Celts and the Classical World

David Rankin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134747214
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

To observe the Celts through the eyes of the Greeks and Romans is the first aim of this book.

1 Origins, Languages and Associations

To observe the Celts through the eyes of the Greeks and Romans is the first aim of this book. We shall scrutinise their perceptions of this powerful and numerous group of peoples, who lived to the north of their Mediterranean world, and who had the inconvenient habit of coming south. In this chapter we shall consider what may be the earliest Classical references to the Celts. We shall try to identify and describe as far as we can within the evidence who and what the Celts were, and what was their origin. Most of our evidence in this and the following chapters comes from the literature of Greece and Rome. The Celts themselves had a lasting prejudice against putting important matters in writing. Not until we reach the eighth century AD, about three centuries after the end of the period which mainly concerns us, do we find insular Celts, not Romanised, but influenced by Rome through Christianity, beginning to set down in writing a literature which was not predominantly Classical in form and content.

Specifically we have to discuss from Greek and Roman points of view some late Bronze Age and Iron Age peoples of Europe who, as far as we may conjecture, spoke dialects of Indo-European origin which are close to what we would now describe as Celtic, and who had a distinctive, but not unique mode of Iron Age culture. Like ourselves, when we talk about the Celtic-descended societies of Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, Man, Scotland and Ireland, the Greeks and Romans had a broad and generally coherent understanding of what they meant by Celtae (Keltoi), Galli and Galatai, even though they occasionally were mistaken about the ethnic affiliations of more remote tribes with whom they had not yet made contact. The word ‘Celt’ as an ethnic attribute was first used by Greeks to refer to people living to the north of the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseilles) in Southern France. The meaning of the name is obscure. Possible roots are kel ‘exalt’ or kel ‘strike’, as in Latin percello. Another suggestion is k^wel ‘turn’, Latin incola ‘settler’. There are other suggestions. ‘Galli’ was the name the Romans gave to the tumult of warriors who wrecked their city in 390 BC; it may be connected with other IE words for ‘stranger’ or ‘enemy’ such as Latin hostis, Gothic gasts (Stokes 1894:108). The Romans habitually used ‘Galli’ for all peoples of Celtic language and culture, and it is not known whether it was originally the name of an individual tribe, or a description given by a wandering tribe or tribes to themselves (Whatmough 1970:15). The invaders of Greece and Asia Minor in the third century BC were known to the Greeks as ‘Galatai’, which may perhaps have a parallel in Old Irish galdae ‘warlike’ and galgart a ‘champion’. Julius Caesar divides his Gaul into three ethnic regions, by no means culturally or linguistically identical: Celtae, Aquitani, and Belgae (BG I.1), and he mentions many tribal names within these sections which have their individual meanings. Classical writers did not describe the inhabitants of Ireland and Britain as Celts. Nor did the Anglo-Normans or English in later centuries. The name was first used as an embracing ethnic and cultural term in the sixteenth century AD by George Buchanan, and taken up in the seventeenth century AD by Edward Lhuyd (T.G.E.Powell 1958:15). We shall use Celt as a general term, but Gaul, Galli, Galatai, Goidelic, Brythonic, Britanni, Picti (Cruithni), Érainn and other specific names will occur from time to time.

Our earliest Greek literary source which mentions Celts is embedded in the text of a late imperial Latin author. Rufus Festus Avienus was proconsul of Africa in 366 AD. He claimed descent from Musonius Rufus, the distinguished and eccentric Stoic philosopher exiled by Nero in 65 AD. Like his famous antecedent, he came from Volsinii in Etruria. His burial inscription proclaims him a successful man, happy in his career, wife and children; proud of his poems, and a worshipper of the Etruscan goddess, Nortia, who not inappropriately was concerned with fortune.

The poem which interests us is his Ora Maritima, a description of the shores of the known world. The first part of this incompletely extant work describes the Atlantic coastline and the coast of the Mediterranean from the Pillars of Hercules to Massalia (Latin: Massilia).

Avienus dedicated his poem to Probus, a consul who may haveheld office in 406 AD. The work is written in iambic verse, and it shows self-conscious, but no doubt, sincere learning. Avienus was a man of education and ability, and we should not be too dismayed by his habit of dropping into his text the names both of famous and of obscure authorities. Amongst others, he mentions Hecataeus, Himilco the Carthaginian, Hellanicus, Scylax of Caryanda, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sallust; also Damastes, Bacorus of Rhodes, and Euctemon of Attica. We cannot tell how deeply read he was in all of these authors. Some of the less distinguished must by this time have been hard to obtain in the original, but he claims (41) to have consulted a great number of writers and to communicate information that has not been available at large. He was a competent writer of verse, but we should be rash to call him a talented poet, even within the restrictions of the didactic genre.

