The Arverni (Gaulish: *Aruernoi) were a Gallic people of the late Iron Age and the Roman period, whose territory lay in the Massif Central of central Gaul, in the area of the later Auvergne. They were one of the most powerful tribes of ancient Gaul, contesting primacy over the region with the neighbouring Aedui.
They are mentioned in 207 BC as treating with Carthaginian commandant Hasdrubal Barca. Headed by their chiefs Luernius and Bituitus, the Arverni dominated many of the neighbouring peoples. After Bituitus was defeated by Domitius Ahenobarbus and Fabius Maximus in 121 BC, this dominance was reduced to suzerainty over a few neighbouring tribes.
In 52 BC, during the Gallic Wars, the Arvernian chief Vercingetorix led the Gallic revolt against the armies of Caesar. After an initial victory at the Battle of Gergovia, Vercingetorix was defeated by the Romans at the Battle of Alesia, after which the Arverni lost their power of suzerainty. They maintained however a status of civitas libera, and remained a prosperous tribe during the Roman period. Under Roman rule the Arverni formed one of the largest civitates of Aquitania, with its capital at Augustonemetum, the later Clermont-Ferrand.
Following Alemannic invasions of the region in the 3rd century AD, Clermont-Ferrand was reduced in size but remained an important centre during the later part of the Roman period. In 475, despite a heroic struggle led by their bishop Sidonius Apollinaris and the aristocrat Ecdicius, the Arvernian territory was eventually ceded to the Visigoths.
Name They are mentioned as Arvernos by Caesar (mid-1st c. BC),Caesar. Commentarii de Bello Gallico, 1:31:3; 7:8:2. Arvernorum by Livy (late-1st c. BC),Livy. Periochae, 61 A̓roúernoi (Ἀρούερνοι) by Strabo (early 1st c. AD),Strabo. Geōgraphiká, 4:2:3. and as A̓rouernō͂n (Ἀρουερνῶν) by Ptolemy (2nd c. AD).Ptolemy. Geōgraphikḕ Hyphḗgēsis, 2:7:12.
The ethnonym Arverni is a latinised form of Gaulish *Aruernoi (sing. *Aruernos). Its etymology remains unclear. Pierre-Yves Lambert has suggested to interpret it as 'those who are above', by decomposing the name as *ar(e)-uer-no- (comparable with Latin supernus). Alternatively, a derivation from an earlier place-name, with the Gaulish stem *uernā- ('alder'; cf. French vergne, Occitan verne) attached to are- ('in front of'), has also been proposed.
The region of Auvergne, attested in 511 as ecclesiae Arvenicae (pagus Arvenicus or pago Alvernio in the 9th c., Alvernhe ca. 1071–1127) is named after the Gallic tribe. Geography
Territory
The Arverni occupied the heart of the Massif Central, a territory centred on the valley of the Allier and the Limagne basin, which formed its economic core, and ringed by wide upland marches, mostly wooded and more thinly settled. The Barrington Atlas locates them east of the Lemovices and Petrocorii, south of the Bituriges Cubi and Aedui, north of the Ruteni, Cadurci and Vellavii, and west of the Segusiavi and Ambarri., Map 14: Caesarodunum-Burdigala, Map 18: Augustonemetum-Vindonissa.
The boundaries of their civitas are usually reconstructed by the regressive method, on the assumption that the medieval diocese of Clermont preserved the limits of the Roman civitas Arvernorum. This is supported by milestones and by a series of place names expressing the idea of a boundary derived from Celtic *randa ('limit') and *broga ('border'), or their Latin equivalents. To the north the territory ran as a wedge into modern Allier, meeting the Bituriges and the Aedui around present-day Moulins. Coinage and pottery show that goods crossed this limit freely in peacetime.
The southern limits are more debated. Bernard Rémy divided it between the Arverni, the Lemovices and the Gabali. Michel Provost and Pierre Vallat proposed a partition among five peoples along watershed lines. Jean-Pierre Chambon, noting the dense distribution of ancient boundary names along the southern edge of the diocese, argued that the limit was in fact precisely marked on the ground, against the view that the Gallic civitates had unstable boundaries.
Chambon's toponymy also suggested that the civitas faced toward the Mediterranean south rather than central Gaul, since most of the boundary names cluster along the short southern frontier with the Vellavii, Gabali, Ruteni and Cadurci. The same orientation appears in the ancient sources and in the coinage, Arvernian issues circulating far more in Transalpine Gaul than among the neighbouring Lemovices, Bituriges and Aedui.
Settlements
Oppida The Arvernian territory was strongly centralised from at least the 3rd century BC, with a succession of very large agglomerations in the Clermont-Ferrand basin. This rapid gathering of a large population into a single, shifting centre has been linked to a context of crisis, perhaps the breakdown of the Arvernian monarchy at the end of the 2nd century BC. In the decades that followed the Gallic Wars, the seat of power eventually settled permanently at Augustonemetum.
