However, by AD 50 Gaulish, and indeed Insubrian and Celtiberian, appear largely to have lost their literate status, even in their heartland areas.
How Gaulish spread
How, then, did these languages reach the far parts of Europe where they were spoken? The spread of Celtic across Europe, phenomenal as it was, happened before recorded history. The forces that drove it are a matter for speculation and intuition, rather than for observation and inference. But if we take the culture at its own evaluation, Gaulish owed its success, or rather the success of the lineages that spoke it, to their distinctive equipment, notably wheeled vehicles drawn by horses, and to the magnificent products of their smiths, especially ironwork for warriors’ swords, helmets and ring-mail armour.
A linguistic note confirms this. The words for ‘iron’ in Greek (sidēron), Latin (ferrum) and Celtic (isarno-)† have separate origins, but the Germanic word (e.g. Gothic eisarn. Old English īsern, īren) appears to have been borrowed from Celtic.25 This is unsurprising, since the Celts were evidently the middlemen for the transmission of ironworking to the north of Europe. (Tacitus even mentions (Germania, xliii) that the Cotini, a Gaulish tribe, paid tribute to the German Quadi in iron ore. He adds typically, ’quo magis pudeat—the more shame to them’: they should have been able to use the iron to turn the tables.)*
† Recorded in the Gaulish name of an old village in the French Jura, Isarnodori, ferrei ostii, ‘iron door’. Grimm (1876, vol. I, ch. 4: 5).
Although the technical level was high, then, its military application tended to emphasise individual leaders’ prowess, sustained by these prestige products, rather than the development of overwhelming large-scale organisation. Their communities remained small, without even a feudal structure of overlords and kings. Literacy was unnecessary, and largely avoided. Perhaps, as some of their descendants would do two thousand years later on the other side of the world, they had been able to rely on their superior weapons, and prevail against vast odds without troubling to outwit their opponents.
Although Celtic warriors and their villages became widespread, they did not eliminate or submerge the communities in their path. (In this, they contrast markedly with the spread of the Pax Romana, and of Latin with it.) To mention only the ancient communities of whose language we can find some trace, Celtic speakers are found in coexistence with Germans north of the Alps, with Veneti and Etruscans south of them, with Basque speakers (Aquitani) in southern Gaul, with Iberians and Tartessians in Spain, and with Macedonians and Thracians in the Balkans. This was a culture that harried its neighbours and thrust them aside, but did not subjugate or incorporate them.
But besides the raid, and military conquest of new land, there was perhaps one other channel through which the Celtic languages spread, and indeed developed into new and separate languages. This was navigation.
It was an accepted tradition of medieval Europe that Ireland had been populated from the coast of Spain. The usual grounds quoted are twin mistakes about geography and etymology. The reconstructed Tabula Peutingeriana shows Ireland as an island offshore from Brigantia (La Coruña), and St Isidore’s influential sixth-century Etymologiae states: ‘Hibernia…extends north from Africa. Its forward parts face (H)iberia and the Cantabric Ocean [viz. the Bay of Biscay]. Whence too it is called Hibernia.’26
However, there may have been a lot more to this link. Avienus, gathering coastal navigation information in the fourth century, says, of the ‘Holy Island’: ‘the race of the Hierni inhabits it far and wide. Again the island of the Albiones lies near, and the Tartessians were accustomed to carry business to the end of the Oestrymnides. Citizens of Carthage too and the common folk round the Pillars of Hercules went to these seas.’27
Now lernē was the common Greek term for Ireland, and the Oestrymnides are probably the Scillies, or Cornwall, since he also notes that these islands are ‘rich in mine of tin and lead’.28 The whole passage is evidence for a link between the British Isles and the southern Iberian region of Tartessus, known to be a focus of Carthage’s trade empire.
