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IN THE 50S BC, Julius Caesar conducted a brutal sequence of campaigns against the tribes of ancient Gaul. On the pretext of curbing an imminent barbarian threat to the Roman Republic – one of Europe’s first migrant crises – he first defeated and decimated the Helvetii tribe, before going on to subjugate the other Celtic peoples who occupied the territory of what is now France. By the time the Gallic commander-in-chief Vercingetorix laid his weapons at Caesar’s feet at Alesia in 52 BC, most of Gaul had been tamed.

Caesar laid Gallic civilization to waste, but within half a century of the conquest the Romans had begun to remake Gaul in their own image. They introduced Roman notions of cities and civic life: triumphal arches, forums, amphitheatres and temples sprang up in new urban centres such as Lugdunum (Lyon) and Arelate (Arles). Celtic chieftains exchanged their quarrels (and their trousers) for togas, worshipping Roman gods, taking on Roman names and learning Latin. Away from the towns and cities, elegant villas replaced simple Gallic farmsteads. The vine and the olive spread across the land. In this Gallo-Roman soil, the seeds of modern European civilization took root and flourished.

From Marseille to Mulhouse, from Orleans to Autun, and from Geneva to Gergovia, Bijan Omrani makes a revelatory journey across Gaul in the footsteps of its Roman conquerors. Fusing authoritative historical narrative and analysis with atmospheric evocations of place, he tells the story of Caesar’s Gallic Wars and traces the indelible imprint on modern France of the Gallo-Roman civilization that emerged in their wake.

Frontispiece

The Amphitheatre at Nîmes. Like that of Arles, it was built around AD 70, and was converted into a fortification by the time of the Visigoths. It functioned as a town in its own right, until being restored to its more recognizably Roman form (and function), for bullfights and other public spectacles, in the mid-nineteenth century.

List of Maps

Maps 2–5, together with the map that appears in the endpapers, were prepared by Colonel Stoffel in the 1860s during the archaeological investigations ordered by Napoleon III into the Gallic conquests of Caesar. They were first included in Napoleon III’s Histoire de Jules César, published in 1866.

A Note on Terminology

The use of the words ‘Celtic’, ‘Gaul’ and ‘Gallic’ caused considerable difficulty to classical authors, who could not agree on their exact meanings. There was a debate as to whether all Gauls were Celts, or whether they were mutually exclusive, and whether the term Gallic should be used to denote just those peoples living in the southern and western areas of modern-day France (as opposed to those who lived in the Belgic or Aquitanian regions). This difficulty exists as much for contemporary authors. For simplicity, I use the word ‘Gauls’ to describe those people who lived in the area designated by Julius Caesar as Gaul.

Another challenge is the use of ancient and modern place names. Here, I make no great claims to consistency. In general, I have tended to use ancient place names when talking about the places in the Roman context. However, this is not always the case. For example, I have stuck with Autun rather than persistently using the lengthy ancient name of Augustodunum. Both ancient and modern names of places are given in the index for clarity.

Engraving of the Pont du Gard by Charles-Louis Clérisseau, 1804; wikimedia commons

The tribes of Gaul at the time of Caesar

Introduction

THE IDEA FOR WRITING THIS BOOK came to me a few years ago, while I was teaching a Latin lesson. It was a Wednesday morning deep in the winter term, period two. I was conducting a Latin language session with a bright but not especially motivated lower sixth. The unfortunate fodder for this exercise was the fifth book of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, describing his conquest of Gaul between 58 and 50 BC.

There was something almost ritualized about the pupils’ misery during these sessions. The use of Caesar as fodder for teenage children to take their first steps in translating ‘real’ Latin, after leaving behind the safety of language textbooks, is an ancient tradition. Say ‘Caesar’ to anyone who has been subjected to an education containing a classical component, and there are two likely reactions. One the one hand, a cheerful reminiscence of how good Caesar was for them: how wonderfully hard his writing worked their brain, as if his dialogues were specifically designed – like some formidable fibre-laced breakfast cereal – to improve their cerebral motions. On the other, a cross-eyed stab of agony, like thinking back to a mental version of the Somme, where all was muddy quagmire and barbed-wire entanglements formed of indirect statements enmeshed with ablative absolutes and gerundives of obligation. My lower sixth form class was very much in the latter camp.

