WE have come to the neighbourhood of the year 300 B.C. At this date, the development of the civilization of La Tène takes a turn which has long been noted by archaeologists, who have marked it by a new period, La Tène II. We shall again see, all round the fringes of the Celtic world, movements similar to those which in the sixth century took the Celts to the British Isles, Spain, and Italy, and at the end of the fifth took them to Provence, Italy, the Danube valley, and again to Britain. We shall see them spreading and wandering about in the East, establishing themselves strongly in the valley of the Danube ; new bands descending on Italy and Spain, and others reaching Britain and Ireland. A new group of Celtic tribes takes part in those expeditions or directs them.
When the power of the Antariatae was destroyed, the conquerors camped in their place, probably in the valley of the Morava, whence they threatened Thrace, Macedon, and Greece at once, for they did not settle down at first ; they remained on the move and no doubt received new contingents, perhaps summoning them.1 These great movements of tribes never stop all at once. Besides, if the Gauls were looking for a settled abode, they could do better than in the present Serbia.
In 298 a body of them advanced as far as Bulgaria. They came up against the Macedonians, and were defeated by Cassander on the slopes of Haemos.2 A little later a second body, led by one Cambaules, seems to have reached Thrace.3 In 281, the death of Lysimachos and Seleucos and the ensuing prolongation of the dynastic war and the disorganization of the Macedonian kingdom weakened the obstacle which still held the Gauls in check. They saw this, and seized their opportunity.
We are told that they resumed their advance in 260, in three armies.4 The eastern army, commanded by Cerethrios, attacked the Triballi on the Bulgarian side. The western army, crossing Illyria, must have entered Macedonia somewhere near Monastir ; it was preceded by envoys.5 Ptolemy Ceraunos, who, after betraying and killing Seleucos, was at the time King of Macedon, refused to listen to them. He was utterly defeated and slain. This army was led by a chieftain called Bolgios, whose name we must bear in mind.6 Historical tradition, which dates from the time of the actual events, records that he crowned his victory by sacrificing prisoners.7 The Macedonian army was scattered and the state, lacking its head, appeared to be destroyed. The Gauls ranged over the country, looting. Little by little, the Macedonians rallied8 and by well-conducted warfare on a small scale compelled them to retire behind the mountains.
The central army, commanded by Brennus and Acichorius,9 had advanced on Paeonia and had to fight throughout the year with the hillmen of Haemos. It did not descend on Macedon until the following year, after it had received large reinforcements, including Illyrian contingents.10 It was a large host, reckoned by the historians at 150,000 foot and 15,000 or 20,000 horse. Each horseman was accompanied by two mounted servants, the body of three being called a trimarkisia. We should note this appearance of cavalry in the Gallic forces. The army seems to have been fairly well organized and skilfully led.11 In the eighty years or so that the Gauls had been serving as mercenaries by the side of Greek troops,12 they had learned something and gained experience. Old trained mercenaries may have rallied to the army of Brennus. At all events, it left a name for resourcefulness and alarming ingenuity.13 Brennus crushed the reorganized Macedonian army, and then descended into Greece by way of Thessaly. At Thermopylae he was met by a force composed mainly of Athenians.14 While one body, detached on Ætolia, sacked the town of Callion with appalling savagery,15 the main force managed to turn the position and came by the gorges of Parnassos to Delphi. The Ætolians and Phocians came to the rescue of the god, and the Gauls had to retire to Thessaly.
The Phocians owed something to Apollo, for they had looted Delphi some seventy years before in the course of the second Sacred War, and had come away with considerable sums. They had not, therefore, left much for the Gauls to take, except the statues. Nevertheless, the gold of Delphi has passed into legend.16 In the great Gallic army there was a body of Teetosages, and the report went about that this treasure had been taken to Toulouse, to other Teetosages, who had migrated there from the same original home. A dark story grew up about this act of pillage and the problematical and accursed gold. The legend-mongers seized upon the sacrilege and gave Brennus a lasting reputation for impiety 17 which placed him on a level with the other Brennus, him of Rome and the Capitol.
Art did its share. This campaign of Brennus was commemorated in monuments. The battle of Thermopylae was depicted on a wall-painting in the council-chamber of Athens.18 But there were also representations of the sack of Delphi, which were to be seen in various temples of Apollo in Greece and Italy, at Delos, and even in Rome, where, according to Propertius,19 one of the ivory-plated doors of the temple of the Palatine showed dejectos Parnassi vertice Gallos, “ the Gauls thrown down from the height of Parnassos,” forming a pendant to the story of the Children of Niobe. The whole affair was one of the triumphs of Apollo. One or more of these commemorative monuments furnished motives to the minor arts of Greece or Alexandria. One portrayed a Gaul setting his foot on the cut-off head of the Pythia,20 another showed Gauls gesticulating against a background of colonnades.21
It is certain that the Greeks thought of the Gauls as beautiful. The figure of Brennus in particular has benefited by their aesthetic indulgence. The story ran that Brennus had received three wounds from Apollo’s own hand. He gave the order to retreat, and had the strength to lead his men through the gorges of Parnassos to join up with the rearguard of Acichorius, who had remained at Heracleia. He might have recovered, but he felt that he was condemned and determined to die. He got drunk and killed himself. A marvellous little bronze in the Naples museum (a replica) apparently represents the suicide of Brennus.22
Although the attack on Delphi did not last long, Central Greece was sufficiently disturbed for the celebration of the Panathenaea to be suspended in 278.23 The Gallic army retired more or less in good order.24 We find one section of it in Thrace, in the neighbourhood of Byzantion ; it surprised Lysimacheia25 at the root of the Gallipoli peninsula. Antigonos Gonatas drove the Gauls out of the place in a battle in which he surprised them while pillaging his camp, which he had abandoned to them.26 This affair took place in 277.
