> From all I've read of Rome if you weren't a citizen, and only a small
>minority of provincials were, you had few rights in law at all.
The situation in Rome is a lot more complicated than that with status of slaves, freedman, latin rights, municipium and proper citizenship. Makes the Lunars look positively simple by comparison.
>Even citizens had little influence on what laws were passed or taxes
>imposed.
The plight of every citizen AFAIK.
>Of course if you were a woman you would have no rights at all, simply
>your father's property until you were married when you became your
>husband's. So that's a 50% chance of being worse off under Roman law.
You really have to distinguish between what the law said and the social practice. Roman law governed the relationship between households while within those households, they had enormous influence as to what was said or done. As Cato once complained "All men rule over women, we Romans rule over all men, our wives rule over us". And he spoke before Livia, Aggripina, Messalina, etc.
>The big plus of Celtic society was that the leader was local, he
>could be appealed to, influenced and even disposed of by the people
>he ruled.
This was also the case in many roman-ruled communities. For example, the proportion of Judean Prefects removed from office as a result of an appeal by his subjects is quite large (so much so that it's been alleged that the romans sent deliberate incompetents there).
> >"Everywhere in Gaul there are only two classes of men who are of any
> >account or consideration. The common people are treated almost as
> >slaves, never venture to act on their own initiative, and are not
> >consulted on any subject. Most of them, crushed by debt or heavy
> >taxation or the oppression of more powerful persons, bind themselves
> >over to serve men of rank, who exercise over them all the rights
> that >masters have over slaves. The two priviledged classes are the
> >Druids and the Knights".
>Not only is Caesar a biased source and would not have understood the
>society he was criticising
He is biased but I don't think that you can claim that as a result his social picture of the Gauls is incorrect. It doesn't take too much brains to notice that a farmer is downtrodden.
>but I'm very suspicious of a translation which uses the word "knights".
The actual word he would have used "equestrian" (an important social rank in Rome that was based on those who served in the Roman cavalry) is usually translated as "knights". All it means is that the Celtic nobility fought on horseback.
>The celtic and norse practice of slavery was a lot less repressive
>than medieval serfdom and that less repressive than 19th Century
>absentee landlords and factory wage labour.
Nobody has any way of knowing this. It can be argued that in a status-proud society, like the norse or the celts, that the plight of a humble thrall is worse than that of a medieval villien. Once again, one should distinguish between the law and practice.
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