I hated it that, for generations of schoolchildren, this was the miserable end to which Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars was put. During that lesson, as someone, floundering in a particularly long and vicious stretch of oratio obliqua,1 paused and expressed his total disgust for Caesar, The Gallic Wars and the whole exercise, I felt compelled to pause and make a defence, if not of using Caesar for grammar bashing, then at least of Caesar’s writing. It was, I pleaded, rather more than a random tale of legions being marched and legates being dispatched. The text stood as an extraordinary account of the very foundation of modern Europe: for it was by taking the heartlands of Gaul under their control that the Romans introduced the culture of the Latin Mediterranean to the European north. Without this conquest – which was not a historical inevitability, and which was undertaken on the spur of the moment because of Caesar’s own political circumstances and all-consuming ambition – the Roman empire would likely never have had the reach or staying power that it attained. The modern languages of Europe would probably have been more Celtic than Latinate in nature. The literary classics of Virgil, Cicero and Ovid, and the masterpieces of ancient Greek literature that influenced them, might not have had such a profound impact on the Western tradition. The same is the case for classical ideas of philosophy, law, rhetoric, music and architecture. Christianity likewise would perhaps never have penetrated Europe as deeply as would prove to be the case. Without Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, the map of modern Europe would look entirely different. There would have been no European neurosis springing from the memory of the barbarian invasions across the Rhine in the fifth century AD; no Charlemagne; no modern state of France; no Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – and very little likelihood that we would have been sitting in that classroom reading a classic work of Latin literature on a cold Wednesday morning.

I expressed myself largely and eloquently. My class essentially told me to sod off. Not one to give up on a fight with my students, I determined then that I would do something to save Caesar from the slough of grammar and syntactical misery to which he – perhaps as fitting punishment from the Furies for the Olympian scale of his ambition – had been condemned.

Modern interest in Caesar tends to concentrate on what he did in Rome rather than on what he did in Gaul. It is the political intrigue that marked his rise to prominence and his victory in the civil war, and the period that led up to his assassination, that captures the twenty-first-century imagination. His time in Gaul, and his bloody activities there, are by contrast relegated to the classroom, and the wretchedness of grammatical exercises for reluctant schoolchildren. My aim in writing this book is to redress the balance: to place centre stage what Caesar – and the Romans who followed him – achieved in Gaul, and to explore their lasting and highly visible cultural legacy.

The purpose of this book is not to give a military account of Caesar’s time in Gaul; nor, indeed, is it exclusively devoted to Caesar. There are many excellent works that already fill this niche. It is intended rather to examine the circumstances that led to the Roman conquest of Gaul, and to consider the reasons why, after the initial bloodletting of the Gallic Wars, it would prove to be such a long-term success: how the Roman transformation of Gaul laid the foundations of modern Europe. It therefore looks at the history of the engagement of Rome and Gaul and the cultural and economic impact of that connection. Physical evidence of this can still be seen on the ground, and parts of the book are devoted to the surviving vestiges of Roman Gaul – amphitheatres, aqueducts, triumphal arches, temples and mausoleums. I will also trace the impact of Roman Gaul on cultural ideas, literary remains and religious traditions.

The question as to how Rome managed to knit Gaul to itself so effectively that it remained a part of the empire for half a millennium has an enduring relevance. In an age in which the aspiration for European unity looks increasingly chimerical despite the blessings of technology and the modern era, it is instructive to look back to when this ideal, under Rome, was first born, how it was brought about and what – in the example of Gaul – was its cost. It is tied up in questions not just of material change, but also culture, and in particular how Rome dealt with outsiders and migration. The Roman movement into Gaul was arguably born as a response to the first European migration crisis for which we possess an eye-witness account (however slanted it may be). To describe Caesar and the conquest of Gaul is also to describe how Rome treated the ‘barbarian other’. And this demands that we look at Caesar not just as a grammatical exercise, but as the brooding presence – the ‘vast ghost’ in the words of Lawrence Durrell – that still hangs over a Europe which struggles to be at one.

1 Indirect speech. For example, ‘Magister est stupidus’ (The teacher is stupid) is direct speech. ‘Putat magistrum stupidum esse’ (He thinks that the teacher is stupid) is indirect speech.

Detail of the Vix Krater, c. sixth century BC.

CHAPTER I

Gaul Before Caesar

OUR STORY BEGINS IN THE OLD port of Marseilles, where the masts of a vast fleet of sailing boats are reflected, ribbon-like, in the opalescent water. These are the same waters that lap at the harbour walls of cities across the length and breadth of the Middle Sea: Ajaccio, Genoa, Algiers, Athens, Alexandria. Water, boats and masts seem to vaporize in the heat, suspended in a haze of ochre and peach dust above the grand frontages measuring the length of the quay. At the traffic lights, a figure in a brown chador washes windscreens for a handful of cents. In a shuttered doorway, sitting on a sleeping bag, an Arab man skins plastic from copper cables with a crooked knife, his young son curled up beside him on a bed of cardboard and dirty cushions.

Their origins may lie elsewhere, but Marseilles is their city. Just as, east of the city, the limestone cliffs of the Massif des Calanques shelter a diverse array of herbs and flowers, so Marseilles has always provided a refuge for new arrivals from foreign shores. A curtain of low mountains – the Garlaban and Massif de l’Étoile – is draped beyond the city’s suburban shoulder like a protective cowl, shielding it from the suspicions of the north. Marseilles was founded not by Romans but by Greeks: it is, therefore, older than Caesar, though not older than Rome. But it was a place of wealth and taste long before Rome made its mark on the wider world. It had no great aspirations to empire or dominion like Rome, no serious martial tradition, but was happy, like Venice after it, to cling to a redoubt in a hostile hinterland – so long as it could make money as a middleman from trading upon the sea.

