The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  Tribes who used perishable materials where the Romans used stone, and who recorded their histories in nothing more durable than brain tissue, are unlikely to be seen as sophisticated precursors of the modern world. The indifference of present-day Gauls to their Celtic ancestors is understandable. A museum curator in Vienne, whose director had decided not to display the collection of Celtic gold coins, explained it to me thus: ‘They lost’ (she meant, ‘to the Romans’). The fragments that do remain are undervalued. Some of the gold coins kept in museum storerooms are among the most beautiful objects of the pre-Christian world. One day, collectors will stare in disbelief at early twenty-first-century auction catalogues and wish they had been alive when ancient works of art could be bought for the price of a television.

  This world is closer than we think, but it takes forms that belong to a very different civilization. The ancient Celts – especially the Gaulish Celts, according to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus – were not the easiest people to understand: ‘They converse with few words and in riddles, hinting darkly at things for the most part and using one word when they mean another.’ The curious symbols on Celtic coins, carvings, weapons and utensils are a reminder from artists who worked under Druidic supervision, and who were perhaps Druids themselves, that there was a hidden sense to everything the Celts produced, and that not all their secrets are undiscoverable, because the answers to their riddles lie in the visible universe. Readers who decide to prolong this exploration beyond the borders of this book may find that the world reinvented by the Celts in the image of their gods is not a certain escape from the present: Middle Earth exists, and many of us are living in it now.

  PART ONE

  1

  The Road from the Ends of the Earth

  For many centuries, the Celts were a mystery to their neighbours. In the sixth century BC, the Greeks had heard from intrepid merchants following the tin routes or from sailors blown off course of a people called the Keltoi, who lived somewhere along the northern shores of the Mediterranean. In the early fifth century, when the historian Herodotus tried to shine a light on this distant world, he was like a traveller on a starless night holding up a candle to the landscape. Of the Celts, he had been told the following: they live in the land where the Danube has its source near a city called Pyrene, and their country lies to the west of the Pillars of Hercules, on the borders of the Cynesians, ‘who dwell at the extreme west of Europe’. This was either fantastically inaccurate (the supposed homelands are nearly two thousand kilometres apart) or an over-condensed version of an amazingly accurate source. Celtic tribes are known to have existed at that time both in the Upper Danube region and in south-western Iberia.

  The Pyrenees – confused by Herodotus with a fictitious city called Pyrene – lie almost exactly halfway between the two. They form a great barrier across the western European isthmus, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, dividing France from Spain. Most of the trans-Pyrenean traffic crossed at either end, where the mountains tumble down to the sea, but the central range was surprisingly porous. In the early Middle Ages, the road that leads to the principality of Andorra was used by smugglers, migrant labourers and pilgrims bound for the shrine at Santiago de Compostela. The snowy passes of the Andorran Pyrenees lie on the watershed line, from which the rivers flow either west to the Atlantic or east to the Mediterranean. In the days of the ancient Celts, this was the home of a tribe called the Andosini, who entered history when they were defeated by Hannibal in 218 BC during his long march from Spain to Italy. No one knows for certain how the Carthaginian general came to encounter such a remote tribe, but ancient history sometimes hinges on a place that seems desolate beyond significance.

  1. The Road from the Ends of the Earth

  The Celts’ own stories of their origins were told over an area so vast that the sun spent an hour and a half each day bringing the dawn to it. Because the Celts were a group of cultures, not a race, they spread rapidly from central Europe, by influence and intermarriage as much as by invasion, until the Celtic world stretched from the islands of the Pritani in the northern sea to the great plains east of the Hercynian Forest, which even the speediest merchant did not expect to cross in under sixty days. As a result, although the tales were told in dialects of the same language, they took many different forms, like trees of the same species rooted in different soils and climates.

