The Roman names of the leading nobles, the Latin legend on the coins of the insurrection, the travesty throughout of Roman arrangements, show most clearly as that the deliverance of the Celtic nation from the yoke of the foreigners in the year 70 was no longer possible, just because there was such a nation no longer; and the Roman rule might be felt, according to circumstances, as a yoke, but no longer as a foreign rule. Had such an opportunity been offered to the Celts at the time of the battle of Philippi, or even under Tiberius, the insurrection would have run its course, not perhaps to another issue, but in streams of blood; now it ran off into the sand. When, some decades after these severe crises, the Rhine army was considerably reduced, these crises had given the proof that the great majority of the Gauls were no longer thinking of separation from the Italians, and the four generations that had followed since the conquest had done their work. Subsequent occurrences here were crises within the Roman world. When that world threatened to fall asunder, the West as well as the East separated itself for some time from the centre of the empire; but the separate state of Postumus was the work of necessity, not of choice, and the separation was merely _de facto_; the emperors who bore sway over Gaul, Britain, and Spain, laid claim to the dominion of the whole empire quite as much as their Italian rival emperors. Certainly traces enough remained of the old Celtic habits and also of the old Celtic unruliness. As bishop Hilary of Poitiers, himself a Gaul, complains of the overbearing character of his countrymen, so the Gauls are, even in the biographies of the later Caesars, designated as stubborn and ungovernable and inclined to insubordination, so that in dealing with them tenacity and sternness of government appear specially requisite. But a separation from the Roman empire, or even a renouncing of the Roman nationality, so far as there was any such at the time, was in these later centuries nowhere less thought of than in Gaul; on the contrary, the development of the Romano-Gallic culture, of which Caesar and Augustus had laid the foundation, fills the later Roman period just as it fills the Middle Ages and more recent times. [Sidenote: Organisation of the three Gauls.]