This link is amply confirmed by archaeological evidence. Impressed by the apparent profusion of exchange relations among the different Atlantic-facing sectors of the European coast, including Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia and Portugal in the late Bronze Age, 1200-200 BC, Barry Cunliffe has suggested that ‘Atlantic Celtic’ may have grown up as a lingua franca, or perhaps an elite language, among the various communities on the eastern seaboard.29
This hypothesis, though archaeologically inspired, has a certain attraction from the linguistic and cultural point of view. It gives a medium for the spread of Celtic across to the southern side of the Pyrenees, when there is no tradition of invasion from the north, and most of the intervening territory between southern Gaul and central Spain was in fact always held by Basques. It gives a basis in history to a persistent theme of old Irish literature, the immrama, tales of magical voyages, such as that of St Brendan. And it provides an explanation for a niggling fact of Celtic historical linguistics: the dialectal similarity between Celtiberian and the Goidelic languages of Ireland and western Scotland.
While Lepontic, Gaulish and Brythonic (P-Celtic) all usually convert old kw to p, Celtiberian and Goidelic (Q-Celtic) retain the k element. It would be possible, then, to see Q-Celtic as the original form, spread to the shores of Gaul by effective users of iron, and then, through the establishment of exchange relationships and trade, beyond to the south and north across the sea. Subsequently, the Celts in Gaul and the Alps innovated in converting kw to p, followed by their close associates in Britain, while the peripheral ones, Celtiberian and Goidelic, retained the kw, those in the north, Iernē, later simplifying it to k. *
* In fact, few linguists today take this P/Q criterion as a very strong discriminant. The change could happen anywhere: indeed it has, in modern Romanian, and quite independently in the Italic dialects (e.g. Oscan changed to P, Latin didn’t). And even in the centre of the P-dialects, not all Qs changed to P: on the Coligny calendar in the Rhône valley we find EQVOS, EQVI, ‘horse’ (even though the usual Gaulish name for the horse goddess is Epona), and the ‘Sequani’, living on the river ‘Sequana’ (Seine) in northern Gaul, seem unaffected. But P-Celtic and Q-Celtic are such a chestnut in the tradition that it seems deceptive to leave it out of the discussion.
In fact, some strange changes came over Celtic in the British Isles, as nowhere else: verb-subject-object as basic word order, mutation of initial consonants, conjugated prepositions, strange locutions to express status and activity (’I am in my student’, ‘I am at reading of my book’), and much else. There are those who believe that these strangenesses are really inherited from the lost previous languages of the old inhabitants, perhaps spoken by the civilisations that raised megalithic monuments. Failing to learn the incoming language fully, they simply continued with many features of their old languages. This is the substrate hypothesis; interesting, but it explains little since we know nothing of the languages of the British Isles prior to Celtic.
Another hypothesis is language mixing, or creolisation. It too can be brought into the theory of Celtic spread by navigation along the Atlantic coast, by noting that major partners in this network, for most of the first millennium BC, were the Phoenicians, many of them (specifically the Carthaginians) based in North Africa, and quite capable of maintaining links along the whole Mediterranean. Now it so happens that in the North African language families, Egyptian, Semitic and Berber, there are direct parallels for at least seventeen of these curious characteristics of British and Irish Celtic, characteristics that are quite unparalleled in any Indo-European language, let alone their Celtic cousins, and which are indeed extremely rare globally.30 If Celtic was indeed spread as a coastal lingua franca, these North Africans, in trade and exchange, would have been among its speakers, and effective in moulding it.
But there is no direct linguistic evidence for any of this at the moment: as to the spread of Gaulish across most of Eu
rope, and the origins of Celtiberian, and the Celtic languages of the British Isles, we are in the realm of speculation and reconstruction. By contrast, we have direct testimony on the advent of Celtic speakers in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.
The Gauls’ advances in the historic record
It is clear that the ideal of the raid, whereby parties of young men would seek to cover themselves with glory and booty, never ceased to be current in Celtic societies that remained independent. Successful raids, especially if perpetrated by younger sons without prospects at home, could turn into de facto invasions. And we also encounter examples of deliberate decisions by Celtic tribes to seek new land in a mass migration: a famous one is the tribe of the Helvetii, whose intent to move from the Alps into southern Gaul was frustrated by Julius Caesar at the beginning of his Gallic Wars.