But, in truth, this city is a cousin to Rome. They are alike in the stories of their birth. They were early friends. They shared their fears, neuroses and hypocrisies. It was through Marseilles that the culture of the Mediterranean made its original entry into Gaul and so into northern Europe. Marseilles prepared the way for the coming of Caesar and the Romans, and presaged the mindset that drew Caesar into conquest. To understand the lure and the myth of the ground that Caesar would tread in Gaul, we must first understand Marseilles.

They came in search of a better life. Their original home, the Ionian Greek city of Phocaea, lay far to the east, clinging to the rocky scourings off the coast of Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, north of Izmir. The land was crowded, stony and infertile. The Phocaeans thus became accustomed – according to the Gallo-Roman historian Pompeius Trogus, writing in the first century BC – to wandering and making a living from the sea. They were the first of all the Greeks, so Herodotus says, to make long journeys on the Mediterranean for the sake of trade. They conducted business past the Hellespont in the north, Egypt in the south, and Spain in the west. But the demographic pressures on their native city led many of them not just to travel, but to abandon Phocaea altogether and settle elsewhere. Some of their colonies, such as Lampascus in the Dardanelles, were close to home; others – Aléria in Corsica or Empúries in Catalonia – were far away. The first wave of Phocaean migration, at the end of the seventh century BC and early in the sixth, was voluntary; the second, in the middle of the sixth, came about as a result of war. Cyrus, king of Persia, determined to seize the Greek hinterland in Asia Minor and captured Phocaea in 546 BC; its entire population fled.

Marseilles was born of the first wave of Greek migration, and augmented by the second. Gaul would not have been completely unfamiliar to the Phocaeans, but it was certainly replete with mystery and danger. The tenth labour of Heracles1 – to kill Geryon, the three-bodied giant, and steal his cattle – led him to traverse the coast of the Mediterranean through Spain and southern Gaul. The land even bore the scars of his journey: chased by the Ligurian tribes, Heracles was aided by his father Zeus, who flung rocks from the sky at his pursuers to cover his escape. According to local legend, the rocks that Zeus threw can still be seen in the dry, stony landscape around the town of Saint-Martin-de-Crau near the mouth of the Rhône. Closer to the Phocaeans’ own experience, the Phoenicians of the Levant, the Etruscans from northern Italy and other Ionian Greeks had – over a number of centuries – carried on a fitful trade with the coast-dwellers of southern Gaul, but there was no sign that they had put down a permanent presence.

The Phocaeans were to change this. At the beginning of the sixth century BC, according to Trogus, Phocaean ships sailed into the mouth of the Rhône and found it to be an inviting place. Quite apart from its favourable location, at the hub of a trading route that could stretch from the furthest reaches of the Mediterranean, via the river Rhône, into the unexplored interior of Gaul, there were safe natural harbours and fine stretches of pleasant land protected by an encircling wall of hills.

Attracted by promising reports from these early visitors to southern Gaul, a fleet of migrants assembled in Phocaea. Its captains were Protis and Simos. They crossed the sea safely and arrived at the mouth of the Rhône, but they still had to win the right to settle the territory. The inhabitants of the area were the Segobrigii, whose king was Nannus. The legend of the coming of the Phocaeans is recounted not only by Trogus but also by Aristotle. They arrived on the very day that Nannus had appointed for his daughter, Gyptis, to be betrothed. When they approached Nannus to ask him for land on which to settle, the Greek captains found themselves invited to the nuptial festivities.

It was the custom at these events for the bride herself to choose whom she would marry. The suitors would gather, and the bride would parade around them clutching a goblet of water, or wine, says Aristotle, before finally giving it to the man she wished to be her husband. That night, after the local chiefs had assembled with the newcomers in their midst, they were astonished when Gyptis handed the goblet to Protis. Nannus, believing that a god had guided her choice, did not stand in her way, and granted the Greek migrants the site of Marseilles, then called Massalia.

Remains of the ancient Greek and Roman port of Massalia, now silted up a few streets inland from Marseilles’ old port.

Trogus’s account of the legend is broadly similar to that of his Greek predecessor, but Aristotle gives the protagonists different names. In Aristotle’s version, Protis was the son born of the marriage of the Greek newcomer and the daughter of the native king; the Greek captain’s original name was Euxenus, meaning ‘good stranger’; while the king’s daughter was Petta (although she changed her name to Aristoxena – ‘best stranger’ – on marrying Euxenus). The descendants of Protis still constituted a noble family in Massalia when Aristotle was writing in the fourth century BC. Whatever the truth of the legend of the marriage, the kernel of the story suggests that a union between the migrants and the native inhabitants took place at the moment of Massalia’s foundation.