After this victory, Antigonos seems to have taken into his service the force of Ciderios, and perhaps the remnants of the vanquished, who helped him to take possession of Macedonia. He still had some of them in 274 when he was defeated by Pyrrhos, who gloried in the fact that he had triumphed over them.27 In 265 a body of Gauls, being ill-paid, mutinied at Megara, and he put them all to the sword.28 But Pyrrhos likewise employed Gauls, whom he allowed to violate the tombs of the ancient kings of Macedon at Ægae 29 ; he had them in the attack on Sparta ; he had them again at Argos when he was killed. Down to the very end of these Macedonian Avars of succession, bands of Gauls left their dead scattered about Greece 30 in the cause of every party. No tomb of them has survived. We shall return later to the amazing story of the mercenaries.
A large part of Brennus’s army returned to its starting-point, under the lead of a chief whose name has come down to us under the distorted form of Bathanattos,31 and settled permanently north of Macedonia between the Shar-Dagh (Mons Scordus) and the Danube.32 It doubtless consisted of bodies of mixed origin. They took a name for themselves from the country, and became the Scordisci. On the banks of the Danube they founded or took over a capital, Singidunum, which is now Belgrade.33
Among the Illyrian peoples of the coast of Epeiros, opposite Corcyra, the ancient geographers mention the Hylli, who are described in the Etymologicum Magnum as a Celtic people.34 They may, at least, have been Celticized by their neighbours the Scordisci. The eastern part of the new domain of the Scordisci was taken from the Triballi who were driven out, at least to some extent.35
Excavation in Bosnia and Herzegovina has revealed traces, still too rare, of the passage of the Celts and of Celtic settlements in these new provinces of the Jugo-Slav kingdom.36 We know nothing of Serbia itself.
Another body, which had likewise belonged to Brennus’s army, retired on to the slopes of Haemos under a leader named Comantorios.37 Little by little it gained the upper hand over the Thracian tribes of the vicinity and founded a Celtic kingdom in Thrace, which lasted until 193 B.C. Its capital was Tyle or Tylis, the site of which is difficult to establish. This people expanded south of Haemos to the basin of Adrianople and north of it, no doubt, to the Danube.
At first the proximity of the Gauls of Haemos perturbed the Byzantines.38 But they showed themselves such good neighbours that they soon dispelled their alarm. They became Hellenized, and struck coins—very fine ones, with the type of Alexander. Some of these coins bear the name of one of their kings, Cauaros.39 In short, they lived after the manner of the Hellenistic states of the time, and became so civilized that they finally succumbed to the attacks of the Thracians in 193.40 Of their Celtic civilization, nothing has survived.
So the invaders of the Balkans who had found no room in the over-populated lands of Greece Proper, covered with cities, had carved themselves kingdoms in the north of the peninsula, among people who were less attached to the soil and did not occupy it so completely, in the wider plains of the Mora va, Maritza, and Danube. At intervals along the Danube below the Iron Gates were towns with Gallic names—Bononia (Vidin), Ratiaria (Artcher), Durostorum (Silistria), and Noviodunum (? Isakcha) in the Dobrudja—which were outposts of the state of the Scordisci or of the Celtic kingdom of Thrace.
The forces which had formed the nucleus of these tribes had been very much reduced. We may suppose that they received additions, which cannot have increased the Celtic element in them very much, but there remained all round them Illyrians and Thracians, and even Illyrian and Thracian states,41 and the states which they formed were composed of Celto-Illyrians and Celto-Thracians.42 I cannot picture the Scordisci very clearly. But I imagine the State of Haemos as something like the first Turkish states which were carved out of the Arabian Empire round a small band of janizaries. Those states were as good as their chiefs ; they depended on the prestige of the chief. The kingdom of Thrace, at least, seems to have had an admirable head—the King Cauaros mentioned above.
But there is a region of Celtic names and sites, still more thinly sown, running northwards along the Black Sea. North of the Danube, in the angle formed by that river and the Sereth, Ptolemy 43 mentions the Britolagae, whose name looks Celtic. So does that of the town of Aliobrix. Further north, on the Dniester (Tyras), there was a Camodunum (Zaleszczyki in Galicia). Pausanias 44 speaks of a Gallic people, the Cabari, remarkable for its great stature, which lived in the far north on the edge of the frozen desert. If his information is worth considering, it is hereabouts that we must place them.
Evidence of the activity of the Celts of this region is given by an inscription from Olbia on the Bug 45 dating from the third century, when the city was purely Hellenic, in honour of a citizen named Protogenes, who had distinguished himself when the place was threatened by the Galatians. These latter had come and attacked it in midwinter, with the assistance of the Sciri, a Germanic people which lived on the Lower Vistula in the first century of the Roman Empire.
