There would no doubt often be but little love lost between the
Helvetians and the soldiery in occupation. Tacitus ("Annals") tells of
one bloody episode. After the death of the madman hero, the twenty-first
legion, surnamed _Rapax_, or Rapacious, no doubt for good reasons, was
quartered at Vindonissa. Cæcina, a violent man, lieutenant of Vitellius,
then commander of the Rhine army, marched into Helvetia to proclaim
Vitellius emperor. But the Helvetians supported his opponent Galba, not
knowing that he had just been murdered, and fell upon the messengers of
Cæcina, and put them in prison, after first seizing their letters. The
lieutenant enraged at this affront laid waste the neighbouring Aquæ
(Baden near Zurich), a flourishing watering-place much frequented for
its amusements, Tacitus tells us. Calling in the Rhætian cohorts, he
drove them to the Boetzberg, and cut them down by thousands in the
woods and fastnesses of Mount Jura; then, ravaging the country as he
went, Cæcina marched on to Aventicum, which at once surrendered.
Alpinus, a notable leader, was put to death, and the rest were left to
the clemency of Vitellius. However, the Roman soldiery demanded the
destruction of the nation, but Claudius Cossus, a Helvetian of great
eloquence, moving them to tears by his touching words, they changed
their minds, and begged that the Helvetians might be set at liberty.
However this military occupation was, after sixty years of duration,
drawing to a close. Under Domitian and Trajan all the land between
Strasburg and Augsburg, as far as the Main, was conquered and annexed to
the Roman Empire. An artificial rampart was formed across country from
the mouth of the Main to Regensburg on the Danube, and the military
cordon was removed from the Swiss frontier to the new boundary line.
Helvetia, now no longer the rendezvous of the Roman legionaries, quietly
settled into a Roman province, where the language, customs, art, and
learning of Rome were soon to be adopted.
If the military stations were starting-points of the new culture, it was
the more peaceful immigrants who introduced agriculture, commerce, and
wealth, or, at any rate, caused it to make progress. Gradually the
Helvetians amalgamated with the Romans, adopting even their religion.
Horticulture and vine-culture were introduced. A Roman farmer grew vines
on a patch of ground near Cully, on Lake Geneva, and on an inscribed
stone (dug up at St. Prex) begs Bacchus (_Liber Pater Cocliensis_) to
bless the vintage. He little anticipated that his plantation would be
the ancestor, as it were, of the famous La Côte, now so highly valued.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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