The city was a great success. Standing in the ancient harbour of Massalia, now silted up a few streets inland from the old port, it is difficult to envisage the prosperity of the early days of the Greek colony. One cannot see the theatre or the temples the Phocaeans built nearby for their migrant gods, Artemis and Apollo. The harbour walls, water tanks and tower bases built of well-squared Roman blocks overtop the Greek originals of the earliest generations; it is only beneath the elegantly grooved Cassis2 stone slabs on the Roman roadway leading from the quayside that traces of the sixth-century Greek road, which lies below the Grand-Rue of the modern city, can be discerned.

To see the early success of the colony, one must look beyond the city to wider Gaul and to the impact that the Greek presence had on the tribes deep in the Gallic heartland. In the sixth century BC, the interior of Gaul was under the sway of a proto-Celtic society – the Hallstatt culture, as it is conventionally termed by archaeologists. It was a society of the warrior chieftain. It possessed a special skill in metalwork, particularly iron, and the manufacture of weapons. The highest members of its aristocracy, perhaps ultimately migrants from the eastern steppes, were buried in timber chambers beneath tumuli, laid out on four-wheeled chariots decked in bronze. They displayed their power through ownership of an abundance of rare and exotic goods, which they could freely distribute to enhance their prestige and also attract new followers. It was the presence of the Greeks that gave them access to these desirable items, and even prompted them to develop this hierarchical society. Greek traders, with their links to the ateliers in the east, brought luxuries to Massalia and from there they were transported along the Rhône and Saône to the deep heartlands of Gaul. Perhaps in return for tin, or iron, or slaves, the noble classes were able to secure fine examples of Greek workmanship as tokens of their own authority.

By examining some of the archaeological finds of this age, it is possible to imagine how Gallic tribesmen might have reacted when they first set eyes on the luxury imports of the Greeks. For a vignette, let us set the date at 520 BC, at a Gallic settlement on the flat-topped hill of Mont Lassois by the upper reaches of the Seine in northeastern Burgundy. A number of boxes have been brought up the hill into the camp of wooden huts and palisades. The boxes contain together just one item, but being a heavy import, it is flat-packed for self-assembly. Fortunately, there are instructions – scratched-on Greek letters, indicating which part should be joined to which. As the tribesmen labour to join the pieces together – handles, stand, cover – the item takes shape. It is not easy work. The item is metal, refulgent hammered bronze, weighing over 200 kilograms, with individual components of as much as 60 kilograms. When finished, it stands at least as high as the tribesmen, at 1.6 metres (5 foot 4 inches). This is no simple bookshelf or bedstead, but a colossal 1,200-litre wine cauldron, or krater. It is the largest such item known from the ancient world, and is intricately and skilfully worked. Gorgons, menacing, with snakes in their hair and tongues sticking out through grimacing smiles, glare from the handles, as do rampant lions, their muscles taut and claws digging into the metalwork, while their tails echo in their curve the elegant whorls and scrolls chased into the rim and the volutes of the handles. In a band below the rim that runs the whole circumference of the krater, Greek soldiers, hoplites, march in an endless parade. They are naked save for great fan-crested helmets (whose plumage reaches down to their waist), greaves and round, dish-like shields strapped to their left arms. Some ride on chariots whose horses, ambling and stately, peer inquisitively at the new owners of the krater.

The tribesmen, who then had no native tradition of sculpture, would have felt similarly curious. They would have recognized and appreciated the chariots, but the panoply of Greek art and decorations – and the complex religious and social ideas that they expressed – would have been quite incomprehensible to them at this point in time. In a classical Greek context, such a krater would have been used for mixing wine and water at a symposium, or drinking party, where the atmosphere would have been that of easy aristocratic conviviality. In the Gallic context, however – to judge from investigations of other such kraters dating from sixth-century BC Gaul – it seems more likely they were used for mead, not wine. Their role in Gallic feasting was not simply as a drinking vessel, but to impress on the guests the power of the owner: they expressed hierarchy, not conviviality. They might even have had a religious function. In the very earliest stratum of Greek culture, the cauldron was associated with death and rebirth, a symbol of the abundant power of nature for regeneration. Such profundities were less likely to occupy the mind of a Greek party-goer of the sixth century BC, but these ideas were also indigenous to Celtic culture, and visible in surviving Celtic mythology.3 Perhaps it was for the power of its religious symbolism that the cauldron was put to its final use, to accompany a lady of high status to the grave.

When the krater, now named the Vix Krater after the village nearest to the grave, was discovered in 1953, it provided compelling evidence of the impact of the Greek newcomers on the interior of Gaul in those early times. They had not at that stage brought about a fundamental change in culture, but they had introduced a material presence that would gradually affect Gaul in myriad ways. Following the import of kraters and ceramic items, Greek methods were introduced into construction, agriculture and the arts. Solid buildings were built, with mud bricks on top of stone bases. Even on Mont Lassois, huge structures of wood but in imitation of Greek halls, or megara, were erected. In the areas near Massalia, the olive and vine began to be cultivated. Local productions of ceramics in imitation of the Greek imports began. Silver coins, like those of the Greeks, were struck. The Greek alphabet was tentatively used for inscriptions in the local languages. Motifs from Greek art were taken up by indigenous artists: the figures and patterns from the imported wares formed the basis for the familiar style of what became known as Celtic art.

