Vediantii Erotic

The Vediantii were a Ligurian people who lived in the Maritime Alps above present-day Nice, in southeastern France, during the late Iron Age and the Roman period, and who gradually merged into the Latin-speaking population of the region. Their identity is tied to a single hilltop. Pliny the Elder names Cemenelum, today the Cimiez district of Nice, as their town. That line, together with the ruins and Latin inscriptions recovered on the site, accounts for most of what is known about them. They were one of many small Ligurian communities in the ridges and valleys of this coast. Greek and Roman writers tended to lump these groups together as hardy, independent hill people and rarely described them one by one.

Their independence ended under Augustus. Around 14 BC Roman forces subdued the free peoples of the Maritime Alps, and the great victory monument at La Turbie, a short distance east along the coast, still marks the campaign. For the Vediantii the result was absorption rather than erasure. Cemenelum became the seat of the new province of Alpes Maritimae, a small frontier district run by an equestrian governor, and the tribal town gained public baths, an amphitheater and the business of Roman administration. That left the area with odd neighbors. Down on the shore sat Nikaia, a Greek trading post founded from Massalia, which answered to a different province altogether. For centuries the Ligurian hill town and the Greek harbor stood only a few kilometers apart under separate jurisdictions, the first looking to the mountains and the second to the sea.

Their own voice is almost entirely lost. Ancient Ligurian survives mostly in place names and personal names, and linguists still debate how it related to the Celtic languages spoken by neighboring Gauls. By the imperial period the inscriptions at Cemenelum are in Latin. Belief followed the same path. Local cults left little behind, Roman gods took their place in public life, and by late antiquity the town had its own Christian bishop, until the see was merged into that of Nice. The people did not vanish in a single event. Over time, sources simply stopped naming them. What remains is the place. The excavated streets, baths and small oval arena at Cimiez now sit in a public park above the city, next to a museum of archaeology, and the district that grew over Cemenelum still carries a version of its name.