CONTENTS
| Preface |
| Barbarian Timeline |
| Introducing the Goodies and Baddies |
|
PART I THE CELTS |
I | Unearthing the Celts |
II | The Looting of Gaul |
III | Celtic Women and the Great British Revolt |
IV | Romans on Top |
|
PART II BARBARIANS FROM THE NORTH |
V | The Germans |
VI | Dacia and the Vanished World |
VII | The Goths |
|
PART III BARBARIANS FROM THE EAST |
VIII | Hellenes |
IX | Persia – the Early Dynasties |
X | Sassanians |
|
PART IV VANDALS AND HUNS |
XI | Behind the Myths |
XII | The Christianization of the Empire |
XIII | Vandals |
XIV | Nemesis |
|
| Epilogue |
| Notes |
| Bibliography |
| Picture Credits |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terry Jones is best known as a member of Monty Python, but he has also written four books on medieval England – Chaucer’s Knight, the highly acclaimed Who Murdered Chaucer?, Crusades and Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives, which accompanied a major television series he presented in 2004. He is the author of several children’s books including Fairy Tales and Fantastic Stories, The Knight and the Squire and The Lady and the Squire. Terry has also directed several feature films – Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life, Personal Services, Erik the Viking and The Wind in the Willows.
Alan Ereira has worked as an award-winning producer and writer of history programmes on radio and television for over 40 years, and has collaborated with Terry for ten years on a number of historical films. His previous books include The People’s England, The Invergordon Mutiny, The Heart of the World and (with Terry Jones) Crusades and Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives.
TERRY JONES’ BARBARIANS
Terry Jones & Alan Ereira
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This book is published to accompany the television series Terry Jones’ Barbarians produced by Oxford Film and Television for BBC Television and first broadcast on BBC2 in 2006.
First published in 2006
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ISBN: 978 0 563 53916 2
Commissioning editors: Sally Potter and Martin Redfern
Project editor: Cameron Fitch
Copy editor: Esther Jagger
Designer: Martin Hendry
Maps by HL Studios, Long Hanborough, Oxon
Picture researcher: Caroline Wood
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PREFACE
It took some nerve to write this book and the TV series associated with it. It embraces over 700 years of history on three continents, and involves us striding into the territory of many dedicated and highly impressive scholars.
But it’s been a bit of an obsession. We first proposed a TV series on this subject to the BBC in 1997 and have been coming back pretty much every year. And for some reason it’s a subject that stirs the passions. What other TV project would have four grown men shouting angrily in an office over the significance of a gerundive in a line of Tacitus?
Terry Jones’ Barbarians is about all those peoples whom the Romans wrote off as uncivilized, but it’s also a chance to take a look at the Romans themselves from an alternative point of view – from the point of view of the people they trashed. And as such it fits into a thesis we’ve been banging on about in Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives and in Terry’s radio series The Anti-Renaissance Show. That thesis is that we’ve all been sold a false history of Rome that has twisted our entire understanding of our own history – glorifying (and glossing over) a long era of ruthless imperial power, celebrating it for the benefit of Renaissance tyrants and more modern empires, and wildly distorting our view of the so-called ‘Middle Ages’ and of the peoples whom Rome crushed and who were then blamed for its fall. Oh yes, and it includes a few measured comments on the Church while we’re at it.
We are certainly not experts in the field, and we are indebted to the many real scholars and historians who have allowed us to pick their brains and stomp all over their patch in our inevitably heavy boots. Many thanks to all of them for being so tolerant and generous with their advice. We should particularly like to thank Dr Walter Pohl for his helpful comments, Dr Peter Heather for taking the time to explore answers to our occasionally obsessive questions, Dr Hartmut Ziche and, above all, Professor Barry Cunliffe, whose kindness in carefully steering us away from some real mistakes, and whose unfailing and discreet enthusiasm for the project, have been of enormous help. To all these people: our apologies.
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the TV production team, especially Nick Kent of OFTV, who managed to get the BBC and the History Channel to sign up to the project and watched over it with a fatherly eye; to David McNab, the series editor; to the producer/directors Rob Coldstream and David Wilson (who had to master a vast amount of material and wrestle with us in the heat of pseudo-academic passion); and to the production assistants and researchers Clare Lynch, Susannah Davis and Sarah Veevers.
If you treat this book as a Lego construction, take it apart and reassemble it in chronological order, you will find a story that goes from the first stirrings of Rome around the fifth century BC through to the last Roman emperor nearly 1000 years later. But there will be odd-shaped gaps, and a number of left-over pieces scattered around the floor. This isn’t a history of Rome, and the narrative here is a different one from the others that have been written.
There are, of course, hundreds of books in English covering the period, but no general look at it from a non-Roman perspective. The ‘barbarians’ of the early period, through to the first century AD, have been written about in books specifically on individual societies – mostly Celts and Germans. For the later period, the general reader has had to browse among a series of huge narratives written in the shadow of Gibbon’s great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The people whom the Romans called Barbarians are either on the periphery of the main story, or come into it as invaders.