  One tale in particular was considered pre-eminent and true, since it described what appeared to be a real journey made by a founding father of the Celts. It survived in various fragmented forms; some of the incidents became detached from their original context or were too strange to be part of a coherent narrative; yet they were held together by the geography of half a continent. The journey began at the extreme western tip of Europe – the Sacred Promontory, where a temple to Hercules stood above the roaring sea in a place so holy that no one was allowed to spend the night there. But it was in the mountains between the two seas that the hero entered the country known as Gaul. And since Gaul is the heartland of the first part of this adventure, this is where the story of Middle Earth begins.5

  With the mists of the Western Ocean draped over the pine forests, it would have been easy to imagine the scene: the smoke climbing up through the trees, the crackle of branches, and the fire, as red as a lion’s mouth. Cattle were stumbling down the riverbeds to the hot plains below. The man knew the route they would take. From the ends of the earth, where the sun and the souls of the dead plunge into the sea, he had followed rather than driven them, so that it was not entirely true to say that he had stolen the herd. He acted out of desires that were foreign to his mind but not his body. It was in the country of the Bebruces, at the time of year when the sun rises and sets in the northern sky. The daughter of King Bebryx had served him bread, meat and beer in the great wooden hall, and when the sun had returned to the lower world she had taken him to her bed, and he had filled her with the seed of a god’s son until the great hall shook and the walls of her chamber were beyond repair.

  He had left the hall like a god or a thief. But the part of him that was human was stung by his act of abandonment. He thought of the creature like a snake that was growing inside her; he thought of her shame and of a father’s rage. He had stopped where the cork oaks and the olives begin. He strode back up into the green, dark mountains, towards the ridge he had dented and levelled with his feet. Her white limbs lay scattered on the ground as though they had lain together on the pine needles and she had been dismembered by the force of his love. He gathered up the remains of the wolves’ feast. Her blood, and the blood of a god’s strange grandchild, burned his hands. He thundered her name to the skies that he had once held aloft – the Greek-named daughter of a Celtic king. Her name meant ‘fire’, ‘a gem’, or the gold ‘grain’ of the harvest. He felled a forest, then another. Rivers that had yet to be named began to flow from the bare mountain tops. He built a pyre that the midday sun would light. The smoke would be seen from the Ocean, where sailors hugged the coast in boats of skin; then the wind would carry it across the isthmus to the safe, thronged harbours of the Middle Sea, and even that blazing range of peaks would be unworthy of his Pyrenea.

  He caught up with the cattle in the salty plain. He walked behind them in a straight line, carrying his club, the lion skin slung over his shoulder. In his other hand, he carried a wheel, divided into eight sections by its spokes. He paused where the cattle stopped to drink, at a ford or a spring at the foot of a hill. There were rough stones at his feet, shaped only by torrents and volcanoes, but behind them, on the path the man and the animals were trampling out, along with the rich gift of dung, there were sherds of brick and pot, cut stones flushed with cinnabar, ingots of tin and even gold. Keeping the land to his left, he walked beside the lagoons of the Middle Sea. Sometimes, there was a stone watchtower and a sail on the grey horizon. At dawn, by the shivering inlets, the sun rose again in the northern sky and burned a beacon onto his eye. In the warm nights, he angled his str
ide by the blurry trail of stars where the sun had passed or where his stepmother, tricked while she slept into giving the misbegotten mortal her breast, had wasted her milk in angry ostentation.

  Near the mouths of the Rhodanus, birds and merchants came down from the other ocean: this was the region where the midsummer wind was called Buccacircius because it blew so hard that it puffed out a man’s cheeks when he tried to speak. The tribes of the region were Ligurians, who belonged to such an ancient time that no one could understand their language. To those wild inhabitants of the hinterland, the road that the man and the animals were creating was something terrible and new. He reached the dry plain called the Crau, which is a desert of silt brought down from the distant Alps to the Rhodanus by the river Druentia. His enemies lurked in the low hills, clutching their quivers; they saw him sleep and watched the cattle that had come from the ends of the earth. The Ligurians had no towns, but if anything had stood on that plain, it would have been smashed like a boat that is splintered and wrecked by the storm. While he dreamt of the circling stars, thunderheads darkened the Crau, the skies cracked, and blazing boulders slashed through the air like a thousand gale-blasts all at once. When he woke, his enemies were gone, and the plain was strewn with stones as far as the horizon. In the dawn’s slow light, the cattle were munching the tough green shoots that pushed up between the stones. He had no memory of the battle, but he knew that his prayer had been answered.