We shall not be incautious, I suggest, if we accept that Avienus is the carrier of some very early information about the Celts in the Classical world. I say this not so much in spite of his pompous and pawky style, as because of it: in concentrating on his own erudite image of himself and grappling with the technical problems of versification, he probably left himself less time for the pure distortion of facts, though we may possibly have to fear some parallax effect inherited from the translators who in some instances came between the Greek originals and his staid iambics.

Avienus’ description in the second part of his poem of the coastal voyage from the neighbourhood of Tartessus (probably near Cadiz) to Massalia, makes no mention of the Massaliote settlement of Emporiai (Ampurias). From the evidence of pottery which has been found on its site, Emporiai was in being as early as the middle of the sixth century BC (Tierney 1960:193–4). It can be argued that if the town had already been founded at the time of the early sailing instructions on which Avienus’ source is based, it would have been mentioned, and the information would have been conveyed to us by Avienus. The omission, however, may be merely apparent. John Hind has suggested (1972) that Emporiai, which means ‘markets’, was the popular name for the place referred to as Pyrene by Avienus, and that this could be the ‘Portus Pyrenaei’ mentioned by Livy (38.8). However this particular matter stands, it is clear that Avienus had access to a range of ancient materials which themselves embodied information from a very early date.

The seafaring inhabitants of Phocaea in Ionia investigated theWestern Mediterranean and Iberian littorals long before they established what was to become the great city of Massalia in 600 BC. Many of their trading stations and settlements on the shore of the Iberian peninsula were eliminated after their excessively expensive victory over the Carthaginians in the sea battle at Alalia in 540 BC. Since Avienus refers to a number of these outposts, it is not unlikely that his earliest source antedates that battle (Savory 1968:239). Somewhat later accretions adhere to this early account. He also used information from the Periplus of the Northern Sea by Himilco, the Carthaginian admiral who explored the waters of Northern Europe. This would represent current knowledge at the end of the sixth century BC.

Avienus seems almost to be looking down on a tidal model of the region:

80 The circle of the outspread earth lies before us panoramic;

and in turn the waters flow around this circle;

but where a deep salt bay projects itself into the land just as the waters of our own [Mediterranean]

sea stretch for a long distance [into the land mass], this is the Atlantic Gulf.

85 Here is the town of Gaddir, earlier known as Tartessus;

here are the pillars of enduring Hercules: Abyla and Calpe:

Calpe is on the left (as you sail into the straits from the Atlantic);

Abyla is next to Libya (on the African side of the straits).

They are racked by the North wind, but still remain in place.

The layout is being contemplated from outside the straits, from the Atlantic side. The poet identifies Gaddir with Tartessus (Biblical Tarshish). However, this city’s site has never been identified. It is said to have been powerful and rich, but its people remain unknown.

90 And here the peak of an eminent ridge rises up; an earlier age called it Oestrymnis:

a high bulk of lofty (pediment) slopes down steeply to the warm South wind. Underneath the peak of this high eminence the gulf Oestrymnicus yawns on the inhabitants. In this arise the islands, the Oestrymnides, placed at their ease, rich in the mining of tin and lead. A vigorous tribe lives here, proud-spirited, energetic, skilful.

On all the ridges trade is carried on:

the sea froths far and wide with their famous ships, and they cut through the swell of the beast-haunted ocean.

104 These people do not build their boats with pine wood–

nor, says Avienus redundantly, do they use any other kind of wood; instead they do something quite astonishing: they make their ships out of skins joined together:

and run the vast salt sea on leather hides.

The reference is to curraghs, still used in this century by the people of the Aran Islands. Pliny mentions the use of these by the British (NH 7.56). According to Strabo (3.155), the Lusitani of Spain also had them. The places which are mentioned here may have been thought to be in the Bay of Biscay (the Oestrymnic gulf?). The Oestrymnides may be the Cassiterides, possibly Cornwall, the peninsular status of which was not necessarily understood by the earliest writers.

From line 130 onwards, Avienus moves towards the only explicit reference to the Celts in the poem:

If anybody has the courage to urge his boat into the waves away from the Oestrymnides under the pole of Lycaon (in the Northern sky) where the air is freezing, he comes to the Ligurian land, deserted by its people: for it has been emptied by the power of the Celts a long time since in many battles. The Ligurians, displaced, as fate often does to people, have come to these regions. Here they hold on in rough country with frequent thickets and harsh cliffs, where mountains threaten the sky.

For a long time they lived a timid life in narrow confines, far from the sea; for they were frightened of the sea because of their previous danger.

Afterwards, when safety renewed their confidence, quiet peace persuaded them–

and we are told by the poet that they moved down to Ophiussa, probably in northern Spain, and then to the Mediterranean shores and Sardinia.