But we’re looking at the world they created and inhabited, and it’s Rome that is the intruder, or, later, their sometime host, sometime prey. Our interest in Rome lies less in what these people did to the Empire than in what the Empire did to them. And since ‘they’ are actually the people who created the world we live in, this becomes quite literally a question of ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’ The answer, as you will have already figured, is not usually very nice.
So what we have constructed here is not a chronological journey through the Empire’s history. We have, instead, chosen to survey the non-Roman world in four sections.
In Part One the world of the Atlantic Celts is traced from its fullest flowering in the first century BC through to its final destruction by Roman armies 200 years later. We then look at the failure of the Roman state in Celtic territory during the third century, and the steady breakdown that led to the re-emergence of a separate Atlantic world in the old Celtic lands.
Part Two is about German territory (in which we include Dacia) and the Germans. So we look at the way in which the Germans resisted Roman occupation in the first century AD, the great civilization of Dacia, which Rome extinguished in the second century, and then the Goths and their attempts to integrate themselves into the Empire in the fourth and early fifth centuries.
In Part Three we turn to people who regarded the Romans as the Barbarians – the Greeks (who in the early period saw all outsiders as Barbarians, and found that the Romans took the same view of them) and the Persians – a ‘barbarian’ society that posed a successful military challenge to Rome and long outlived the Western Empire. To tell the Greek story we go back to the early fourth century BC, and for the Persians even further back, another 100 years, in an epic sweep that ends, for our story, with the arrival of the Huns in Persia nearly 800 years later.
So far we have looked west, north and east. Part Four of the book takes us south, into Vandal Africa, with a narrative entirely set in the fifth century AD. But this is where we look at the Christian revolution and its impact on the very idea of ‘barbarian’, as well as on the Barbarians themselves, and also at the quite extraordinary reign of Attila the Hun, who probably (and quite inadvertently) did more to effect a transfer of power in the West from Empire to Church than anyone else.
There’s quite a lot that may come as a surprise: the sophistication of Celtic engineering and mathematics, the highly developed religious philosophy of Dacia, the fact that the Greeks were evidently on the edge of an industrial revolution, the comfort of life in Vandal villas, Attila’s remarkable ‘Iron Curtain’ between his kingdom and the Roman Empire. And much more besides.
So welcome to history from a different point of view.
BARBARIAN TIMELINE
A crude and somewhat primitive timeline of events covered in this book, but it may provide a sense of chronology to help you through the narrative.
c. 576 BC | Reign of Cyrus I, King of Persia begins |
c. 550 BC | Great age of religious philosophy – Pythagoras and Zalmoxis (and Buddha) |
522 BC | Reign of Darius I, King of Persia begins |
486 BC | Reign of Xerxes I, King of Persia begins |
406 BC | Syracuse–Carthage war |
c. 390 BC | Brennus’ Celts attack Rome |
336 BC | Alexander ‘the Great’ becomes king of Macedonia |
330 BC | Persepolis destroyed |
324 BC | Alexander dies |
305 BC | Rhodes–Macedon war |
282 BC | Colossus of Rhodes erected |
279 BC | Celts attack Greece |
212 BC | Romans take Syracuse |
168 BC | Rome controls Greece |
164 BC | Rhodes–Rome treaty |
146 BC | Romans raze Corinth |
c. 70 BC | Reign of Burebista, King of Dacia begins |
59 BC | Caesar appointed Protector of the Gauls |
55, 54 BC | Caesar to Britain |
53 BC | Vercingetorix victory: Battle of Harran |
52 BC | Fall of Alesia |
49 BC | Caesar invades Rome: civil war |
44 BC | Caesar assassinated; Burebista assassinated |
42 BC | Sack of Rhodes |
27 BC | Octavian (Augustus) becomes first emperor |
12 BC | Rome occupies Germany |
AD 9 | Varus’ defeat |
AD 14 | Tiberius becomes emperor |
AD 17 | Germanicus’ Triumph |
AD 41 | Claudius becomes emperor |
AD 42 | Cunobelin dies |
AD 43 | Invasion of Britain |
AD 54 | Nero becomes emperor |
AD 60 | Revolt of Iceni |
AD 69 | Vespasian becomes emperor, captures Rome |
AD 81 | Domitian becomes emperor |
AD 87 | Reign of Decebalus, King of Dacia begins |
AD 98 | Trajan becomes emperor |
AD 105 | Rome takes Dacia |
AD 117 | Hadrian becomes emperor |
AD 196 | Albinus proclaimed emperor; Septimius Severus loots Persia |
AD 218 | Elegabalus becomes emperor |
AD 222 | Alexander Severus becomes emperor; reign of Ardashir I, King of Persia begins |
AD 235 | Start of 50-year period when 49 people are proclaimed emperor |
AD 241 | Reign of Shapur I, King of Persia begins |
AD 244 | Gordian III killed |
AD 259 | Postumus sets up Gallic Empire |
AD 260 | Shapur I captures Valerian |
AD 267 | Zenobia declares her son emperor |
AD 270 | Aurelian becomes emperor, abandons Dacia |
AD 272 | Aurelian defeats Zenobia; Shapur I dies |
AD 273 | Aurelian reconquers Gallic Empire |
AD 284 | Diocletian becomes emperor, divides Empire and Maximian rules West |
AD 286 | Carausius makes Britain independent |
AD 297 | Constantius retakes Britain |
AD 309 | Shapur II crowned in womb |
AD 312 | Constantine captures Rome |
AD 324 | Constantine takes Byzantium, sole emperor |
AD 325 | Council of Nicaea |
AD 337 | Constantine I dies |
AD 350 | Huns attack Persia |
AD 358 | Shapur II resolves Hun problem |