  For the third time, the sun rose in the same place, as though a god’s strong arm were holding its chariot to the same course until the journey was done.

  They crossed the Rhodanus where an island divides it into two rushing streams. Beyond the valley, there were blue hills, each one higher than the last, with crests of yellow limestone: they might have been the backs of giants who had been stranded there when he pulled two continents together to prevent the monsters of the Ocean from entering the Middle Sea. He climbed until the air grew thin and the Druentia was just a torrent. At last, he reached a place from where the rivers flow and the Alps formed an impassable wall. Pausing only to shift the snow of countless centuries, he piled a forest against the mountain, set fire to it and waited for the crack of thunder. Then he cleared away the rubble.

  No sooner had the gateway opened in the mountains than people and animals were passing through it in both directions: soldiers in bird-crested helmets returning from the east; brides whose braided hair might have been worked by goldsmiths, travelling in procession to a new home; merchants with small, stubborn horses carrying salt and iron, or red wine in leather bags, each one of which was worth a slave.

  From then on, guided by the sun, he crossed the land in eight directions. His club was a feather compared to the weight of Pyrenea’s unbearable generosity, and so he paid his way by performing acts of public good. He created more roads, set their distances and tolls, and killed the savage bands who robbed travellers. He diverted rivers, drained and irrigated fields; he built towns and supplied not only the building materials – the squared stones, the pointed staves, the mounds of earth – but also their populations. For wherever he went, he found fathers more grateful than King Bebryx and virgins curiously skilled in the art of love.

  One town above all received his favour. It lay on a levelled hill in the fertile land of the northern watershed. This was Alesia, which became the mother-city of the Celts. The princess of Alesia was a tall and beautiful girl called Celtine. She served the traveller salted fish from the distant sea and sides of venison as large as herself; she poured out the strong wine spiced with cumin. In the mornings, she brought him strawberries from the woods and the water that was used to cleanse the honeycombs. She did this out of love and the desire for a son. But the traveller had grown tired and his head ached with memories. And so Celtine stole his cattle and – this is the only unbelievable part of the tale – hid them and refused to tell him where they were until he agreed to rest his heavy limbs on the soft skins of her bedchamber. Somehow, in that land of tidy fields and gentle hills, a girl concealed from the son of a god a herd of road-hardened cattle that had eaten the sharp grass that grows by the Western Ocean . . . It was the kind of trickery a man of his years could easily excuse. He accepted his defeat, paid generous tribute to his conqueror, and a son was born, named Celtus or Galates.

  At last, he grew so old that he was recognizable only by his club, his lion skin and his wheel. There was nothing left for him but to tell stories. He never wanted for an audience: as soon as he opened his mouth, the children and grandchildren of Celtine felt his eloquence tug at their ears, and they gathered round like the herd when the shepherd brings the hay. And they knew that everything he said had really happened, because he himself had made the roads on which he travelled, and the roads were as true as the sun that wheels overhead and underneath the earth, dividing up the heavens and the world below, so that souls are never lost when they journey to the Ocean and the lower world, and from there to the gateway in the east where the sun is reborn.

  It is an uncanny characteristic of Celtic myths – including those that recount the adventures of a demi-god – that they often turn out to be true. The bards who preserved tribal memory in verse were not rambling improvisers: they were archivist-poets who knew the dates of battles and migrations. The story that Massalia (Marseille) was founded by Greeks from Phocaea in about 600 BC has been confirmed by archaeological excavations. The legend of a mass resettlement of Gaulish tribes in northern Italy is more accurate than histories written by erudite Romans, who were never sure whether the Celts had come from the east or from the west. In Irish mythology, the great mound called Emain Macha (Navan Fort) was said to have been founded by a certain Queen Macha (identified with a goddess of that name) in 668 BC. This was considered impossibly early until archaeologists dated the oldest features of Emain Macha to c. 680 BC.