The earliest known oppidum was the open agglomeration of Gandaillat east of Clermont-Ferrand, which covered at least 150 hectares and was occupied from the first half of the 3rd century BC to the turn of the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. It was densely built up and supported metalworking in iron, bronze and precious metals. After Gandaillat was abandoned, three large oppida a few kilometres apart succeeded one another during the 1st century BC. Corent, a basalt plateau of about 70 hectares, was the first of the three, its centre yielding a sanctuary, aristocratic dwellings, streets and a mint. It is probably the Nemossos named by Strabo. Gondole, on the Allier to the north, enclosed about 30 hectares behind an earthen rampart and was held through the middle decades of the century. A pit there yielded the joint burial of eight men and eight horses, read either as the aftermath of a battle or as a sacrifice. Gergovia, of comparable size to Corent and occupied in the second half of the century, has not yet yielded a rampart that excavation can tie to the one Caesar describes at the Battle of Gergovia.
Augustonemetum Their Roman capital, Augustonemetum (modern Clermont-Ferrand), was founded in the name of Augustus in the last decade of the 1st century BC. Connected with the road network of Agrippa, it grew into one of the largest towns of the province of Aquitania, perhaps reaching some 150 hectares. Though often described as a foundation ex nihilo, the town was not laid out in an empty landscape. The piedmont of the hill and the wider Clermont basin had long been settled. Hélène Dartevelle reads the capital as the last stage in a slow shift of central places across the basin, from the open complex of Aulnat to the southern oppida and then to Augustonemetum. The name Nemossos, recorded by Strabo for an Arvernian centre, was formerly taken as the earlier name of the capital but has more recently been linked instead to the oppidum of Corent. The name of the people was soon added to that of the town, and in the Late Empire the form Arverni alone survived, eventually giving way to the medieval Claromont. The Early Imperial town was open and unwalled. From the second half of the 3rd century AD occupation contracted to the volcanic hill. By the time of Sidonius Apollinaris in the 5th century the much-reduced site was fortified.
Rural settlement The countryside of the Limagne was densely and dispersedly settled. Systematic survey has revealed a network of farms of every size, reaching six to seven establishments per square kilometre in the most favourable areas, a density without parallel in Gauls. Intensive cultivation of the fertile but waterlogged 'black earths' depended on systematic drainage, attested by ditch networks from the second half of the 3rd century BC. The early field systems were in places kept without a break after the conquest, and several excavated villae overlie La Tène enclosures whose orientation they preserve, which has been taken as evidence for a continuity of aristocratic landholding.
From the first half of the 1st century AD the rural habitat grew denser and more varied, structured by a regular network of villae, the residential centres of estates working for the benefit of the urban aristocracy of Augustonemetum. Estates ranged from working farms to large villae. The largest known in the civitas, at Belde on the eastern edge of Clermont-Ferrand, covered about 10 hectares under the Early Empire, with a residential quarter of mosaics, marble and painted plaster, and was occupied with little apparent break from La Tène to the early Middle Ages.
History Iron Age background By the time the Arverni first appear in the written record at the end of the 3rd century BC, an Arvernian entity had taken shape in Auvergne several generations earlier, already marked by a distinct regional material culture.
Research on the settlement of the Limagne in the Iron Age has shown a density of occupation in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC without parallel elsewhere in Gaul, with the strongest concentrations near present-day Clermont-Ferrand. An early drainage network suggests that much of the plain was already intensively cultivated, which Trément takes as the agricultural and demographic foundation of Arvernian power. The Arverni also practised inhumation, a rite exceptional in Gaul at the end of the 2nd century BC.
Arvernian hegemony (3rd–2nd century BC) Ancient writers present the Arverni as a dominant power. Drawing on Posidonius, Strabo claims that their authority once reached as far as Narbonne and the borders of Massalia, and that the peoples between the Pyrenees, the Ocean and the Rhine obeyed them. Historians regards these statements as heavily exaggerated, reflecting a Mediterranean viewpoint and a source written when the interior of Gaul was still little known. Venceslas Kruta holds that an Arvernian economic empire resting on control of the tin trade and on an early coinage is hard to reconcile with what is known of Celtic society in the 3rd century BC, and connects that early coinage instead with the rise of mercenary service, in which the Arverni were prominent. Following early studies by Camille Jullian (1859–1933), French scholars had developed from this passage the idea of an 'Arvernian empire', now generally seen as a construction of late-19th-century nationalist historiography.
At the same time, ancient sources do show that the Arverni were powerful people able to intervene in the affairs of its neighbours through an active diplomacy directed chiefly southward: military support to Hasdrubal in 207 BC, aid to the Allobroges in 121 BC, and a long-standing domination over the Vellavii, Gabali, Cadurci and Eleuteti. Rather than an empire, this relationship is best described, after Christian Goudineau, as a 'hierarchical confederation' under Arvernian leadership, in which each client people kept its own territory, government and institutions.
In the 2nd century BC the Arverni appear to have been ruled by kings. Ancient authors name two, Luernius and his son Bituitus. In 121 BC Bituitus was defeated by the consul Quintus Fabius Maximus in the Rhône valley. According to Livy, the king was captured and sent to Alba, and his son Congonnetiacus was held as a hostage at Rome. Rome may have imposed a treaty on harsh terms and forced a change of regime after this defeat.