AD 363 | Julian defeated and killed by Shapur II |
AD 364 | Valentinian I becomes emperor; Valens becomes emperor in East |
AD 375 | Valentinian I dies; Valentinian II becomes emperor in West; Huns in Dacia; Goths cross Danube and convert to Christianity |
AD 378 | Valens killed at Hadrianople; Theodosius I becomes emperor in East |
AD 391 | Arianism and paganism outlawed |
AD 392 | Valentinian II killed |
AD 394 | Battle of Frigidus: Eugenius defeated; Theodosius I becomes sole emperor |
AD 395 | Theodosius I dies; Alaric rebels; Empire permanently divided into East and West |
AD 401 | Alaric attacks Italy; Vandals in Alps |
AD 406 | Vandals, etc., cross Rhine |
AD 407 | British proclaim Constantine III emperor |
AD 408 | Stilicho killed; Alaric’s first siege of Rome |
AD 410 | Alaric’s ‘sack’ of Rome |
AD 411 | Vandals in Spain |
AD 412 | Murder of Hypatia |
AD 417 | Visigoth Kingdom of Aquitaine; Visigoths attack Spain |
AD 425 | Vandals take Cartagena and Seville |
AD 428 | Gunderic dies; reign of Gaiseric, King of Vandals begins |
AD 429 | Vandals move to Africa |
AD 434 | Attila and Bleda rule Huns |
AD 439 | Vandals take Carthage |
AD 441 | Huns attack Balkans |
AD 444 | Death of Bleda |
AD 447 | Attila attacks Constantinople |
AD 451 | Huns invade Gaul |
AD 452 | Huns invade Italy |
AD 455 | Vandal ‘sack’ of Rome |
AD 476 | Last Western emperor deposed |
AD 477 | Gaiseric dies |
AD 489 | Ostrogoths take over Italy |
AD 496 | Clovis converts to Catholicism |
AD 507 | Franks conquer Visigoths |
AD 526 | Death of Theodoric |
AD 533 | Byzantine conquest of Africa |
AD 535 | Byzantine conquest of Ravenna |
INTRODUCING THE GOODIES AND BADDIES
WHO WERE THE BARBARIANS?
Nobody ever called themselves ‘barbarians’. It’s not that sort of word. It’s a word used about other people. In fact, it’s a term of otherness. It had been used by the Ancient Greeks to describe non-Greek people whose language they couldn’t understand and who therefore seemed to babble unintelligibly: ‘Ba ba ba’. The same word, Barbara, appears in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, meaning ‘stammering, gibbering’ – in other words, alien.
The Romans adopted the Greek word and used it to label (and usually libel) the peoples who surrounded their own world.
Once the term had the might and majesty of Rome behind it, the Roman interpretation became the only one that counted, and the peoples whom they called Barbarians became forever branded – be they Spaniards, Britons, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, Persians or Syrians. And of course ‘barbarian’ has become a by-word for the very opposite of everything we consider civilized. In contrast to the Romans, the Barbarians were lacking in refinement, primitive, ignorant, brutal, rapacious, destructive and cruel.
The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed, and the savage hordes over-ran the Empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilization was virtually snuffed out by the Barbarian hordes who swarmed across Europe, annihilating everything the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the Renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.
It’s a familiar story, but it’s codswallop.
The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law, its care for humanity or its sophisticated political culture. In fact, in all these areas it was equalled or even surpassed by peoples whom it conquered. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the world’s first professional army. Normal societies consisted of farmers, hunters, craftsmen and traders. When they needed to fight they relied not on training or on standardized weapons, but on psyching themselves up to acts of individual heroism. Seen through the eyes of people who possessed trained soldiers to fight for them, they were easily portrayed as simple savages. But that was far from the truth.
We actually owe far more to the so-called ‘barbarians’ than we do to the men in togas. And the fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths, the Visigoths and so on as ‘barbarians’ means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We are still letting the Romans define our world and our view of history.
In the last 30 years, however, the story has begun to change. Archaeological discoveries have shed new light on the ancient texts that have survived, and this has led to new interpretations of the past. We now know that the Roman Empire brought much of the development of science and mathematics to a grinding halt for about 1500 years, and that a great deal of what was known and achieved before Rome took over had to be relearned and rediscovered much more recently.
Rome used its army to eliminate the cultures that surrounded it, and paid its soldiers with the wealth it took from them. It ‘Romanized’ these conquered societies and left as little record of them as possible. The truth is that much of what we understand to be ‘Roman civilization’ was plundered from the Barbarian world. The Romans conquered with swords, shields, armour and artillery that were copied from the people they fought; their cities were built with the loot from the wealthier cultures that surrounded them; and as for the famous Roman roads, well, read on . . . Sadly, many of the engineering and scientific achievements of the Barbarian world were destroyed so completely that, even when evidence of them turned up, it was either disbelieved or the achievements attributed to the Romans themselves. Now, however, we are beginning to realize that the story of a descent from the light of Rome to the darkness of Barbarian dominion is completely false.
