I am a Roman citizen living in Rome. I have no hope of ever acquiring my own land due to the latifundia. I have some debt, but I believe if I can make it to my land near Condate I can repay my debt. I have sold everything I own and successfully snuck past my creditors out of Rome. I now sit on a ship bound for Massalia with only a few sesterii.
How are things going to go for me? What will my journey on the ship look like, and what will my journey involve after I land in Massalia? What can I expect to find near Condate when I arrive?
This scenario seems implausible (really impossible) for a number of reasons:
my uncle perished during the battle of Alesia and has left me land he acquired near Condate
How? And which Condate? A number of settlements in Gaul had this name. In any case, it seems implausible to the extreme to expect that a soldier actively serving at Alesia would have Gallic landholdings, much less that these would be subject to Roman law. I'm not even sure whether a Roman soldier of the period could leave land as an inheritance, since the right of soldiers to hold a peculium castrense, which alone of the soldier's property could be inherited while he was still mobilized, was an Augustan development. Soldiers were not settled in Gaul during Caesar's lifetime, and except for colonies Gallic land remained Gallic throughout the early Principate. The rapid Romanization of Gaul, driven mainly by local elites, is a well known phenomenon, and is one of the standard case studies in the hands-off approach to provincial administration that typifies the Republican and early Imperial periods.
I have no hope of ever acquiring my own land due to the latifundia
Really? In a period in which the term latifundia does not appear and in which modern scholarship has pretty definitively shown there was no decrease in small, independent farming plots? Indeed, such plots increase rather steadily over the period. And that's without considering programs like the Caesarian agrarian commission of seven years prior, which opened large areas of ager publicus to settlement, such as at Novum Comum.
if I can make it to my land near Condate I can repay my debt
How? It's long been understood--and was still true in the modern period--that agricultural life accumulates debt extremely rapidly as a matter of course. The Roman farmer was continuously in debt. But this alone was not a great issue. Most people in the ancient world were in some form of debt, the same way that most people in the modern world are in some form of debt. It's impossible to use credit without debt. The problem of debt was only harder for the farmer, however. Due to the uncertainties of pre-Green Revolution agriculture a single bad harvest could lead to a spiral of debt from which it would be effectively impossible to recover, a fear that urban laborers did not typically have to worry about. The classic study is Frederiksen, "Caesar, Cicero and the Problem of Debt"
It's also far from certain that an urban dweller at Rome would consider farming in Gaul (Cisalpine vastly more plausibly than Transalpine in this period) more secure and stable than life in the city. When Cicero spoke against the Rullan bill in the de lege agraria one of his arguments was that urban life was preferable to agricultural labor. The Rullan bill failed.
I have sold everything I own and successfully snuck past my creditors out of Rome
Why? Moreover, why would it be necessary to sneak past creditors and how would that stop them exactly from tracking down a person and collecting the debt if they wished? That's not really how credit and debt worked. Just as today debt is not a problem unless it cannot be paid, debt in the ancient world didn't prevent anybody from moving around. The sole exception was if one's creditors called in the debt suddenly, which they typically could do. But such incidents were rare, and typically only occurred in periods of money shortage or great economic destability, most notably in periods of civil war or civil unrest. The last time something like that had happened was in 63 during the Catilinarian conspiracy, and the 50s appear to have been a pretty normal period for the cash supply. A similar shock nearly occurred at the beginning of the civil war in 49, but there was no sign of that in 52.
The journey from Rome to Massilia would have been pretty simply in 52. Scheidel's ORBIS project allows us to plot easily a cheap, though abnormally slow (some 12 days), route along the Italian coast, hopping between ports--ORBIS suggests stops at Cosa, Populonium, Pisae, Luna, and Genua, so I suspect it has in mind that one would jump between short-range small cargo ships. A penultimate stop at Forum Julii can be safely ignored since no such city existed in 52. The journey from Rome to Masillia was a pretty easy one and the route was regularly trafficked in the late Republic. Someone intending, for whatever self-destructive reason, to travel into Transalpine Gaul following Alesia, which was taken in September, would have had to wait until late March, when shipping resumed after halting to shelter from the Mediterranean's winter storms, or he would have had to pay probably quite a lot of money to convince a captain to risk the journey. More likely such a misguided person would have had to take the land route if he wished to reach Transalpine Gaul as quickly as possible. An overland journey, travelling as cheaply as possible, would have taken almost a month without delays. It would have involved crossing the Alps, probably by the coastal route, in the winter at a period when even Caesar's troops were not entirely safe from raids by the Alpine peoples. Someone sneaking out of the city having sold all of his possessions for some reason would likely have been travelling alone, without the usual crowd of fellow travelers and/or friends that accompanied most Romans taking land journeys, and which certainly should be expected to have typically accompanied people heading into what was, effectively, enemy territory. Provided such a person made it to Genua without being robbed from there to Masillia, a distance of over 350 km, there would be no settlements at which to rest.