At the end of the sixth century BC there was an apparent breakdown in trade along the Rhône, as Etruscan rivals began to compete for business in the interior of Gaul using overland routes from northern Italy. Sites like Mont Lassois were abandoned, and Massalia turned its attention more to the southern coast of Gaul. The colony spawned a cluster of daughter colonies during the fifth century BC – Nice, Antibes, Agde, Monaco – increasing the Greek cultural presence in the south and marking a divergence from the northern interior. ‘Such a radiance was shed over both men and things’, writes Pompeius Trogus, ‘that it was not Greece which seemed to have immigrated into Gaul, but Gaul that seemed to have been transplanted into Greece’.

The Gauls had given the Phocaeans refuge and permitted them to found Massalia, but they were nonetheless uneasy. Trogus relates that a subject complained to the king of the Segobrigii by telling him the following fable: ‘A bitch once asked a shepherd, when she was pregnant, for a place to give birth to her puppies. When he agreed, she asked again to be allowed to bring them up in the same place. Later, when her puppies were grown up, and she could depend upon their support, she seized the place as her own.’ In such a way, the subject continued, ‘the people of Marseilles, who are now regarded as your tenants, will one day become masters of your territory’.

The king began to fear. The immigrants were now too powerful to expel by open warfare, so he decided on a plot to remove them. Some of his strongest warriors would enter Massalia openly, as friends to the newcomers, to join in a festival. Others would lie concealed in carts, covered with baskets and branches. The king himself would hide with an army in the hills outside the city, waiting for the moment when – as the Massalians slept off the day’s carousing – his agents within the city would throw open the gates. But, after the plot was set, one of the king’s relatives told her Massalian lover what was afoot, and he rushed to alert the city authorities. The alarm was sounded. The Massalians, putting their celebrations on hold, scoured the city, rooting out and killing the intruders, before marching out of the city and destroying the army that was ready to trap them; even the king of the Segobrigii was killed. Thus did a reprise of the Trojan horse fail to overcome the Greeks.

This was not the only battle the Massalians had to fight. There were skirmishes in the sixth century BC with the north African city-state of Carthage, then the dominant naval power in the western Mediterranean, and their north Italian allies the Etruscans. Massalia and Carthage clashed over the capture of fishing vessels and perhaps the liberty of trade within Gaul itself. But it was on the landward side that the danger to the Greek colony was perhaps the greatest. Sometime before the end of the fifth century, Massalia was besieged by a large army of Gauls under a prince named Catumandus. It appears that, in response to Massalia’s ever-growing prosperity, the neighbouring tribes had come together under Catumandus’s banner/leadership. The legend of how Massalia came to be saved on this occasion, again recorded by Trogus, is telling. One night during the siege, when Catumandus was asleep outside the city walls, he saw a vision of a fearsome-looking woman. She told him she was a goddess, and ordered him to make peace with Massalia. Terrified, he begged the Massalians to allow him to enter the city by himself to worship their gods. As he came into one of the unfamiliar temples he saw, in a portico, a statue of Athena. Recognizing her as the goddess who had appeared in his sleep, he told the Massalians of his dream, and said that, since they were under the protection of the gods, he would leave them in peace. Before departing, he left what must have seemed to the onlookers a barbarous offering on her shrine: a Gallic neck torque, laid in submission to the most Greek of goddesses.

It is difficult to believe that the Gauls were easy neighbours for the Greek incomers. Some scholars, it is true, do not hold to this opinion. They observe that the stories portraying the Gauls as barbarous warriors who terrified their opponents are seen only in texts after the third century BC, particularly following wide-ranging Gallic attacks on Delphi and Asia Minor (Trogus was writing in the first century AD). They also point out that the Gauls bought goods from the Greeks, and began over time to imitate Greek ways. However, the Gauls used many of those Greek ways and ideas in a fashion that the latter must have found unnervingly beyond their cultural comprehension. The Gauls scarcely ever received good press among Greek authors based in mainland Greece. Authors such as Aristotle asserted that the Gauls were warlike, obsessed with drinking, cruel to their children for the sake of toughening them for battle, and bold to the point of irrationality. It might be easy to dismiss such writings as the projection of cultural clichés on a distant other. But setting eyes on some of the remains, one wonders if these Greek writings had more than a modicum of truth in them.