Of course, it was thoughtless of the Celts not to leave us anything much in the way of written records – they should have known that the lack of books putting forward their own propaganda would weight the evidence firmly in favour of the Romans. But even so, we shouldn’t believe everything the Romans tell us. Here, for example, is Julius Caesar’s considered opinion about elks. Elks, the great statesman and general informs us, are
destitute of horns, and have legs without joints and ligatures; nor do they lie down for the purpose of rest, nor, if they have been thrown down by any accident, can they raise or lift themselves up. Trees serve as beds to them; they lean themselves against them, and thus reclining only slightly, they take their rest; when the huntsmen have discovered from the footsteps of these animals whither they are accustomed to betake themselves, they either undermine all the trees at the roots, or cut into them so far that the upper part of the trees may appear to be left standing. When they [the elks] have leant upon them, according to their habit, they knock down by their weight the unsupported trees, and fall down themselves along with them.1
This interesting piece of zoological observation was solemnly repeated by the Greek geographer Strabo2 and the encyclopedist Pliny the Elder.3 It seems to be a confusion with an identical story about elephants told by Aristotle, and which, having also been repeated by Strabo, became part of the ‘standard truth’ about elephants right into the late seventeenth century, when Sir Thomas Browne complained that, even when people could see the animals perfectly clearly, and watch them kneel and stand, the determination to cling to the security of classical authorities made them deny what was in front of their own eyes.4
Just as people were prepared for centuries to deny that animals had knees even when they could see them, Western society’s enthusiasm since the Renaissance for all things Roman has persuaded us to see much of the past through Roman eyes even when contrary evidence stares us in the face. Of course, we now have a better working knowledge of elks than Julius Caesar had, but when it comes to Barbarians we still tend to accept his estimate of them – the estimate of a conqueror with an agenda to push.
But once we turn the picture upside-down and look at history from a non-Roman point of view, things start to look very different. For example, the Roman depiction of the Vandals gave us the term ‘vandalism’, and yet, as we shall see, the Vandals were highly moral, educated, literate and often a lot more civilized than the Romans.
The sacks of Rome by the Goths and Vandals were not great acts of destruction. The Goths destroyed only one building, the Vandals none at all. Both were armies of Christians. But the Roman Empire itself had already adopted a particular form of Christianity – Catholicism – and, being Rome, it was trying to impose this form of the religion on everyone else.
The Catholic Church triumphed, and – again in the great Roman tradition – did all it could to remake people and history as it wanted them. The Church decided which documents would survive and which would not: all our sources come to us from medieval Catholic copyists. So again, our picture of the past has been given to us in a very particular way.
This book is an attempt to reconsider the vast numbers of European and Asian peoples who have been written off as the villains of history – the Barbarians – and, at the same time, to re-evaluate those paragons of civilization: the all-conquering Romans.
WHO WERE THE ROMANS?
WELL, THEY WEREN’T BARBARIANS
Because the word ‘barbarian’, as we use it, is essentially a term that the Romans used to describe those who weren’t Roman, we have to start with Rome. The Romans had a very clear concept of themselves. They called it Romanitas or ‘Roman-ness’. It meant using the Latin language, respecting Latin literature, obeying Roman law and tradition, and even following the custom of having three names. Everyone else, everyone foreign, was a Barbarian and was to be feared.
Oddly enough, fear seems to have played a key role in the history of Rome, and despite the might and power of the Romans, there is something curiously desperate about their whole story. It’s almost as if the grandeur of Rome was born of paranoia and desperation. Another odd thing is that the major event in Roman history that kicked off this paranoia may never have happened at all – it may just have been a legend. But true or false, the great Roman historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) wrote it down, and his account became the standard historical text for every Roman ever afterwards. This was where Romans learned to fear the Barbarians.
THE STORY OF BRENNUS
In the late fourth century BC, when the city of Rome was beginning to dominate central Italy, a community of very different people crossed the Apennines from Gaul and settled on the Adriatic coast between what are now the towns of Rimini and Ancona. They were called the Senones, and they founded a town called Senigallia. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a great place for a beach holiday but not much use agriculturally. Their search for a better spot wasn’t easy – other Celts had already bagged the best places. So, in 390 BC, the Senones’ warriors turned up at the gates of Clusium (modern Chiusi, in Tuscany), ‘strange men in thousands . . . men the like of whom the townsfolk had never seen, outlandish warriors armed with strange weapons’.5 Clusium didn’t seem as well protected as the other places they’d tried, so these fearsome newcomers demanded they be given better land on which they could settle.