In addition, Gallic objects of La Tène have been found in Southern Russia, for example in the cemetery of Jarubinetz on the Dnieper (Government of Kiev).46 These are, it is true, quite recent and they may have been brought in by Germans who had Gallic objects with them. All these facts are evidence of the advance either of the Celtic kingdom of Thrace and the groups which had gone about its territory in search of settlements, or else of the Boii of Bohemia, of whose roving spirit we have already seen something. Whichever it was, the Celts went as far as the Sea of Azov (Maeotis). Here the ancient geographers fix the furthest limit of the Celtic world.47
In 278 Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, probably through the agency of Antigonos Gonatas, summoned into Asia Minor a body of Celts which may have included some of the men defeated at Lysimacheia.48 This body was commanded by a chief named Leonnorios. It usually operated with another body, led by one Lutarios. Both seem to have been detached from the army of Brennus before its descent into Greece, to repeat in Thrace the pillaging of Acichorius. Lutarios seized vessels and joined his comrade on the other side of the Hellespont.49 A treaty was struck,50 and for some time the Galatians, for thus we must henceforward call them, did good service, duly appreciated, to Nicomedes, or to the Greek cities allied to him, from which they drove off Antiochos the Seleucid who was threatening them from a distance.51
The two bodies amounted together to about 20,000 persons, 10,000 of whom were men under arms. They were a difficult host for a petty king of Asia to keep under control. They left Nicomedes and started working on their own account, threatening, ravaging, and negotiating to raise tribute from the terror-stricken cities.52 We find them at Troy,53 at Ephesos, at Miletos. In St. Jerome’s day people still told of the Milesian Virgins, who had killed themselves to escape outrage and mourned their lot in one of the most beautiful epigrams in the Palatine Anthology.54 Here again the gods had manifested themselves ; the River Marsyas had defended Celaenae with his waters,55 and Heracles, Hermes, and Apollo had shown the people of Themisonion a cavern where they could take refuge.56
There as elsewhere the Gauls looked for a place in which to settle down. When and how they succeeded it is very hard to say. Livy says that they divided Asia between them.57 One tribe took the Hellespont ; another, Æolis and Ionia ; a third, the south of Asia Minor to the Taurus ; finally, they had established themselves on the River Halys in the centre of the peninsula, to threaten Syria and exact tribute from it. In writing this part of the history of Asia, Livy and the rest of them lacked objectivity, sense of proportion, and, above all, a good map of Asia Minor. Their judgment was led astray by the terror of those who had lived through the invasions and naturally exaggerated the number and power of the destroyers. However prolific they may have been,58 the 20,000 Gauls, male and female, of Leonnorios and Lutarios were still, a few years after the invasion, only a very small army, which could not hold a country of that size and was lost when it spread itself.
Antiochos Soter defeated them badly about 270.59 The Gallic cavalry is said to have been crushed by the elephants of the Syrian army. This battle of the elephants was suitably glorified in after years. The memorial was a painting,60 which must have been exhibited at Pergamon beside the other “ Galatomachies ”.
It was probably Antiochos Soter who established the Galatians astride of the Halys and on the Phrygian plateau, for he was the lawful ruler of those regions. This was the most sparsely populated part of Asia Minor, the poorest and least desirable, and it is more likely that the Galatians made the best of what they got than that they chose it for themselves. Their settlement on the plateau of Asia Minor has been compared, with some justice, with their settlement on the plateau of Spain.
It was some time before they gave up their wild ways, and the Greek cities had to pay the tax known as Galatika (Gaul-Geld) for many years. Moreover, their real military value caused their services to be greatly sought after by one and another of their neighbours. They played a part in the game of Asiatic politics. Their history becomes intermingled with that of the Hellenistic states, and ceases to belong to the general history of the Celts. They took sides in the question of the Bithynian succession ; they warred against the Kings of Pontus and the people of Heracleia ; they fought for the pretender Antiochos Hierax against Seleucos II Callinicos. This last war brought them up against the enemy who worsted them, the little kingdom of Pergamon. Having defeated Seleucos at Ancyra, they were beaten in 241 near the sources of the Caïcos by Attalos of Pergamon, Avho was backing Seleucos. This victory finally established the power of Attalos, who gained the title of King by it. Between 240 and 230, he again defeated one of the Gallic tribes—the westernmost, the Tolistoagii—four times. These defeats were decisive. The Gauls of Asia were confined to their own country, and hardly came out of it again ; even there they were not always independent, but they remained there.
These victories were gloriously commemorated. In any case, the acropolis of the new capital had to be adorned. Attalos and his successor Eumenes set up monuments which must have formed a single scheme.61 In the excavation of Pergamon bronze statue-bases have been found on which the name of the sculptor Epigonos appears several times. Pliny mentions three other artists—Phyromachos, Stratonicos, and Antigonos. These men did a piece of work, the remnants of which are magnificent. They treated the Gauls admirably, idealizing them just enough. Of these Pergamene statues there are two certain copies in marble—the Dying Gaul of the Capitol and the Ludovisi group of a Gaul stabbing himself with his own sword after having killed his female companion. These are Gauls sure enough, recognizable by some detail of costume, their ornament, their weapons, and their type, with the prominent eyebrows, deep-set base of the nose, and stiff, rebellious hair. But they are also very noble works of art. These sculptures did not lack emotion or sympathy ; the masterpiece of Epigonos, according to Pliny, was a dead mother caressed by her child. The monuments of the victor certainly contributed to the glory of the vanquished.
On the Acropolis of Athens, Attalos I dedicated another monument composed of groups representing four subjects—a battle of Giants, a battle of Amazons, the battle of Marathon, and the defeat of the Gauls in Mysia. Six statues of half life-size from the battle of Giants are known, dispersed between the Louvre and the Venice and Naples museums.62 There were also paintings in Pergamon,63 and some of the small objects representing Gauls are derived from those famous works of art.
What we know of the Galatian state gives us our first example of the organization of a Celtic state.
When they started on their migration, there were two main bodies and seventeen leaders of bands.64 Very soon we find ourselves in the presence of three peoples formed into twelve groups, four groups to a people—the Teetosages, the Tolistoagii (or Tolistobogii or Tolistoboii),65 and the Trocmi or Trogmi. The Teetosages are probably Volcae ; it is very doubtful that the Tolistoagii or Tolistoboii are Boii ; the Trocmi are not found elsewhere and their name cannot be explained. The twelve subdivisions are sub-tribes, similar to the pagi which we shall find in Gaul. The names of a few of them are known—the Teutobodiaci among the Teetosages and the Voturi, Ambituti, and Tosiopes among the Tolistoboii.66 Historians have been misled by the title of Tetrarch, borne by chiefs of tribes or sub-tribes. Each of the three peoples, with its four sub-divisions, formed a tetrarchy with proto-tetrarchs.67 It is an organization, a typical example of which is furnished by Ireland. Each sub-tribe was the quarter of a tetrarchy. At its head was a king (regulus or 
), assisted by a council of nobles, who were sometimes also called reguli. Ireland presents just the same arrangement of royalties of different ranks. For each sub-tribe there was, in addition, a judge 
and a military leader 
with two lieutenants. The Celtic constitutions will give us instances of the same distinction between the judicial, royal, and military functions.