In the centre of St-Rémy-de-Provence, a dozen miles south of Avignon, stands a complex of Roman baths. Its walls are mostly intact, though the ancient buildings have been integrated into a warren of tall and handsome Renaissance townhouses. The little square outside is filled with tubs of white flowers. It was near here, in the Asylum of St Paul about a mile outside the town, in the midst of wide olive groves, that Vincent van Gogh spent the last months of his life. But in the inner recesses of the baths, which now house a selection of the archaeological finds from the nearby Gallic settlement of Glanum – a town based around a healing spring that fell strongly under the Greek influence of Massalia – is an item that speaks of more than a severed ear. Next to a storeroom, laid out on packing crates, is a stone door lintel from Glanum. From a cursory glance, one might think it an unremarkable Greek or Roman relic. The surface is well-squared, although battered by time, and topped with finely carved egg and dart mouldings. More arresting, however, are the six visible head-shaped niches gouged into the polite Greek stonework. These niches were, indeed, for heads. A Greek scholar, Posidonius, who travelled in Gaul at the end of the second century BC, records his difficulty in getting used to the sight of severed human heads on public display. On occasion they were strung like beads on a bracelet to adorn the neck of a horse, or preserved in linseed oil and kept in store chests to be proudly brought out on special occasions. Sometimes they even served practical uses. Livy writes that in 215 BC, the general Lucius Postumus, who was campaigning in Gallia Cisalpina, was captured and killed by members of the Gallic Boii tribe who then proceeded to clean out his skull, cover the scalp with beaten gold, and use it as a drinking vessel. No Gaul would want to part with the heads that they had won or inherited. They were marks of success in war, and a sign of the endemic competitiveness between Gallic warriors for the greatest glory in battle. Examples of lintels and pillars for displaying heads have been found at Roquepertuse and Entremont, sometimes with the skulls of the victims themselves pierced with iron spikes to secure them to the display space. The custom of exhibiting the severed heads of enemies would have been deep rooted when the Greeks arrived, and remained the norm even in the area close to ‘civilized’ Massalia throughout the Greek period. For all the willingness of the Gauls to adopt Greek artistic and architectural styles, Greek consciousness of the Gallic proclivity for head-hunting must have induced a fear of their underlying bellicosity, a primal terror of the brutalities they were capable of inflicting.

The ‘Terror Gallicus’ was the abiding impression that the Gauls left behind after their first encounter with the Romans. And it was an encounter that very nearly led to Rome’s early extinction.

The Celtic Gauls, according to some accounts, were first present in the north of Italy as early as the sixth century BC. A grave stele found at Bologna, dating to the fifth century BC and depicting an Etruscan on horseback in combat with a characteristically naked Celt, suggests that Gallic warrior bands had taken up residence south of the Alps by this time. However, the first major incursion of Gauls into Italy appears to have taken place in the fourth century BC.

The ancient historians offer various explanations for their arrival. One reason given is the desire of deprived northerners for the luxuries of the south. According to Pliny the Elder, a Gallic craftsman from Switzerland who lived in Rome for a time sent back to his homeland dried figs and grapes, as well as samples of olive oil and wine. ‘We may offer some excuse, then, for them, when we know that they came in quest of these various productions, though even at the price of war,’ remarks Pliny indulgently. Livy reports a legend that one citizen of an Italian town sent presents of wine to Gallic warriors to lure them south of the Alps; once they arrived, he hoped to employ them to rid himself of an otherwise untouchable local dignitary who had been sleeping with his wife.

Perhaps the vintages of the south were indeed one of the leading attractions for the Gauls. However, the ancient historians acknowledge that there was more to their movements than this alone. Both Polybius and Livy (writing respectively in the second and first centuries BC) state that, as was the case with the Greek migration from Phocaea, Gallic migrations into northern Italy were triggered primarily by overpopulation in the Gallic heartlands. Livy explicitly recognizes the analogy between the southward movement of the Gauls and the northward movement of the Phocaeans. Placing the movements at the same time in the sixth century BC, he says that the wandering Gauls took the migration of the Phocaeans to Massalia as a good omen, and that each helped the other in their journey. To explain the circumstances of the Gallic migration, Livy tells the tale of one of the most powerful kings in Gaul, who had been so successful and had obtained so many followers that his kingdom had become overpopulated and difficult to manage. As he himself was growing old, he ordered his two nephews to set out in search of new kingdoms. He told them to take as many followers as they needed to overcome any opposition they might encounter on their journey. The nephews looked to heaven for signs indicating which way they should take: the less fortunate of the two found himself heading for the uplands of southern Germany; the other was assigned ‘the much pleasanter road’ to Italy.

This legend may reflect part of a wider truth. Archaeological evidence suggests that there was a rapid depopulation in Champagne and around the upper stretches of the Marne at the beginning of the fourth century BC. This was the starting point for an established route that led south, via the Rhine, to the Great St Bernard Pass and across the Alps. However, Livy’s legend may also reflect an economic impetus behind the Gauls’ southward migration. As has been said, Gallic chiefs relied on abundant wealth for their prestige. Aside from sporadic trade, the other source of such wealth was raiding. A successful chief who had gained a large entourage of warriors after a spell of local raiding would be compelled to raid further afield to support them. As the quantity of plunder increased and the warrior entourage swelled in number, the chief was caught in a vicious cycle of success. He had to lead his ever-increasing band of followers further and further afield to win sufficient plunder to maintain his authority and prestige. Eventually, the raids necessary to sustain him covered such a distance that they took on the character of a sudden long-distance exodus. Whether or not it was such an imperative that led the Gauls into Italy, the Gallic culture of raiding goes some way to explain the character of the first encounter between the Gallic migrants and Rome.

