8 - Keeping faith?

Summary

Gallic gods, Roman rites

Did any place remain where Gallo-Romans remained Gauls above all? Put otherwise, did some form of Celtic or Gallic identity persist beneath a public veneer of Romanized manners and culture, perhaps in the remoter parts of the country, or in the depths of forests or in mountain valleys? The argument of this book has so far made the opposite case. Roman and Gallic identities were opposed during an early – but brief – formative period; thereafter that opposition was supplanted by more familiar Roman contrasts, between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, military and civilian and so forth. Cultural distinctions echoed these social changes, so that the construction of theatres and temples or the possession of mosaics and consumption of fish-sauce rapidly came to signify good taste and social eminence, rather than adherence to a set of cultural norms associated first and foremost with alien conquerors. The villas of Brittany and the material culture of the Vosges villages seem to offer little support for the idea of islands of residual ‘Celticism’ in a Gallo-Roman sea. The spread of Roman style, right down to the most basic tableware, shows that even the poorest had learned to be impoverished in a Roman manner.

Historians who have taken a different line have most often based their case on Gallo-Roman religion. It is easy to see why this has been the case.