How was the tribe, the gens, populus, or civitas governed ? We do not know, but the absence of information seems to indicate that its rulers were only temporary and chosen by common agreement among the sub-divisions. But the three peoples formed a federation, which was exactly translated under the Roman Empire by the expression 
the Commonwealth of the Galatians. It was governed by a senate composed of the twelve tetrarchs and by an assembly of three hundred representatives, that is twenty-five representatives to a sub-tribe, who met at the common shrine of the Galatians, in a place called Drynemeton.68 The powers of this assembly seem to have been chiefly judicial. The general policy of the confederate peoples apparently remained independent. We always see them developing separately.
There is something artificial in the regularity of this structure and its numerical symmetry, and indeed it is probable that the Gauls who were collected together from the remnants of military bands, sorely tried by the adventure of Brennus and a succession of wars, bore no resemblance to organized nations when they arrived in Asia Minor. They must then have rearranged themselves, like the Scordisci, on the ideal plan of the Gallic tribe, and we have the good fortune to know how they did it. The plan was not modified for the simple reason that the Galatians remained a closed community. We have proof of this. Another band of Gauls, the Ægosages, were summoned from Thrace in 218 by Attalos of Pergamon, who afterwards tried to get rid of them. They revolted and settled on the Hellespont, where Prusias I of Bithynia defeated them in 217. They did not attempt to unite with the Galatians of Phrygia.69
The three peoples lay one behind the other, from west to east. In the west, the Tolistoboii occupied the upper valley of the Sangarios ; Pessinus was their capital and Gordion was probably in their territory. Next came the Teetosages, with Tavium as capital. The Trocmi stood astride of the Halys, reaching westward as far as Ancyra ; they had the largest and least populous district.
The Galatians apparently settled down side by side with the Phrygian population without driving it out, by some process of endosmosis which we cannot follow.70 The association of the new population and the old was probably peaceful. There was nothing to show that it was not, and certain facts suggest that it was,71 although they do not justify us in supposing that relations were always cordial and that the domination of the Gauls was always endured with patience. They were a foreign minority encamped in the midst of a dense population of Greeks and Phrygians, who kept their own independence.72 The great centres were not touched, and few new ones were created. Only three or four towns have names which are certainly new and at least partly Gaulish—Tolistothora in the south of the country of the Tolistoboii, Pitobriga in the north of the country of the Teetosages, and Eccobriga among the Trocmi.73 What were these towns ? Were they like the camps of refuge in which, according to the historians, the Gauls shut up their women and children ? Where did the Galatians live ?74 Being semi-mobilized and often at war, they remained an army for a very long time. The position of the Galatians in Galatia must have been like that of the Franks in Gaul and the Mongols in China.
Antigonos Gonatas, who had placed Gallic mercenaries at the disposal of Nicomedes of Bithynia, also lent a body of them to Ptolemy II Philadelphos in 277-6.75 Ptolemy was at war with his brother Magas. He defeated him, but the mutiny of a corps of four thousand Gauls prevented him from following up his victory. Pausanias speaks of a conspiracy to take possession of Egypt.76 What an adventure as a sequel to the sack of Delphi ! But, however disorganized we may imagine the great kingdoms of the Successors to have been, they were too big for a small band of janizaries, and however mad the Gauls may have been, perhaps they did not go to such lengths as this. More mildly and credibly, the scholiast of Callimachos, who celebrated their defeat,77 speaks of an attempt to plunder the treasures of Ptolemy. The Egyptians shut up the Gauls on an island in the Sebennytic arm of the Nile. There they all perished, either by starvation or by a kind of ritual suicide of which we shall see other instances. In memory of this affair Ptolemy had a Gallic shield on his coins. The victory was considered of sufficient importance to deserve a monument. A superb fragment of it survives, and possibly three. The first is the head of a Gaul, with an intense expression of anguish, now in the Cairo Museum.78 The others, which were found at Delos,79 are a younger head, also expressing pain, and a wonderful headless body of a fallen warrior.80 The whole monument must have represented the scene of the suicide and must have been a magnificent illustration of the epic of the Gallic mercenaries.81
Ptolemy II at the end of his reign, and Ptolemy III after him, enrolled more mercenaries. Under Ptolemy IV, we find some settled in Egypt ; those were the 
whose descendants were 
.82 Some of their graves, with painted tombstones, have been found in the cemetery of Hadra,83 south-east of Alexandria. From these men a body of four thousand was raised, which appeared at the battle of Raphia in the Coele-Syrian campaign with ten thousand Gauls from Thrace.
There were likewise Gauls in the army of the Seleucids. Some took part in the campaign against the Maccabees. There was no prince in the East who could do without his corps of Gauls.84
Gauls appeared in the army of the Lagids which besieged Abydos in 186–185 in the repression of the revolt in Upper Egypt. Here is an inscription which they left on the walls of the temple of Seti I, in the small chapel of Horus 85 :
 |
Of the Galatians |
 |
we,Thoas,Tallistratos, |
 |
Acannon, |
 |
Apollonios, |
 |
came, |
 |
and a fox |
 |
caught we here. |
It is a thrilling monument in its extreme simplicity, scribbled on the walls of the deserted, sanded-up old chapel one evening by men who had wandered there out of idle curiosity and had come on a jackal, which they took for a fox. It brings before one the glorious adventure of those simple-minded men, whose fathers had come from the banks of the Rhine to overthrow the order of sacred things in Greece, and who, since then, had been dragging their heavy hobnailed soles over every battlefield in the East.
But this inscription suggests yet other reflections. Those Galatians could write, and that by itself is interesting enough. But they did not think of writing in Gaulish ; they wrote in Greek. Their Greek is very straightforward and shows no subtlety, but Greek it is, and the spelling is so correct as to shame our troops who record the simple distractions of a soldier’s life on the walls of monuments in distant lands. Greek was the language of the Gallic troops. I do not know that they ever had Greek officers 86 ; so it is not a military question, but a question of civilization. Greek was likewise the official language of the Gauls of Asia Minor. They have not left a single inscription in Celtic. All their inscriptions are in Greek.
