John D. Grainger - The Galatians: Celtic Invaders of Greece and Asia Minor

The Galatians

The Galatians

Celtic Invaders of Greece and Asia Minor

John D Grainger

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Pen & Sword History

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright John D Grainger 2019

ISBN 978 1 52677 068 4

eISBN 978 1 52677 069 1

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52677 070 7

The right of John D Grainger to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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G alatian is the Greek term for the people who invaded the Greek and Asian lands in the third century

BC

, settling, many of them, in Galatia in central Asia Minor. They were notorious among the Greeks as the barbarian raiders who sacked Delphi, and who attacked many of the Greek cities in Greek Asia. They founded several states in the Balkans and Asia Minor which lasted for several centuries; the Romans used a more descriptive term Gallograeci.

The immediate origin of the invaders was in the northern Balkans, north of the Danube River. But these people, or at least their immediate ancestors, had themselves arrived from further west relatively recently. The original home of the Gauls (which was the Western European, or Roman, term for them) was in all probability a wide stretch of land north of the Alps, where the settlements are associated in particular with the La Tne period in archaeology, but developing out of the preceding Hallstatt period, extended from northern France, through southern Germany, and into Bohemia. They began expanding at more or less the same time as the Greeks began their colonizing activities, in the eighth/ seventh centuries

BC

, and about the same time that Rome claimed to have been founded. However, not being literate, their colonizations have not been as well recorded as those of the Greeks and Romans.

Despite this lack of literacy, they were one of the great peoples of the classical world, eventually occupying an enormous territory, from Spain to Poland and Romania, and into the Ukraine and Asia Minor. As such they had a greater extent of territory than either the Greeks (before Alexander, at least) or Rome (before its later imperial expansion in the first century

BC

). But, like the Greeks in their independent cities, they were much divided, into tribes rather than cities, though both were independent, and their history is, because most of them did not write, more of an archaeological problem than a historical, based on the records of their enemies.

They were, above all, feared by the Mediterranean peoples because of their warlike prowess, though this was something they shared, of course, with every other people of the region. This, and their proclivity to invade their neighbours, resulted in widespread conquests. They came early into the occupation of all Gaul to use the Roman name then spread east along the upper Danube and into the Balkans. In the late-fifth century

BC

bands of them successively invaded Italy, spreading through the Po Valley and subjugating its inhabitants. In the process of their raids, they captured and sacked Rome early in the fourth century.

These Italian conquests converted northern Italy into Cisalpine Gaul Gaul this side of the Alps and the result helps explain related conquests in the east. They may have invaded as a single people, though it is more likely that they came in successive waves, and when they settled into their conquests they did so as a series of tribal groups. These tribes often bore the names of similar tribes in other lands. For example, there were Boii in northern Italy and in Bohemia, and there were Senones in Italy and in northern France. The implication is that the parent tribes dispatched fragments of themselves as raiders searching for loot and aiming to acquire a new homeland; they were quite likely to coordinate arrangements with other Gallic tribes in the same situation. That situation was probably overpopulation at home. The same solution to that same problem was adopted by Italian tribes such as the Samnites, where those born at a certain time were selected for dispatch, an action known to Rome as the ver sacrum the sacred spring; how voluntary this was is unclear, but the process among the Gauls was clearly successful, judging by their wide geographical spread.

Rome itself had experienced that population difficulty and had also solved it by conquest, but they did so in the near vicinity of their own city, and held on to their colonists by organizing them to form detached parts of itself coloniae a small-scale version of the Gallic response. Rome thus became a compact conquest empire, while the Gauls remained fragmented and later on were subjected to Roman conquest. And yet the Romans, the Greeks, and the Gauls were all in effect colonizing in very similar ways, and using very similar methods. As it happens, the Roman method, enforced by the relatively narrow land that they were operating in, turned out to be the most powerful, but from several centres the Greeks, then the Gauls, expanded most successfully. The sheer scale and extent of the Gallic expansion, however, would have made it impossible to retain any sort of unity, even if they had been united in their original homes. There never was any suggestion of a Gallic empire.

Gauls from northern Italy harried Romans and other Italians for the next generation, after the sack of Rome (c.390

BC

), and meanwhile they firmly established themselves in the north of the peninsula, where they maintained their independence for the next two centuries. Another route of expansion took more Gauls into Spain, and still more went eastwards. This expansion was undoubtedly a process of conquest, but, despite the Gallic reputation for savage warfare, it was not necessarily a process involving the extermination of the conquered. In Spain the invaders appear to have blended with little difficulty with the natives, forming a group of tribes called the Celtiberians, who occupied much of the centre of the peninsula. This process of assimilation was no doubt also the effect of the Gallic conquest elsewhere, so that their rapid progress in expanding was in part due to their propensity to assimilate conquered peoples. If the expelled Gauls, driven from their homelands, and forming, at least at first, warbands often comprised mainly of men, then assimilation would be relatively easy by intermarriage. The Gauls seem in most cases to have established themselves as a ruling group, without too much continuing disturbance to the existing inhabitants.