These kinds of movement twice led to major incursions by parties of Gauls into the centres of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The first was the sack of Rome by Brennus in 390 BC, followed almost immediately by a withdrawal with massive booty and extorted payments. Polybius describes the characteristics of the Gauls who moved into the valley of the Po around this time:
They lived in unwalled villages and had no knowledge of the refinements of civilization. As they slept on straw and leaves, ate meat and practised no other pursuits but war and agriculture, their lives were very simple and they were completely unacquainted with any art or science. Their possessions consisted of cattle and gold, since these were the only objects that they could easily take with them whatever their circumstance and transport wherever they chose. It was of the greatest importance to them to have a following, and the man who was believed to have the greatest number of dependants and companions about him was the most feared and powerful member of the tribe.31
The second was the pillage of Delphi, the Greek religious centre, in 279 BC, carried out by another Brennus, but soon beaten off by the rallying Greeks. Remnants remained as roving mercenaries in Macedonia. But one party (numbering twenty thousand, half of them women and children—so not just a war band) was invited next year to cross the Sea of Marmara into Anatolia, to fight on behalf of Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, against the Seleucid king Antiochus. They gave good service, but afterwards became a liability, until they were settled more permanently in the region around Ancyra. This became the capital of this new settled community, henceforth known either as the Galatians or Gallo-Greeks. Their wars with neighbours, especially the city of Pergamum, and their service as mercenaries (as far afield as Egypt), continued for another century.
Both in northern Italy and in Anatolia it was the Romans who finally settled the hash of restless Gaulish marauders.
A series of Roman pre-emptive aggressions on the Adriatic coast, and the founding of military colonies in the area, between 330 and 270 BC, gained them considerable respect. The first Punic war then intervened (264-41), but after the Romans had seen off the Carthaginians, they returned to the fray, and from 232 to 218 BC pressed farther into the heart of northern Italy with pitched battles and new colonies of their own citizens and allies (hence permanent pockets of Latin speakers) at Placentia (Piacenza) and Cremona. Once again the Carthaginians interrupted, this time with an invasion right through the heart of northern Italy (Hannibal and his elephants, in 217 BC); amazingly, this had no effect against the strengthening Roman hold on the area. When Hannibal had been eliminated—an ordeal that itself took sixteen years—the Romans proceeded once again to battle, with a victory over the Insubrians at Como in 196, and more colonies in the valley of the Po at Bologna, Modena and Parma, effectively staking out the area where the Gauls had previously been able to organise raids. The Boii, the principal warlike tribe, were defeated and stripped of half their territory. Writing fifty years later of a visit to the valley of the Po, Polybius observed that ‘Gallia Cisalpina’ was now just a name: the place had become a part of Italy.32
In Anatolia, the Romans started to try to bridle the independent Galatians just after they had finished the job on their kinsmen in Italy. In 189 BC a Roman general, as part of a campaign in support of Pergamum (still suffering from Galatian mercenaries), defeated all three constituent tribes, the Tolistobogii, Trocmi and Tectosages, and sold forty thousand of them into slavery. (The previous century had evidently been good to them, and their population had grown massively.) But Galatian provocation continued, not only with Pergamum, but also with other neighbours, Cappadocia to the east, Pontus in the north. A century later, under King Deiotarus, they were allied with Rome, on the strength of a common enmity with the ambitious king of Pontus, Mithradates VI; in a signal feat of political juggling he managed to remain in favour throughout the civil war that followed Caesar’s assassination, and to die in his bed in 40 BC. Thereafter little more is heard of the Galatians’ irrepressible ways, but in 25 BC Augustus made Galatia part of a much larger unit including all the provinces directly to its south, diluting any remaining Celtic identity.