But we must add that they had not, at least in general, forgotten their own tongue. Strabo vouches for it.87 In the second century after Christ, Lucian 88 tells us of a sorcerer from Paphlagonia who could give answers in Celtic to people who asked him for consultations. Still later, in the fourth century, St. Jerome,89 while saying that the Galatians used Greek, admits that they had kept a Celtic dialect. Moreover, the Galatians of Asia Minor have left a few Celtic words in Greek, such as 
a kind of body-armour ; 
a kind of soup or porridge ;
the kermes-oak ;
a stake ; 
a trumpet.90
Another point to note is that none of the Gauls at Abydos has a Celtic name, and many of those buried in the cemetery of Hadra have Greek names. This would be easy to explain if the corps of Galatians were recruited as the auxiliary corps of the Roman army were afterwards recruited, being originally formed of men of one race, the name of which was given to the unit, but being filled up by men of all nationalities. But we have no reason to suppose that this was so. The Gauls in Greek lands assumed or gave to their children additional names, Greek names, as a result of intermarriage, or simply because they liked them.91 In Galatia itself, such names as Apaturios and Lysimachos appear as early as the events of 223–218.92
The Gauls of Asia and the mercenaries kept their own weapons,93 at least the chief of them, certain peculiarities of armament, and certain military traditions. These were the marks of their units. They had the great sword with a central rib (this is what they kept most faithfully), the helmet, with or without horns, copied from the Italic helmet and derived by them from Cisalpine Gaul, the sword, worn on the right, the long sword of La Tène II,94 besides Greek or Asiatic swords, and, finally, various types of javelin. Although they had body-armour, which is represented on the trophies, the historians describe them as fighting naked for choice. Some of the horsemen painted on the tombstones in the cemetery of Hadra are accompanied by their squires, so the system of the trimarkisia survived in the mercenary cavalry. The troops were always followed by women and children, who went with the baggage,95 as with the Senegalese troops of France.
We have seen that those Gauls who formed political units adhered in a’curious way to their national organization. If we are to believe the ancient anecdote-mongers, they remained true to their racial character and even to their manner of living. Plutarch depicts them in the bath with their children, emptying pots of porridge.96 The one year’s feast given to the Galatians by a noble called Ariamnes97 (here is a man with a non-Gaulish name already) reminds one of the feasts of Luernius, King of the Arverni, or, in Celtic literature, of that prepared by Briccriu for the chief men of Ulster. It was a potlatch, as it would have been called in the northwest of America ; it was not a banquet of satraps. Among the settled populations of Asia with their urban civilization, the Gauls seem on the whole to have been not very strongly attached to one spot ; their chief wealth is pastoral.98 But excavation in Galatia has yielded nothing more than the hope of finding a few portable objects of Gaulish origin—a blue glass bracelet in a tumulas, a little pottery at Gordion, and that is all.99 In crafts and gear, as in language and the habits of daily life, the Gauls borrowed largely from the people among whom they lived, and indeed became merged with them astonishingly quickly. They adopted their religion. Plutarch twice tells us a story of a beautiful Gallic woman named Camma who was priestess of Phrygian Artemis.100 The priest-kings of Pessinus were Celts ; the first of them is mentioned in inscriptions of 153 and 139.101
In addition to the arts and crafts of material life, Greece or the Hellenistic world had something to teach its guests which was new to them, and that was, if not its moral culture, at least its culture of the soul. For nearly three centuries all Greece had been educated by the school of the rhetors or the philosophers, who taught them to use their reason and to use it about themselves, to analyse the motives of human actions and to interpret the rules which govern them. They were not more moral or more just than other men—far from it—but there were in Greece men with more lively and enlightened consciences than elsewhere. Greek culture, grafted on the good instincts and solid morality of the Gauls, produced excellent fruit. Plutarch tells us of noble ladies who were not only beautiful but models of virtue. Among the men, in the long list of chiefs of whom we do not know much, two figures stand out—those of Cauaros, King of Thrace, and Ortiagon, one of the four kings of the Tolistoagii who came into contact with the Romans a few years after the date at which I stopped. Unfortunately, we only see them in the summaries of the lost books of Polybios. But the summaries tell us enough. Polybios had known Ortiagon. He had conversed at Sardis with his wife Chiomara, who had had, in the course of the war, an adventure which had certainly lost nothing of its tragic character through her ; she was a heroine by birth and by education.102 Ortiagon doubtless inspired Polybios with equal enthusiasm. He aspired, the summary tells us, to the kingship of all Galatia. “ He was well prepared for it by nature and by upbringing, for he was liberal and magnificent, full of charm in his personal dealings, and highly intelligent. Moreover, what the Galatians always hold in esteem, he was brave, and, in war, efficient 
.” So, then, he was a fine man, able and well educated, with distinguished manners and lively intelligence. He shows these qualities in history. As for Cauaros, Polybios depicts him acting successfully as arbiter between Byzantion and the king of Bithynia. He was, then, both a diplomatist and a just man. The summary tells us that he had a kingly nature, greatness of soul.103 He had displayed his phil-Hellenism in assisting the Greek traders of the Black Sea. It follows from this that he had an economic policy and that he kept good order in his dominions, which extended to the Black Sea.
The Hellenization of the Galatians does not seem to have greatly benefited the Celtic world as a whole, not so much because they were cut off from it by the states of Western Asia Minor as because they looked in another direction. We have a conclusive proof of this.