Classical authors spoke admiringly of the movement of the Phocaeans and the foundation of Massalia. It represented, among other things, an extension of the Hellenic world, and hence civilization. Aristotle himself wrote a work in praise of the constitution of Massalia. But the movement of the Gauls south into Italy was not so well regarded. By about 400 BC, the Gallic migrants had established a number of settlements in the valley of the River Po. The Greek historian Polybius, writing about 250 years after this time, reflects an impression of the new arrivals that would have been commonly held by his Roman readership, even if he errs in the detail or repeats idées reçues. They lived, he says, in unwalled villages, and had no knowledge of the refinements of civilization. They were unacquainted with art or science. They slept on straw and leaves, ate meat, and had no occupations other than war and agriculture. Polybius’s account hints at a raiding culture. Their only possessions were cattle and gold, since these were easily portable. It was of the greatest importance to have a following, and whoever had the largest following was the most powerful and the most feared.

The Romans, at this time, knew little of the Gauls. Rome was then a rising power on the Italian peninsula – significant, but not without its rivals. Just after the turn of the fourth century BC, it had captured the important Etruscan city of Veii, ten miles to the north of the city, and also subdued the tribes on the surrounding plain of Latium. Other enemies, nevertheless, remained further afield. The Samnites, to the south, were a potential threat, as was the Greek city-state of Syracuse in Sicily. To the north, the Etruscans likewise represented a danger to Rome. It was therefore hardly surprising that the Gauls, even though they had begun to enter Etruscan areas, were little noticed by the Roman authorities. Thus, reports Livy, when a lowly Roman plebeian one night heard a voice more than human near the shrine of Vesta calling ‘Tell the magistrates that the Gauls are coming!’ – the first, he says, that was known of the Gauls’ approach in Rome – the warning was disregarded.

The Gauls’ first port of call was Clusium, about ninety miles north of Rome. The sight of the new arrivals, according to Livy, threw the city into alarm. They came in their thousands, arrayed before the gates, men the like of whom Clusians had never seen before – outlandish warriors with strange weapons. Clusium sent for help to Rome. The citizens hoped to be able to deal with the Gauls peaceably, but that the Romans would support them with arms if they could not.

Rome decided against sending any military assistance. Instead, they sent three envoys to warn the Gauls against harming Clusium. Livy muses that things might have ended very differently if the Roman envoys ‘had not behaved more like Gauls than Romans’. When all the parties came together to negotiate, the Gauls demanded land from Clusium. They needed land, said a Gallic emissary, and besides, Clusium had more land than it could manage. At this point the Romans intervened, asking what right the Gauls had to demand land, and what they were doing there at all. The Gauls replied that they carried their right on the point of their swords. At that, a fight broke out. One of the Roman diplomats stabbed a Gallic chief with a spear, and began to strip him of his armour. When the Gauls realized what had happened, they turned their anger against Rome. They did not, according to Livy’s account, immediately march against the city, but instead sent their own mission to demand the surrender of Rome’s envoys, who had breached time-honoured convention by killing their chief while he was engaged on a diplomatic embassy. The Romans, however, not only flatly refused to comply with the Gallic demands, but appointed the men responsible to positions of military command for the following year, thus making them immune to prosecution. The Gauls now gave way to their ‘characteristic uncontrollable anger’. Ignoring every other town and city on the way, they marched directly on Rome.

The Roman military preparations to meet the Gallic invasion were lackadaisical. An emergency force was assembled to block the Gauls’ advance at the River Allia, about ten miles from Rome. However, it was disorganized and poorly led, and the Gauls swept it away without effort. Rome was thrown into a panic. With its army scattered, the decision was taken that able-bodied citizens and the Senate should retreat into the fortified Capitol and make a stand. The rest of the city was to be abandoned to the barbarian onslaught.

Such was the abiding trauma of the Gallic attack on Rome that it attracted all manner of myth-making to mitigate the reality of what was in truth a catastrophic defeat. Elderly grandees, says Livy, who were too frail to merit a place in the citadel, dressed up in the finery of their past offices and sat, dignified and statue-like, on thrones in the courtyards of their great houses – a sight that filled the Gauls with reverential dread. When the rest of the city had been burnt and the Capitol was under siege, one of the Roman priests, determined that the blockade should not prevent him from celebrating an annual sacrifice that was meant to take place on a particular spot, put on his vestments and walked calmly through the enemy lines to perform the ritual, unharmed. A flock of geese, sacred to the goddess Juno, were also famously hailed as heroes of the siege. The geese, resident on the Capitol, are said to have cackled and hissed as the Gauls attempted a night-time assault. This woke the Roman guards, who were able to repulse the attack.