The Gallo-Greeks never left a trace of written Gaulish, although they provided the inspiration for some of the finest artistic evocations of the Gauls (in statuary at Pergamum); and the evidence of their names is pretty authentic (Tectosages, ‘home-seekers’, Deiotarus, ‘holy bull’.*) Nevertheless, a memory of their linguistic identity lingered: at the end of the fourth century AD, St Jerome, famous for his Latin translation of the Bible, which became the Vulgate, was declaring that he could communicate with Ancyra’s Galatians in much the same language as he had heard spoken in his youth near Trier, on the Moselle. But four hundred years is an awfully long time for a language without a written tradition to survive in the midst of Hellenised Asia Minor: perhaps he was just alluding to something he had read.
* Perhaps this is a glimpse of Gaulish with a Greek accent: the natural Gaulish for this would be Deiwo-tarwos, but Greek had dropped all [w].
This venture into Asia Minor, with its linguistic impact on the central highlands round Ancyra, is instructive about the way in which a language like Gaulish could be spread, and the conditions for its survival. It was the language of a lineage. When its speakers moved, its domain would move with them, and if the community grew, so would the number of its speakers. If the community lost its identity, or its distinguishing customs, the language would disappear.
Consilium: The rationale of Roman Imperium
Consilium: (a) deliberation, consultation, a considering together, counsel; (b) a conclusion made with consideration, determination, resolution, measure, plan, purpose, intention; (c) the persons who deliberate, a council.
Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary
The Celtic speakers in Britain proved surprisingly impervious to Latin in the long term, even if it was the country’s language of officialdom and literacy for four hundred years. Latin never became the language of the common people in Britain. So it was that Britain’s derisory reputation with the Romans was ultimately fulfilled: ‘neither brave in battle nor faithful in peace’.33 We must ask how this spread of the conqueror’s language could fail to occur.
Mōs Māiōrum—the Roman way
It is no secret that the basis for the spread of Latin was the political and military spread of the Roman imperium (a word originally meaning command, but later carrying all the connotations of its French rendering, empire.) In this it was unlike Celtic, but rather like English in its early modern career. But like the speakers of English too (and again unlike the Celts), the Romans were seldom nakedly aggressive or belligerent in motivating their campaigns. There was also, among both sets of empire-builders, an unwillingness to talk openly about the commercial and material benefits of what was achieved—again unlike the Celts with their emphasis on the joys of booty. What really drew Rome out to conquer every country round the Mediterranean?
We have seen that very early on (the second century BC) it was a matter of curiosity to Greeks such as Polybius to figure out what made the Romans so speedily victorious, apparently against all comers. Although he made some trenchant remarks abo
ut the Roman character (see ‘The contenders: Greek and Roman views’, p. 279), he did not settle for any easy or simple answer. And even with the benefit of two thousand years’ hindsight, it smacks of special pleading (or ex post facto rationalisation) to detect reasons why it had to be just this village halfway down the Mediterranean’s central peninsula which was bound to take over the whole circuit of its coasts. Nevertheless, it is possible to see differences between the Romans’ way and that of their neighbours, especially those in western Europe, which are our special interest in this chapter.
The Romans were an intensely civic society, with an overriding and persistent aversion to long-term dominion by a single man. Their system of government took checks and balances to heights unequalled before or since. From 510 BC, the traditional date of the foundation of their Res Publica (this Latin term for their constitution, the basis for our word republic, means simply ‘the people’s property’ ), they had organised annual elections for the main offices of state, and each holder was matched with one or more colleagues with whom he must share his power. The two holders of the supreme executive office, called consuls, were each in effect joint king for the year; but their power was only absolute when on campaign outside the city; otherwise every decision, like those of all the office-holders, was subject to prōvocātio ( ‘challenge’ ), i.e. appeal to the Roman people. (The joint nature of consulship even led to their assuming the post of commander-in-chief on alternate days, which could cause military chaos at times of crisis.) The only persistent executive institution was the Senātus, the council of ‘elders’, usually about three hundred strong, made up mostly of men who had previously held office. They were responsible for setting the level of taxes. The Senate was always dominated by the old families that had taken responsibility for government since the beginning. Nevertheless, there was room for the occasional novus homō (’new man’) of talent (and the necessary means*) to break into the ranks from time to time.
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Page 36