One result of the Hellenization of the Gauls was that they entered into a world which had long made use of coinage. It is true that the Celts of the West might have known (though not for long) of coinage through Marseilles and its colonies. But these cities were on the fringe of the Celtic world and the coins of Marseilles do not seem to have spread there in the form of imitations so very quickly. The Gauls of Italy had likewise seen coins. The Roman as has been found in Celtic surroundings. But Italy was ill-provided with coins at that date. The Gauls in the East suddenly found themselves with fairly large masses of coin in their hands—the tribute of the cities and the payment of their services. Byzantion, for example, paid a tribute of eighty talents a year, for which it obtained a loan of four thousand gold pieces from Heracleia. The Gallic tribes taken on by Antigonos Gonatas received a gold piece per man.104 So the Gauls had coins, and they made coins themselves, copying those which came their way. These were Macedonian coinages and those of certain cities such as Thasos105 and Larissa.
Now, the coins of the Galatians are not Macedonian ; they are imitated from the coins of Tarsos.106 The coins of Tarcanos of Tarsos, bearing a woman’s head on the obverse and a helmeted warrior on the reverse, were copied in Galatia. Other Galatian coins are imitated from those of Euthydemos of Bactriana, with a portrait on the obverse and a seated Heracles on the reverse. The diffusion of the former is perhaps explained by the commercial relations of Galatia. The choice of the models may have been imposed by the mercenaries.
It seems to me that, while the colonization of Northern Italy had a great and beneficial influence on Celtic culture as a whole, the colonization of Asia Minor had no effect on it whatever. That colony was lost to the Celtic world. It was not so on the Danube.
To the ancient historians, the Celtic Danube was still an unknown world at the time at which we have taken our stand in order to view it. A few proper names, a few archaeological data, scanty but valuable, may help us to picture that ancient world, not without having resort to conjecture.
Behind the armies and the roving bands whose expansion we have followed, the middle valley of the Danube was becoming peopled and organized as a Celtic country. Northwest of the Scordisci, two main groups had formed. The Taurisci 107 had carved a domain out of the territories of the Veneti in Upper Austria, Carinthia, and Styria. They had taken their name, as the Scordisci had done, from the mountain on whose slopes they had settled, the Taurus, now the Tauern. Later the country was called Noricum, from its capital Noreia. This group comprised the Ambidravi,108 who lived in Styria and Carinthia on both sides of the Upper
Drave, and the Ambisontes,109 who were settled north of the Tauern, astride of the Isonta (Saltzach).
The other group was that of the Pannonians, who had settled in the northern domain of the Antariatae 110 in Lower Austria, Western Hungary, and Croatia. Attached to this group were the Osi111 on the left bank of the Danube and the Aravisci 112 on the other side, extending from the station of Carpi (
),113 at the point where the river turns south, to the border of the Scordisci, whose country lay between Mount Scordus and the Danube.
Apart from the Aravisci, about whose origin there is doubt,114 and who may have come with the Boii when the latter invaded Noricum, these are certainly Celtic peoples, or at least bands in which the Celtic element predominated. Thirty years before Cæsar wrote his Gallic War, a Latin historian, Sempronius Asellio, observed that Noreia was in Gaul.115 Indeed, a great Danubian Celtic domain had come into being between the Celts of Germany and those of Italy. The map is dotted with a great number of Celtic names of towns and villages, some old, some formed later, even in the time of the Roman Empire, according to habits of name-making which outlive languages.116 Noreia is a Celtic name, formed on a stem noro which appears in the proper names Noromertus (in Britain) and Norus (the name of a potter). In Carinthia117 Matucaium (Treibach) is also Celtic (math “ pig ”, caion “ enclosure ”), and so are Gabromagus, “ the plain of goats ” (Windisch-Garstein) and Lauriacum (Lorsch) in Upper Austria, Graviacae (villa understood) (Tamsweg) in the province of Salzburg, Cucullae, “ the city of cowls ” (Kuchl), and Masciacum, east of Innsbruck. In Pannonia118 we have Vindobona (Vienna), Carnuntum (Petronell), Brigetio (Ószöny), Cornacum (Šotin) ; among the Scordisci there are Singidunum (Belgrade), Capedunum (? Banostor), and Viminacium (Kostolatz). The Latin inscriptions of the country, especially in Pannonia,119 present a great number of Celtic proper names—Enigenus “ son of the Inn ” ; Broccus “ badger ” (Irish brocc,Welsh broch) in Carniola ; Assedomarus, Excingomarus, Nertomarus, Ategnatus, and Devognata in Styria ; Iantumara in the province of Salzburg ; Ritumara and Ateboduus in Carinthia ; Atepomarus and Drogimarus in Austria ; Retimarus in Hungary. The inscriptions also speak of Teutates at Seckau in Styria and a Belinus at Klagenfurt in Carinthia.
We may reasonably imagine this great Celtic population of the Danube as a kind of hotch-potch in which the Celtic element predominated. What Strabo tells us of the country of the Iapodes 120 is very significant in this respect. They lived south of Pannonia, near the Adriatic ; the names of their towns, Metulum, Avendone, Monetium, are perhaps Celtic ; their weapons were those of the Celts and they tattooed themselves in the fashion of the other Illyrians and the Thracians. It is a mixed civilization and a mixed people. We may say the same of the Taurisci and the Pannonians, among whom the Venetian and Illyrian elements survived. The actual name of the Pannonians is an Illyrian racial name and, if we are to believe Tacitus,121 the mixed people which they formed spoke a language which was not Celtic.
Given what we already know of the habits of the Celts at this time, we may suppose that the greater part of the country newly conquered by them was not of a kind to tempt them. They probably occupied the valley-bottoms and the lower slopes, which could be tilled ; they made for the bank of the Danube, where they had many settlements down to Pest. But these settlements were towns, crossing-points, between which the banks, being too low, were no doubt left unoccupied. Let us look at the map : Austria and what were until recently its southern provinces, with their mountains and their many valleys, offered the Gauls a very broken-up domain ; Hungary, too, was unsuitable, for other reasons, which are revealed in the fact that the river along its whole length in that country was occupied by the Aravisci, who may not have been Celts. Between the places held by the Celts the aborigines remained.
