Caesar's brief triumph was over, Marc Antony had recited his
virtues over his bier, Rome had wept, and then forgotten him in the
absorbing splendors of his nephew Augustus. In an obscure village of
an obscure country in Asia Minor the young wife of a peasant finds
shelter in a stable, and gives birth to a son, who is cradled in the straw
of a manger from which the cattle are feeding.
Can the mind conceive of human circumstances more lowly? The child
grew to manhood, and in his thirty-three years of life was never lifted
above the obscure sphere into which he was born; never spoke from the
vantage-ground of worldly elevation; simply moving among people of
his own station in life, mechanics, fishermen, and peasants, he told of a
religion of love, a gospel of peace, for which he was willing to