We seem to have here a shadowy ancient account of the arrival in Spain of a pre-Celtic people who came into the peninsula from the North. This may be a dim reflection of a population that spoke an IE dialect which was not Celtic. In the conglomerate of Iberian linguistic remains, traces of this kind of dialect have been found. It is suggested that they came by ship, and that the Celts who expelled them also used ships. Perhaps the northern zone from which they were displaced was in the area of Jutland where the Cimbri lived in later historical times. The old compiler and source whom Avienus is using seems to be explaining the presence of Ligurians in the neighbourhood of Massalia together with the presence of Celts in the region to the north of them, as well as the presence of ‘Ligurians’ in Spain.

Avienus tells us that from the Oestrymnides it is two days’ sailing to

107 the Sacred Island—the ancient authorities call it this–

rich in its land it lies amid the waves, and widely the race of Hiberni inhabit it.

On the other hand is situated the island of the Albions nearby.

Since Britain and Ireland are designated as islands, this part of the story may be based on an ancient Periplus or ‘Circumnavigation’. We need not regard this item as being of significantly high antiquity. The same can be said of Avienus’ use of the Greek interpretation of the name for Ireland as ‘sacred island’. Thename ‘Ierne’ seemed to the Greeks to be connected with their word for ‘sacred’, hieros. He refers to the larger island as ‘Albion’ rather than using any name involving /Brett/ or /Prett/, but there is very little to be deduced from this, or from the fact that neither Ierne nor Albion seem to be words of Celtic origin.

Avienus says (111ff) that Tartessus engaged in trade with the region of the Oestrymnides. Carthaginian merchants also came to it. In this connection he mentions Himilco, who from his own experience said that the journey took four months. There follows a description of a sea heavy with weed, which must be the Sargasso Sea.

In the lower Guadalquivir valley there are traces of what could be a Celtic style of living combined with influences from the Eastern Mediterranean. This culture, which has been dated to the sixth century BC, may be a blend of Celtic culture with that of Tartessus. This has been confirmed by the investigation of tumuli in the district which could have been the graves of Celtic chiefs (Arribas 1981:46).

Avienus does not mention Celts as inhabitants of Spain. One interpretation of his words might allow us to suppose that his source regarded them as resident in Southern France. We do not know how far north he intends us to place the land under the constellation of Lycaon. He mentions the Saefi and the Cempses: they live near the Ligurians. They are mentioned once in this poem, and nowhere else. We need not believe that they are Celts pushing against Ligurians. Nor are the Cynetes, who also occur in other authors, proven Celts; though we note that they are said to be neighbours of Tartessus. Perhaps we should resist the temptation to infer that Avienus’ sources are telling us about a time when Ligurians were settled on the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain; when Celts were to the north of Ligurians in France, but not yet an identifiable presence in Spain. This would be a time earlier than the sixth century BC. The luxurious contents of the burial at Vix in the Côte d’Or proves the existence in the sixth century BC of a flourishing community engaged in trade with the Greek world, no doubt through Massalia. Probably it was a Celtic community, and no mere weed-like growth, but the product of lengthy settlement. We cannot exclude the possibility that the supposed Celtic neighbours of Tartessus represent a comparable development. They were not near enough to a major Greek settlement to attract literary attention.

Avienus’ information has an atmosphere of the archaic, and Ido not think that the impression is entirely false. We discern darkly ancient movements of tribes, supported rather than disproved by later and modern evidence. It is possible that some of the sources of Avienus may have carried information older than anything we have in other writers. If this should be the case, then the next most ancient author to whom we have access on this topic is the geographer Hecataeus of Miletus, who was active at the end of the sixth century BC. In one of his fragments, he refers to Narbo as a Celtic city and trade centre (FGH 54); he says that Massalia (FGH 55) is a city in Ligurian territory near Celtic territory. He is quoted by Strabo as having said this in his work on Europe. The distinction he makes between Ligurian and Celtic areas probably shows that he is aware of cultural and linguistic differences between them. Of known ancient geographers, Hecataeus seems to be the first to lay stress upon the influence of physical environment on biological and cultural development.

In his Europe, he also refers to ‘Nyrax, a Celtic city’ (FGH 56). There is no certainty about the location of this city: one candidate has been Noreia in a generally accepted heartland of the early Celtic tribes in Austria. This area is the old habitation of the Bronze Age Urnfield (from the thirteenth to the seventh centuries BC) and Bronze/Iron Hallstatt (from the eighth century BC) cultures, whose members were, if the widely held view is correct, speakers of a kind of Celtic. Certainly there are many placenames of almost certain Celtic derivation in these areas of habitation.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century BC) is traditionally the father of History, but essentially he was an epic poet in prose, as his uncle Panyassis was in verse. Nevertheless he was a highly intelligent gatherer and assimilator of information, and we should pay attention to what he says about the Celts in the second book of his Historiai or ‘Researches’.