Everything, to the very names borne by these Gallic populations, shows that they were formed on the spot out of unrelated elements. We must imagine, with the ancient historians, a reflux of the great expeditions into Greece and a steady influx from early times of immigrants from Bavaria or Bohemia ; in short, a series of complicated happenings, very different from a systematic conquest made by one organized people. Even more clearly, the Gallic peoples scattered about from the Adriatic to the Black Sea and from the Ægean to the Sea of Azov were unconnected groups in the midst of the Illyrians, the Thracians, and the Scythians.
Archæological finds add something to this picture. A certain number of cemeteries of the second La Tène period have been found in what was once the Austrian Empire.122 The civilization of the same period is very well represented in the Budapest Museum by objects discovered in the western part of Hungary. But this culture extended a long way beyond the Danube. A cemetery of La Tène II has been excavated at Apahida in the old county of Kolozs.123 In the Kluj Museum (Kolozsvâr) there is a chariot-burial with brooches of La Tène II, found at Balsa, near Szabolcs.124 Celtic remains have been discovered between the Danube and Theiss.125 Were these left by isolated Gauls who had strayed far from their own territory, or by the Dacians imitating Celtic culture ? The tombs at Apahida are indistinguishable from other Celtic tombs. It is quite conceivable that there was here a small body of Celts, lost in the midst of the Dacians and forgotten by history.
One thing is certain, and that is that the culture of the Danubian Celts came to be accepted by the Dacians, as it was by the Illyrians and Raetians. It would be extraordinary if the relics of the Celts alone had survived and those of their neighbours had disappeared, or the survival of native habits were represented only by objects of early date ; indeed it is quite impossible. In any case, the Dacians, who had been under the influence of the Scythian civilization before the Celts descended the valley of the Danube, came under that of the Celtic civilization when it reached them. This is what one gathers from the series of archaeological finds made in Dacia.126
The little that we know of these settlements points to a sedentary people, which, at least for a time, had given up adventurous undertakings. But we still have to record a few expeditions on the part of the Danubian Celts. At the end of the second century, they seem to have invaded Macedon and Thessaly again 127 ; in 110 the Scordisci and Thracians menaced Delphi. The Balkan campaigns of the Romans Republic evidently woke up all the unsettled and unruly elements among them. But these were accidental episodes, and it would be wrong to regard these peoples, among which brigands were certainly to be found,128 as a collection of freebooters. A passage in Livy 129 enables us to pass a fairer judgment on them. In the neighbourhood of Bella in Macedonia, the historian mentions Celts and Illyrians as being “indefatigable tillers of the soil”. These few words (which show, incidentally, that there were Gallic settlers outside the Gallic political formations) pick out of all the characteristics of the Celt one which distinguished him and won him the esteem of the Greeks and Latins ; he was a hardworking and efficient farmer. As we have already found him, so we find him here, more particularly in his own country—in Noricum, for example. It was a rich and peaceful country, anxious to have good relations with its neighbours, given up to its agriculture and its trade,130 and, what is more, a mining country which produced an iron ore of some reputation.131
The Scordisci had the name of being rougher folk, more attached to the old ways of the Celts,132 and readier to take up arms. What has been related of their partiality for silver seems to indicate that they worked the mines of the Drena.133 Here they extracted the metal, which was beginning to spread among the Celts 134 and is still found in the region in the form of various objects. Political history shows them sometimes allied to Mithradates, sometimes combining with the Dacians,135 in the capacity in which they must have constantly appeared, that of middlemen of civilization.
The archæological evidence of these exchanges is scanty—three small plaques of repoussé silver. One, which is said to have been discovered at Roermond in Dutch Limburg,136 represents a human figure strangling a lion, crudely modelled in the style of the Gundestrup cauldron. All round are galloping animals, and above the man are two lions attacking a lamb, above which again are two confronted dogs with a bull’s head between.
The two other plaques, which come from Asia Minor,137 have the same arrangement : in the centre a wolf or a lion attacks a kid ; above it, the same beast is attacked by two winged monsters ; below is an ox’s head flanked by two griffins ; the field is adorned with spirals and dotted lines representing foliage. They bear an inscription which was doubtless the same on both but is completely preserved on only one : NAO
APTEMI
EX TΩN TOϒ BA MIΘPAT.....” Temple of Artemis, from the gifts of King Mithradates.” We may suppose that this Artemis is she of Comana, and it is quite possible that the king is Mithradates Eupator, the ally of the Scordisci.138 In any case, these two plaques are in quite a different style from that of Roermond ; they are more skilful, better drawn, and in higher relief. But the Dutch specimen was copied from a similar model. It is an imitation which might have been produced among a silver-producing people’ which had dealings with Pontus where its warriors took service, and exchanged gifts with the kings of Pontus or traded with the Scythians, but was capable of getting models from them.139 This description applies to the Scordisci.
The art of the Pontic medal-maker,140 which recalls the very ancient art of the Hittites, is more truly like that of the Scythians. The kingdom of Pontus and Southern Russia were closely bound in civilization as in politics. Pontus was one of the stages through which the Scythian style would pass on its way to Celtic lands. At any rate, the Celts of the Danube must have passed it on. Dćchelette 141 thought that the practice of wearing the torque as a sign of chieftainship had come to the Gauls from Scythia. But, while the torques of Southern France may be derived from the same region,142 it is not at all likely that the Gauls waited until they were settled in the valley of the Danube, in contact with the Scythians, before they started wearing trousers.143
To a certain extent, the Gauls played the same part in the Danube valley as the Greeks round the Ægean Sea and in Asia Minor. Their racial origins were very mixed, and their cultures varied greatly in origin and in depth. The Greeks made one single world out of their motley world ; the Celts did the same, except for the language, in the valley of the Danube. In the culture of these kingdoms there was a special element, which, however, only appears in a very few monuments. To their relations with Asia Minor and Scythia they owed certain new forms of art, and they handed on a certain number of these acquisitions to the rest of the Celts.