The inhabitants of Clusium appealed to Rome to help them negotiate, and the Romans duly sent three brothers from the Fabii family to act as arbitrators. According to Livy, when the Roman envoys asked the Celts what gave them the right to demand land from the people of Clusium, ‘the haughty answer was returned that they carried their right in their weapons, and that everything belonged to the brave’.6
The Fabii brothers were young, arrogant and not the most tactful negotiators in the world. They were, according to Livy, ‘envoys of a violent temper, more like Gauls than Romans’. In fact it was the Celts who seemed to have the greater respect for international law. When the talks broke down, the Fabii brothers joined the townsmen in fighting the Senones; one of the brothers, Quintus Fabius, even killed one of the Celtic chieftains. As both Livy and another historian, Plutarch, observed, it was ‘contrary to the law of nations’ for a negotiator to take arms to support one side against the other. The Senones were rightly outraged and decided to send their own ambassadors to Rome to complain.7
Unfortunately, the Fabii brothers belonged to a very powerful family, and when the Senate referred the matter to the people of Rome the brothers’ actions were endorsed and – to make matters worse – the Fabii were heaped with honours. The Celtic ambassadors warned the Romans that there would be repercussions and then withdrew to Clusium. There it was decided to teach these upstart Romans to respect international legalities in future. According to Plutarch, the army, under the command of Brennus, marched the 80 miles from Clusium to Rome in a highly orderly manner: ‘Contrary to expectation, they did no injury as they passed, nor took anything from the fields; and, as they went by any city, cried out that they were going to Rome; that the Romans only were their enemies, and that they took all others for their friends.’8
This ‘strange enemy from the ends of the earth’ then smashed the Roman army and swarmed through the city, burning and looting. Many Romans fled, and those who did not took refuge on the Capitoline Hill. Brennus and his army laid siege to them for six months, but finally agreed to withdraw in return for 1000 lb of gold.
Three hundred years later, Livy narrates the horror and the shame of that event, which was to haunt the Roman psyche for eight centuries: ‘Insult was added to what was already sufficiently disgraceful, for the weights which the Gauls brought for weighing the metal were heavier than standard, and when the Roman commander objected the insolent Barbarian flung his sword into the scale, saying “Vae Victis” – “Woe to the vanquished!”’9 Actually, what really seems to have got up Livy’s nose was the fact that the Celts had been bought off so cheaply. Imagine, he writes, 1000 lb of gold as ‘the price of a nation soon to rule the world’!
At the time, according to Livy, the Romans seriously considered abandoning their city. But they decided instead to rebuild it, and never again to be put in the shameful position of being the vanquished. The legend of Brennus became one of the motors driving Roman expansion. Out there were Barbarians, terrible savages, and Rome needed to strengthen its frontiers. Not just strengthen them, but push them away, further and further away, until eventually there would be no place left for Barbarians unless they had been thoroughly Romanized. From now on Rome would follow the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes to subdue all the peoples on its frontiers and thus make the Roman world safe from otherness.
Although we no longer believe that there are quadruped mammals without knees we still accept the Roman view of their world, in which the word ‘barbarians’ goes together with ‘hordes’. They painted a picture of themselves as civilized people whose Empire held at bay a world inhabited by incoherent tribes of violent savages.
The Roman legend begins with the story of Romulus and Remus, two lost babies who were suckled by a she-wolf. The Romans did not see that as a charming story; they meant to show that they had imbibed wolfish appetites and ferocity with their mothers’ milk. It’s time to ask what the world would be like if, instead of feeding them, the wolf had eaten Romulus and Remus. What if there had been no Rome?
What if there had been only Barbarians?
I
UNEARTHING THE CELTS
There was once a town called Alesia, in what is now central France. It was here that the French Celts, the Gauls, under their charismatic leader Vercingetorix – whose enduring memorial is, of course, his reincarnation as the French comic-book hero – made their last concerted stand against Julius Caesar’s legions. There is another monument to him: it is a huge statue of the Gallic hero, pensively looking over the remains of his city . . . except that the city he looks over isn’t Gallic – it’s Roman, with a theatre, temples and basilica. The town that Vercingetorix would have known has been squashed flat.
A few miles away, an archaeological museum celebrates the famous siege that was his downfall. The great, dominating exhibit is a reconstruction of the siege works built by Julius Caesar. Everywhere we look, the Celtic story has been buried under the heavy stones of Roman history.
The Romans imposed their mark all over Europe. Remains of aqueducts, amphitheatres, walls and roads carry their own message. Signs of the native cultures that inhabited the provinces before the Romans arrived are much harder to see, and it’s all too easy to assume that these societies were vastly inferior and were replaced by Progress and the superior civilization of Rome.
Part of this annihilation was deliberate policy. The Romans had learnt their lesson from the occupation of Brennus and his Celts in 390 BC, and that lesson was a simple one: woe to the vanquished! Might is right and military power is the only international law. The Romans had no problem demolishing whatever stood in their way.
But part of it was also acculturation: the Roman world possessed such mass that its gravity simply drew satellite cultures into its own orbit. In the Barbarian world, the rich and influential saw financial and political advantage in seeking Roman support, and began adopting Roman habits and building styles as signs of status. Some who were not so rich no doubt also longed to join the party. In this way, those who opposed Roman domination, and who tried to defend the traditional values of their own people, faced a double enemy: the one without and the one within. The parallels with the modern world are not hard to find.
The net result was a cultural eclipse that has made the real ancestors of modern Europe, the ancient Celts, hard to trace. Their place in history has been usurped by the might of the Roman Empire, and it is only recently that Celtic civilization has begun to be rediscovered. And it’s not at all what anyone expected.
CELTIC ROOTS
The Celts didn’t all think of themselves as Celts, any more than they thought of themselves as Barbarians. Some did. Julius Caesar tells us that the inhabitants of central France called themselves Celts. But we now apply the term to many more peoples than would have seen themselves as ‘Celtic’ in Caesar’s time.
Indeed, historians have recently begun to regard the word with dark suspicion, and with some reason.1 The term ‘Celtic’, in the way we understand the word today, was not coined until 1707, when a Welsh antiquary and naturalist by the name of Edward Lhuyd used it to identify Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Breton as a distinct group of languages.
Before that date, no inhabitants of the British Isles would have dreamt of calling themselves ‘Celtic’. But this does not mean that Lhuyd was barking mad; there was an identifiable and cohesive culture that existed over a large area of Europe, and even if those people who shared that culture were unaware of it at the time, it seems as reasonable to supply them with a group identity (now it has been recognized) as it is to refer to the people of the Stone Age as ‘Stone Age people’, even though they would undoubtedly have regarded themselves as ‘modern man’.
But before we go any further we need to rid our minds of the Mediterranean world-view, in which the warm centre of the universe is the sunny Med and a place like the Orkneys would be regarded as the end of the earth – a remote and inhospitable hinterland on the fringes of knowledge. That may have been how the Romans saw it, but the Celtic world – the world as the Celts themselves saw it – wasn’t necessarily like that at all.2
The World of the Atlantic Celts
Human communication in early times tended to evolve around water. The seaways and the rivers were the natural means of travel, especially when transporting heavy goods. Being a sea, the Mediterranean formed one such network of communication, but so too did the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. Rather than being a series of far-flung places on the fringe of the civilized world, the settlements of the Atlantic coast represented a network of interlinked societies.
This network goes back a very long way. As far back as the fourth millennium BC, polished stone axes made of diorite (magma that has solidified beneath the earth’s surface) from central Brittany were being manufactured and distributed on a massive scale. And radiocarbon dating has shown that the megalithic monuments of the Atlantic coastal region owe nothing to Mediterranean inspiration. It seems that there were closely related belief systems concerning the cosmos and death operating over this area from time immemorial, and that Portugal, southern Brittany, Ireland and the Orkney Isles were all centres of innovation that practised similar art and architecture.
In the past, the assumption was always that mass migrations of people accounted for the spread of such similarities, and that Celtic culture was carried by invading migrants from central Europe. More recently, however, archaeologists have suggested that cultures often spread via short sea voyages and river journeys, linking scattered and perhaps disparate communities in a network of trade and communication.
Back in prehistoric times, the Atlantic seaboard demonstrated a ‘stunning display of shared culture’.3 Neck ornaments made of gold mined in Ireland show up in Cornwall, Normandy and Brittany; neck-rings from southern Iberia are found in Brittany, northern Britain and Northern Ireland. It is our good fortune that these peoples had a rather odd habit: they were very keen on throwing a lot of their most valuable possessions into bogs and lakes or burying them in the ground. Whatever their reasons for such a flamboyant waste of resources, it does mean that we have some record of their world. Moving into the Iron Age, the common culture of the Atlantic coast becomes even more evident in the form of offerings of swords, shields and spears that demonstrate a shared value system and sometimes exhibit similarities of design.
So the culture and languages that we now designate as ‘Celtic’ might not have been brought to western Europe by invaders from the east, but may have been indigenous to the Atlantic seaboard. In other words, the Celts’ origins may lie in the coastal network of the Atlantic.
But rivers too were important routes of cultural transmission. That is why Celtic identity was also strong in west central Europe – in the regions north of the Alps, supplied by the great rivers Danube, Rhine, Rhone, Saone, Seine and Loire. We just don’t know which way the flow went.
We do know that from around 440 BC Celts from the Danube region started to cross the Alps and settle in northern Italy around Lakes Como and Maggiore. They also made a settlement in what is now Milan. Perhaps not surprisingly, our knowledge of the Celts improves as they begin to make contact with the thoroughly literate world of Classical antiquity.
HOW BARBAROUS WERE THE CELTS?
Much of our view of Iron Age Celts comes more from the Greeks than the Romans.4 Plato lumped them together with a whole lot of other Barbarians who were warlike and enjoyed getting totally legless. Binge drinking is a constant theme in descriptions of Celts over the next 800 years. Diodorus Siculus (‘the Sicilian’), writing in the first century BC, depicts the Celts as prototype lager louts – ‘wine wallies’ might be the more appropriate term. ‘They are,’ he tells us, ‘exceedingly addicted to the use of wine.’5 They don’t water it down as Greeks do, and they drink until ‘they fall into a stupor or a state of madness’.6 Sound familiar?
Obviously the Celts weren’t the sort of chaps any self-respecting Greek would invite around for dinner: ‘They look like wood-demons, their hair thick and shaggy like a horse’s mane. Some of them are clean-shaven, but others – especially those of high rank – shave their cheeks but leave a moustache that covers the whole mouth and, when they eat and drink, acts like a sieve, trapping particles of food.’7
What particularly shocked the conservative patricians of the Classical world was the vulgar way the Celts dressed: ‘The Gauls display a . . . love of ornament. They wear golden collars round their necks, and bracelets on their arms and wrists, and those of any status have garments dyed and embroidered with gold.’8 It’s easy to imagine the sober Romans in their plain white togas tut-tutting at all that foreign frippery! It was all evidence of a serious moral failing that would inevitably reveal itself in battle: ‘This lightness of character makes them intolerable when they conquer, and fills them with panic when things go wrong.’9
On the other hand, they weren’t to be treated too lightly – after all, they were head-hunters who went around ‘hanging the heads of their enemies from their horses’ necks on their return from battle, and then nailing them up on their gates for people to see’.10
What’s more, they were big! The Britons (whom Classical writers distinguish from the Celts) were particularly tall. Strabo saw them with his own eyes: ‘I myself, in Rome, saw mere lads towering as much as half a foot above the tallest people in the city,’ he states in some awe, but then hastily adds that there is no need for short but handsome Romans to envy them because apart from their height ‘they were bandy-legged and presented no fair lines anywhere else in their figure’.11
The Celts were also wildly aggressive and easily provoked: ‘The entire race . . . is warlike, passionate, and always ready for fighting . . . Anyone can enrage them when, where, and under whatever pretext he pleases . . .’ It sounds as if Celt-baiting must have been a regular Roman pastime. But on second thoughts, perhaps not: there were a lot of them! ‘Their power lies both in the size of their bodies and also in their large numbers.’12
Strabo, writing as he was in the first century BC, displayed a distinct nervousness about the Celts that is lacking in the earliest commentaries. Some 400 years before, his fellow Greeks didn’t seem to have anything to fear from the Celts. Hellanicus of Lesbos, a historian of the fifth century BC, described them as practising justice and righteousness’. In the next century the historian Ephorus described them as using ‘the same customs as the Greeks’ and being on very friendly terms with them.
All that changed in 279 BC, when Celts from the lower Danube launched a massive attack on Greece. We don’t really know why the Celts became more aggressive, if that is indeed what happened, but perhaps those ‘large numbers’ that Strabo talked about indicated an exploding population that forced the Celts to search for new territory. Or perhaps it was simply a cultural change. There seems no doubt that during this time some Celtic societies developed an heroic culture based on a warrior elite. Courage and honour became crucial, and gave the Greeks plenty to admire. Strabo praised their sense of duty to each other: ‘Their frankness and simplicity lead them to form mobs easily, everyone feeling indignant at what looks like injustice to his neighbour.’ But in the end this simplicity meant they could be defeated by a superior civilization: ‘They are simple and not malicious. If provoked, they rush in crowds to the fight, openly and without any caution; and thus are easily vanquished by those who employ strategy.’13
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Greeks began to sentimentalize the struggle of the Celts. The concept of the Dying Gaul became a theme of Greek sculpture, in which a well-muscled heroic youth with a golden torque around his neck gracefully expires from a sword-thrust. The Romans copied several of these in marble; a Dying Gaul is on show today in the Capitol.
The attitude of both Greeks and Romans appears somewhat patronizing, but then why not? After all, the Celts were in every way inferior, with poorer technology, fewer skills and less science and understanding. To us, looking through the hindsight of history, it seems inevitable that Rome should have triumphed against these brave but backward people.
But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.
CELTIC MILITARY TECHNOLOGY
In Roman eyes the Celts may have lacked battle strategy, but their arms and equipment were in no way inferior to the Roman army’s. In times past some of the Celts may have charged naked into battle, but by the first century BC they had become master armourers.
When the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix inflicted on Caesar his first military defeat in 53 BC, you might – if you were simply judging by appearances – have had a problem knowing who was who on the battlefield. There were chaps in Roman helmets, but they weren’t the Romans – they were the Gauls. The Romans were the ones in bronze hats with rather cute ponytails. They later copied the sturdier design of the Gallic helmet, with its characteristic cheek-guards.
And then again, the Celts had better shields than the Romans. ‘They have man-sized shields,’14 wrote Diodorus Siculus, ‘decorated in a manner peculiar to them. Some of these have projecting figures in bronze skilfully wrought not only for decoration but for protection.’ (Perhaps the first example of offensive decor?) The Romans were quick to adopt the Celtic style of shield and make it their own. They also copied a variety of Celtic weapons and adopted the Celtic names for them. The Latin for a light spear, lancea, was taken from the Gauls of Spain, the Celtic word materis became the Romans’ word for a javelin, and gaesum, meaning a long javelin, was also borrowed from the Celts.
When the Romans got to Britain they found another technological advance: chariots. It may seem odd to those of us brought up on Ben Hur that the Romans should have been surprised by chariots on the battlefield, but that was the case. It was the skill with which the Britons operated their chariots and the use they made of them that most impressed Caesar:
The way they fight with their chariots is this: they start by driving all over the battlefield hurling their javelins and generally the terror created by the horses and the noise of the wheels is enough to throw the enemy’s ranks into disorder . . . Thus they combine the mobility of cavalry with the staying-power of infantry; and by daily practice and training they become so proficient that, even on a steep slope, they are able to control the horses at full gallop, and to check and turn them around in a moment. They can run along the chariot pole, stand on the yoke, and get back into the chariot as quick as anything.15
All this was entirely new to the Roman troops: Caesar goes on to say that his men were ‘dismayed by the novelty of this mode of battle’, and that he was forced to retire from the field.