  The historical truth of Celtic myths was far from obvious to the Greeks and Romans who recorded them. By the time these stories were written down, they no longer made much sense either as legend or as history. Some of them were skewed by Roman propaganda and prejudice; others had become entangled with local myths from an age before the Celts existed. Cluttered with incomprehensible names and impossible events, they spoke of stones hurled down from the heavens and a race of serpents born of human beings. The gods themselves became confused. When the peripatetic writer and raconteur Lucian of Samosata was travelling through Gaul in the second century AD, he was shocked to see a piece of ornamented sculpture which he took to be an insulting depiction of the deified Herakles: the god had the appearance of a grizzled old man with the sun-baked face of a sailor. Lucian was looking at something too exotic to be comprehended: the tongue of the Celtic Herakles was pierced with delicate chains of gold and amber attached to the ears of a happily captive audience. Some of his listeners were so enthralled that the chains had slackened as they surged towards the storyteller. A Greek-speaking Gaul had to explain to Lucian that this was the Gaulish Herakles: his name was Ogmios, and his eloquence was such that his audience literally hung on his every word.

  The ear-tugging tales of the Gaulish Herakles were not just a metaphorical expression of the scope and fertility of the Celtic world. They belong to that tantalizing, protohistoric zone between legend and myth. There probably was a tribal chief, some time in the late Bronze Age, who grew rich through cattle rustling, or a warrior-king who pacified the prehistoric tribes that lived along the Mediterranean trade routes. Centuries before the Romans imposed their genocidal peace, the roads had been made safe enough for herders and traders to travel up from Iberia, bringing livestock, salt, amber, iron, tin and gold. The civilizing feats of a heroic figure were celebrated in an Odyssey that was like a storytellers’ warehouse of domestic and imported produce. Greeks who founded trading-posts along the Mediterranean recounted the tenth labour of Herakles (the theft of a giant’s cattle from Erytheia, the ‘red’ sunset island on the edge of the world); Phoenician sailors brought tales of the god Melqart, whom the G
reeks recognized as their own Herakles. The serpent creature in the womb of Pyrenea was probably the vestige of a snake-god worshipped in the forested foothills long before the Celtic Bebruces occupied the region later known as Gallia Narbonensis. But the passionate gift that she made of herself to a wandering hero from the ends of the earth would have had the sound of recent history to tribes who formed commercial and matrimonial alliances with the Greeks.

  The Heraklean Way – the path that adhered wherever possible to the diagonal of the solstice sun – may have required a god-assisted reconfiguration of the landscape in the form of mountain passes, but it was, on the whole, a practical route. It followed the prehistoric trails of transhumant animals which, as Pliny the Elder noted in the first century AD, ‘come from remote regions to feed on the thyme that covers the stony plains of Gallia Narbonensis’. It avoided the impossibly rugged coastal route into Italy, which Roman legionaries dreaded and which is an obstacle course even today; instead, it climbed up to the grassy plains of Provence and from there to the only Alpine col that remained passable in winter – the Matrona or Montgenèvre, near the source of the Durance. Beyond the Matrona, a trader or an army could descend to the plains of Etruscan Italy or continue towards the land of the dawn and the salt mines of the eastern Alps.

  The people who heard these tales knew that these places existed: the Sacred Promontory, where the journey began; the mist-covered mountains of Pyrenea; the holy spring at Nemausos (Nîmes), which was said to have been founded by a son of Herakles; the rock-strewn desert of the Crau and the Matrona Pass. These tales would have been told in the oppida – the Roman name for Celtic hill forts – from which the arrow-straight line of the Heraklean Way can still be seen bisecting the landscape in the form of tracks and field boundaries. The inhabitants of these oppida knew that all these sites were joined by a line that had been blessed and ratified by the gods, because it also existed in the upper world.