They owed to the Greeks, and they left for us, something more important—coins.144 The gold and silver coins which they received are chiefly of Macedonian origin ; they are dated by the reigns of the rulers who issued them, and so they constitute a new source of information for the history of the Danubian Celts.
The oldest coins are gold staters and tetradrachms of Philip II of Macedon (359–336),145 silver coins of Alexander (336–332),146 Philip Anthidios,147 and Lysimachos (d. 281),148 and, lastly, coins of the kings of Paeonia, Patraos (340–335)149 and Audoleon (315–306),150 which were of the same type as the Macedonian pieces.
It is evident that the Danubian Celts got the coins of Philip at the very beginning of his reign, about 350,151 and that they copied them before they had any very large supply of other current models ; that is, in the reign of Alexander at the latest. They had, therefore, dealings with the Macedonians which brought a quantity of money into their hands long before they settled in the country of the Antariatae, either because the services which they rendered to Macedonian policy with regard to the Illyrians were not given for nothing, or because they exported goods into Macedonia. These models continued to be popular in the Danube region, perhaps in consequence of the release of depreciated coins, and the Celts remained faithful to them until the Roman province was erected.
All these coins are of silver. The gold staters of Philip and Alexander and those of Lysimachos were imported direct into the Danubian country, but they also travelled in other directions and seem to have gone to Raetia direct.152 The reason was that in ancient Greek times gold coins were a kind of international coinage, and it was as such that they entered Celtic lands by other sides.
The Celts of the Danube faithfully maintained the types, alloys, and weights of the Macedonian coins. They had the same standard. Beyond Vienna, large coins are found at greater intervals, the size decreases as one goes westwards,153 the type, while remaining the same, degenerates, and the influence of another coinage and another standard makes itself felt. Noricum was definitely the boundary of the Danubian Celts, who were more closely attached to the Hellenistic world than their neighbours and acted as middlemen between that world and the other countries subject to them. The Illyrian groups 154 copied the local coinages of Damastium and Pelepia Illyriae, while those of the Lower Danube and Black Sea copied the money of Thasos exclusively.155 This special coinage corresponds to the commercial relations which the lower valley of the river and the shores of the Black Sea must have had normally with the region of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. It also shows that in these eastern regions the Celts of the Black Sea formed a distinct province, looking in other directions than their kinsmen of the Danube.
On the two sides of the Julian Alps, with the Celts of the Po and those living north of the Danube, the Gallic peoples were in political communication.156 Coins of the Aravisci, which have been found in considerable quantities in the district of Mortara, point to a commercial intercourse which had doubtless been going on for some time.157 On the Upper Danube, the Boii of Bohemia, who had furnished so many men for the Celtic expeditions, were still sufficiently powerful to extend their sway to the Theiss.158 In their rage for conquest they disturbed the peace of the peoples of Noricum 159 and Pannonia,160 a large part of which they occupied. This was, indeed, the only important event in the history of these peoples, which is brief, before the arrival of the Romans. The area over which their coins are discovered—concave pieces known as Regenbogenschùsselchen, or “ rainbow saucers”, the most distant and barbarous derivatives of the stater of Alexander—is evidence of their roving disposition.161
Unlike the great army which invaded Italy,162 the warriors who fell on Macedon and Greece were not, for the most part, grouped in tribes. They were a collection of bands, recruited no one knows how from groups which were politically un-associated.163 It is possible that some of them came from a great distance.164 The Gallic bands contained more than one adventurer who was attracted by the prospect of loot and a mercenary’s pay.
But you cannot make a great army out of rovers alone, and the great companies of Gallic mercenaries never numbered more than a few thousand men. To form the army of Brennus, recruiting of a more regular kind was needed, drawing largely on groups of neighbouring tribes. Men to train them were needed, and leading tribes to direct the others.
This time the lead was taken by the Belgæ. Historians who lay stress on the different names of Celt, Galatian, and Gaul have not failed to point out that the name of Galatian prevailed from this time onwards.165 But this is merely a question of pronunciation ; the word which was written down as Keltos 
in Spain and the neighbourhood of Marseilles sounded differently in the ears of the Greeks of the Balkan Peninsula, who wrote it down Galates 
But it was the same name ; the Gallic mercenaries buried in the cemetery of Hadra 166 were described on their tombstones as Keltos or Galates without distinction. “ Galatian,” therefore, does not mean Belgic ; but there are certain facts which indicate that there were Belgæ in the bands of Galatians and that they were at the head of them.
First, there is the name of the leader of the expedition of 281, Bolgios.167 If Bolgios is a proper name, that in itself is significant ; and it would be still more so if the Greek historians had called the leader after the body which he led. In Pannonia, Pliny mentions a town called Belgites.168 So the name of the Belgæ remained attached to these Danubian expeditions and to the settlements left by the invaders.
The archæological remains, too, preserve the memory of the descent of the Belgæ into the East. The statuette at Naples representing the suicide of Brennus,169 the statue of a Gaul in the New York Museum,170 and many other similar works show the Gauls of the Danubian armies dressed in wide, flapping trousers. Even the women wore them, and are depicted in that costume ; there is a statuette in the British Museum of a Gallic woman lying down, wearing trousers and cloak.171
Other representations of Gauls, of a semi-realistic character, namely the paintings on the tombstones at Hadra, show Gallic mercenaries wearing trousers which are not the wide bracca.172 It is clear that this latter garment was not, and never was, worn by all Celts. It was peculiar to the northern Gauls, and more particularly to the Belgæ, who, as has been said before, owed their name to it.173
Lastly, St. Jerome states that in his time these Galatians still speak Gaulish, and he particularly compares their language to that of the Treviri, who were Belgæ.174 That, too, is perhaps of significance.
That there were Belgæ among the Gauls who invaded the Balkans and Asia Minor, and also among those who settled in the Danube valley, is a fact beyond dispute, and we find them in the position of leaders. Their rank makes up for their lack of numbers.