War chariots had been used long ago in the Near East, but had been replaced by cavalry. Roman chariots were either heavy, lumbering vehicles used for parades, or ultra-lightweight, specialized race vehicles. The Britons, however, had made significant design improvements and, as Caesar notes, had thoroughly mastered the art of using them. Yet despite the evidence, horse-drawn chariots are an essential part of the myth of Roman superiority. Collins’ English Dictionary, for example, defines ‘chariot’ as ‘a two-wheeled horse-drawn vehicle used in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome etc . . .’ The Britons don’t get a mention. And yet it was actually the Celts who were leaders in the development of wheeled transport.
The grave goods included in burials are a good sign of what mattered to people, and rich Celtic burials sometimes included a wagon and a huge jar for holding drink. For example, there’s a tomb-chamber at Hochdorf in south-west Germany, dating from about the fifth century BC. The dead man fits Strabo’s description of the Celts as big, powerful warriors – he’s 6 feet 2 inches tall – and he lies on a huge bronze couch beneath walls hung with fabrics. He must have been a formidable warrior – except that there are no weapons in here except a dagger. The grave contains only a huge cauldron for mead, drinking horns and a wagon that takes up almost half the chamber.16
The Romans seem to have adopted their wheeled transport from the Celts. At any rate, that’s what the linguistic evidence suggests. Although the earlier inhabitants of Italy, the Etruscans, did have wheeled vehicles, the wheel rims were fragile – they were made by joining sections together with dowels. The Celts invented a way to make the whole rim out of a single piece of heat-bent wood. In Asia, iron was fastened to the rim to strengthen it, but the Celts’ skill with iron-work allowed them to shrink a complete iron tyre on to the wheel, making it even stronger and more reliable.17 So the Latin word for a two-wheeled cart, carpentum, was imported from the Old Celtic. It survives in modern English as ‘carpenter’. And a whole raft of other words for different kinds of carriages and wagons entered the Latin language from Celtic: carruca, carrus, essedum, reda, petorritum, covinarius, plaustrum.
Even the Latin for horse, caballus, seems to have come from the Celtic, giving us eventually the English words ‘cavalry’ and ‘cavalier’. And, as the coup de grâce, the Latin word for a league, leuca, originated with the Celts.
WHO BUILT THE ROADS?
So how come the Romans built roads and the Celts didn’t? Well, the answer is simple. The Celts did build roads. We know about them only because of ones that have survived in locations where no Roman road was put on top. These Celtic roads were made of wood and laid across bogland into which they have sunk over the centuries and thus been preserved.
As usual, the ‘Romans-were-greatest’ version of history made the earlier roads invisible until very recently. One of the best-preserved Iron Age roads is at Corlea in Ireland, but it was not until the 1980s that people realized how old it is. It was known locally as ‘The Danes’ Road’, and generally assumed to be of the Viking period or later. It wasn’t until the timbers were submitted for tree-ring dating that the truth emerged: they were cut in 148 BC.
But the really startling thing is that wooden roads built the same way and at the same time have been found right across Europe, as far away as northern Germany. The Celts, it seems, were sophisticated road-builders, and the construction of these wooden roads was no mean feat of engineering. Oak planks were laid on birch runners, and they were built broad enough for two carts to pass each other. What’s more, Celtic road-building is not necessarily predated by that of the Romans. The first Roman road was the Appian Way, built in 312 BC, but the so-called ‘Upton Track’ in South Wales, a wooden road laid across the mudflats along the Severn estuary, dates back to the fifth century BC.
And now we call Roman roads ‘roads’, and the surviving Celtic roads ‘causeways’ or ‘trackways’ – not roads at all, just some Barbarian track.
THE FALLACY OF TEXTS
One of the main reasons why we tend to see Celts as ‘barbaric’ and Romans as ‘civilized’ is that we have so much written material in Latin and virtually nothing in Celtic. No Celtic books, poems, works of science or literature have survived from the Iron Age (by which we mean before being taken over by Rome). But that is in itself misleading because hardly any Roman texts have survived either. We don’t have Latin manuscripts from the time of Caesar: the oldest surviving text of Caesar’s Gallic Wars was copied out 1000 years later.
The Catholic Church originally devoted itself to stamping out paganism – the one remaining bronze statue of a pre-Christian emperor, Marcus Aurelius, survived only because the image was mistakenly thought to be that of a Christian. Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) tried to suppress the works of Cicero and is said to have burnt all manuscripts of Livy that he could lay hands on.18 But monks in monasteries did painstakingly copy out the writers that they approved of. That’s how we know about Roman authors. Even then, only fragments survived of those medieval manuscripts, to be recopied in later centuries.
We would know even less if it hadn’t been for the Irish. There seems to have been a flight of intellectuals from Gaul to Ireland in the fifth century AD19