Yet none of this mythologizing could efface the fact that this was Rome’s most grievous defeat: traditionally dated to 390 BC, it was the only time that Rome would be sacked by an enemy before Alaric and the Goths 700 years later, in AD 410. A story Livy tells about the conclusion of the siege illustrates how Rome’s shame persisted. After several months, the Romans, starving and hopeless, offered 1,000 pounds of gold to the Gauls to lift the siege. It was a proposal that the Gauls readily accepted. The desire for wealth was likely to have been one of the principal motivations for their attack: they were not experienced in siege warfare, the conditions in the disease-ridden, burnt-out city were not easy for them either, and they were eager to return and secure their northern base in Italy which was under threat from other tribes. A delegation from both sides met to weigh out the gold. As this was happening, the Romans realized that the Gauls were using doctored weights, heavier than marked. When they angrily objected, the Gallic leader Brennus, chief of the Senones tribe, threw his sword into the scales as well and said ‘vae victis’ (‘woe to the conquered’): ‘words intolerable to Roman ears’, laments Livy.

The scars of the attack were still present and vivid even in Caesar’s time in the first century BC, nearly 400 years later. The destruction of the city, writes Plutarch, led to the loss of the early records of Rome’s history. When the Gauls departed, the Romans came close to abandoning the ruins of the city and decamping en masse to another. When they decided not to do so, the work of rebuilding was rushed and ill planned. Old boundaries were ignored. Buildings went up wherever there was space, and no one took measures to ensure that the streets were straight. Old sewers that originally ran under straight streets ended up beneath private property. It was because of the Gallic attack, writes Livy, that the general layout of Rome in his time was more like a squatters’ settlement than a properly planned city.

But the scars were more than physical. It took around thirty years after 390 BC for Rome to regain its authority in the immediate vicinity. This time was marked by social unrest in the city, as citizens from the lower plebeian order attempted to seize power from the patricians. All the while, the continuing threat from the newly arrived Gauls of northern Italy weighed heavily on Rome. The following centuries of Roman history are a litany of conflict with the Gallic incomers. On occasion, the latter would offer themselves as mercenaries to the opponents of Rome, including the Syracusians in the fourth century BC, King Pyrrhus in the early part of the third century, or Hannibal – another invader who attacked Rome from the north – in the later years of the second century. Sometimes they would ally with local tribes, such as the Samnites. On other occasions, the Gauls who had settled in the north would be impelled by further waves of Gallic migration to make incursions into Rome’s expanding territory in the centre of the Italian peninsula, or join with the latest newcomers in making such attacks. It is a measure of the fear that the Gauls inspired in the Romans that the latter negotiated an early truce with the Carthaginian commander Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, in order to deal with what they saw as the more fundamental Gallic menace.

Throughout this period, Roman prejudices vis-à-vis the Gauls seem to have hardened. Polybius, among others, describes the martial customs of the Gauls: they charged into battle with extraordinary shouts, sounding horns and war trumpets throughout their ranks. Some of their number fought naked in the front rank of battle. This made for a terrifying spectacle, the warriors being men of splendid physique and in the prime of life, their bodies adorned with gold necklaces and torques. It was a sight, says Polybius, that did indeed strike fear into the Romans, but when it came to the practicalities of battle, intimidating appearance was to be overcome with strict Roman discipline.

It is a contrast that is pursued ad infinitum by Roman authors. The Gauls were temperamental, volatile, boastful, given to rash displays of boldness at the start of a fight, but were incapable of channelling these qualities into an orderly plan of battle. If their initial – admittedly dangerous – impetus did not produce swift results, they lost heart and enthusiasm; they lacked the discipline necessary to fight a prolonged battle. Frequently, Gallic warriors are seen in the works of classical historians challenging Roman soldiers to resolve battles by single combat. A huge Gaul marches before the battle lines, boasting of his prowess, wielding a long slashing sword. A small and taciturn Roman, with an unglamorous short stabbing sword and a larger shield, comes to meet him. The slashing sword whistles past the Roman, or is rendered useless by its first contact with Roman blade or shield – an analogy between the sword and its Gallic wielder not lost on the Roman authors. The Roman, hiding safely behind his shield, then dispatches the Gaul with a brief and undramatic stab to the face or torso.

That the Gauls, in the words of Polybius, were swayed by ‘impulse rather than calculation’ was not just a point of military strategy. It was also a moral judgement. The clash with the Gauls was not only a fight for survival, but also for civilization. The Romans were the representatives of order: a bulwark protecting not only themselves, but also the rest of the Italian peninsular against the perpetual danger of a Gallic irruption with all the chaos that it would bring. The centuries of friction with the Gauls, Polybius suggests, were to some extent responsible for the ever more military character that Rome took on as it developed. They were also at the root of an abiding neurosis that was to play out to the end of the Roman empire: a fundamental terror of what lay beyond the northern frontier.

Fear of the Gauls impelled the Romans to move the frontier northwards, and to take under their control those areas south of the Alps that had been colonized by Gallic migrants. It was a slow, difficult, long-term undertaking, interrupted by the First and Second Punic Wars (264–241 and 218–201 BCBCBCBC’BC