In a passage which compares the Nile with the Danube, he says that the Danube rises amongst the Celts and the city of Pyrene and flows through Europe, splitting it in the middle. The Celts, he says, live outside the pillars of Heracles, and have common boundaries with the Cynesioi who live to the West of all the other inhabitants of Europe (2.33).

We can elicit from these remarks that in Herodotus’ time the Celts were settled in Iberia and lived close to the Cynetoi (or Cynetes). Herodotus has no notion of the source of the Danube, but he is aware that it rises in Celtic territory, and that much we can regard as being based on some reliable and well-informed source. He seems to have blended two streams of information: one which tells of Celts living near the upper reaches of the Danube; the other referring to the presence of Celts in Spain, and their penetration into its South-West. Separately these stories are credible enough. The fact that there were Celtic peoples in Spain next to the Cynesioi and also in Central Europe made it seem reasonable enough to him, or his informants, that the Danube rose far in the West in the Celtic lands of the Iberian peninsula.

Herodotus has nothing to say about the cultural characteristics or language of the Celts. Are we in a significantly more favourable position than he was, when we talk about Celts at this early stage of their infringement of the European consciousness? Though we have no linguistic evidence, we usually suppose that we are talking about groups of IE speakers who achieved a recognisable cultural consistency in archaeological terms in the areas associated with the Urnfield Bronze Age cemeteries and the Hallstatt Iron Age culture in western Central Europe. These cultures are represented in many parts of Europe. Both occur in the Iberian peninsula as well as in the Danube valley.

Placenames of apparent Celtic derivation occur in the Northern Alpine areas of these archaeological provinces. This may suggest that in this part of Europe the Celtic peoples had their original home, in the sense that it may have been the region in which they developed their individual character as distinct from other presumable IE groups. Placenames cannot be the basis for certainty in this matter. There are other areas of Urnfield and Hallstatt culture and even of familiarly ‘Celtic’ La Tène type of culture (5th century BC onwards) which are not considered to be in fact of Celtic habitation. It is not easy to assume the monolingual uniformity of any inhabited area in ancient times. Even if we accept the testimony of placenames, it can only point to the relative predominance of speakers of the dialect in question at a time hardly to be defined within a couple of centuries. In modern Ireland and Scotland, Celtic placenames are certainly prominent. This would not help a future archaeologist to discern that he was not dealing with a uniform linguistic province, but with one in which the language which had provided the placenames had become marginal and remote. At the same time he would have grasped, without being aware, that the culture which still spoke the language and that which did not still had many features in common. However, it is reasonable to accept that in the fourth and third centuries BC the Celtic peoples dominated northern andcentral Europe from the Black Sea to Spain (Momigliano 1975:51). This is the message of the Greek and Roman authors, who, together with the archaeologists of the present time, are convincing on this point.

The Celts, like other IE societies, had social strata: kings, warrior-aristocrats and at least two grades of clienthood, one more respectable than the other (Strabo 4.4.24 (Pos.), Caesar BG 6.13). Insular literature of later centuries gives us a picture of a relatively complex social system composed not only of noble warriors and druids, but of various groups devoted to particular skills and professions, or agricultural and service functions. The learned classes consisted of druids and various grades of poets. There is archaeological evidence for the emergence in the Halstatt culture of a social pattern which differed from that of the Urnfield in constructing, undoubtedly for a minority, elaborate and richly furnished tombs. The Hallstatt grave at Vix (6th century BC), the burial of a young woman, illustrates this by its store of magnificent Greek bronze and ceramic ware, its interred four-wheeled chariot, and other valuable articles (Piggott 1983:138ff). The construction of hill-forts at this period may also indicate the emergence of a class within society which had conspicuous power and prestige. We need not assume that the holders of these forts or the deceased in these luxurious graves represent an intrusive wave of foreign heroes alien to the greater part of the local population. At the same time we must avoid any assumption of cultural or racial homogeneity in the populations we are considering. The technology of ancient killing did not develop to the point where it could easily eliminate whole populations.

The occurrence of chariots in elaborate burials may be evidence that they were princely status symbols rather than vehicles activ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1 Origins, Languages and Associations
• 2 Massilia, an Early Contact
• 3 Notices in Some Fourth Century BC Authors
• 4 Anthropology and Heroics
• 5 The Second Finest Hour of Hellas
• 6 Tumult, Prejudice and Assimilation: Rome and the Gauls
• 7 Cisalpine Literary Talent
• 8 Celts and Iberians
• 9 The Galatians
• 10 The Celts in Greco-Roman Art
• 11 Britain, a Source of Disquiet
• 12 Ausonius and the Civilisation of Later Roman Gaul
• 13 Celtic Women in the Classical World
• 14 Religion and the Druids
• 15 Concluding Speculations
• Appendix: The Romans and Ireland
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography