by Graham Robb
Since the days of Polybius, historians have wondered where Hannibal and his elephants managed to cross the Alps in early November. Etymologists have analysed place names in search of Carthaginian roots, which are no more likely to be found than the petrified elephant droppings that an archaeologist recently hoped to detect along the presumed route of Hannibal. Several expeditions, seeking a suitably heroic crossing, have struggled pointlessly over impossibly high passes, in one case misled by the old ‘Elephant’ inn on the road to the vertiginous Col Agnel, which, even in the days of motorized snow ploughs, is closed from October to May. In July 1959, a Cambridge engineer drove an Italian circus elephant, which refused to answer to the name Hannibella, over the 2081-metre Mont-Cenis Pass. (The elephant, not having received Carthaginian military training, lost 230 kilograms.) In fact, given a choice of routes, an elephant – or, for that matter, a hiker or a cyclist – would head for Italy over the Col de Montgenèvre, which the Celts called Matrona. Not only is this the lowest crossing of the French Alps (1850 metres), it also marks the Gaulish end of the Heraklean Way. The Matrona had everything a military commander could desire: there was a tribal capital – Brigantium – only eight kilometres away, and a broad plain on which crops ripened and which now supports the lush green lawns of an eighteen-hole golf course.
Twenty-three centuries after the Carthaginian invasion, Montgenèvre is a defiantly expanding leisure zone of concrete ‘chalets’ where the Iron Age seems never to have existed. Perhaps its unheroic demeanour explains why it has almost never been identified as the crossing-point. The col itself is now said to lie on the main road through the town, but at the original, unsignposted col, higher up on the narrow road to the Village du Soleil holiday centre, there is something of the electrifying clarity of the high Alpine passes, where distances contract and whole regions suddenly come into view when a bank of cloud disintegrates. At the Matrona Pass, an extraordinary historical vista opens up, though it takes the digital equivalent of a solar wheel to reveal it. If Herakles had stood where the temple of the Mother Goddesses once stood, and turned precisely ninety degrees to the west of the Heraklean trajectory, he would have been looking towards one of the towns he was said to have founded: Semur-en-Auxois, the neighbour of Alesia. If he had followed the setting sun, he would have reached the hill at Lugdunum (Lyon), from where he was said to have looked down on the confluence of the Rhone and the Saône. A bearing of 0° – due north – would have taken him straight to the vast Herculean sanctuary of Deneuvre, where a hundred statues of Hercules (over one-third of all the statues of Hercules ever found in Gaul) were unearthed in 1974. Only a god or a migrating bird returning to its nesting-site could have attained such accuracy.
These hypothetical lines reach far into the depths of ancient tribal Gaul, over ice-bound mountains that had still not been accurately mapped two hundred years ago. Even on a sunny day, it is hard to believe that the precise array of terrestrial solar paths that the Celts would develop is anything other than a beautiful Heraklean coincidence, or some intoxicating piece of false wisdom dispensed by the oracle of the temple, giddy with altitude or Greek wine, conjuring cosmic hallucinations out of the thin air.
When Hannibal stood at the Matrona in the early winter of 218 BC, watching his elephants stumble down to the plains of northern Italy, he knew that he was standing in the rocky footprints of Herakles. His strategists and astrologers, and their Celtic allies and informers, were certain that the sun god had shown them the way. They seem to have known, too, that the source of the Rhone lay in a ‘central district of Europe’ and that it was somehow related to the Heraklean itinerary.
The computerized oracle agrees: a line projected for two hundred and twenty kilometres from the Matrona at right angles to the summer solstice sunset leads to the region of glaciers where the Rhone rises. At the river’s source there was a mountain which, despite its remoteness, was known to the early Iron Age inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast. It was mentioned in a poem of the fourth century AD called Ora Maritima (‘Sea Coasts’). Using what must have been an excellent scroll-finding service, the Roman proconsul, Rufus Festus Avienus, assembled a collection of ancient periploi (descriptions of maritime routes) with the aim of turning them into an unusable but entertaining guide for armchair navigators. One of those ancient texts – of which no other trace remains – was a nine-hundred-year-old handbook for merchants sailing from Massalia to the Sacred Promontory, ‘which some people call the Path of Hercules’. In a passage on the Rhone, the author had mentioned the fact that the mountain at the river’s source was known to the natives of the region as ‘Solis columna’ or ‘the Pillar of the Sun’.
When this name was recorded in the sixth century BC, valuable geographical intelligence was already flowing into the busy harbour of Massalia from distant parts, along with works of art from the eastern Mediterranean and precious metals from the enigmatic Cassiterides or ‘Tin Islands’ – perhaps the islands later known as Britannia – that lay beyond the Carthaginian blockade at the Pillars of Hercules. It might have been common knowledge among the Celts: somewhere in the heart of Europe, many days from the sea routes that were bringing the first trappings of Greek civilization to the barbarous Keltoi, there was a named point of reference, a solar coordinate. The Heraklean Way itself was a wonder of the world, and perhaps there were other wonders, too: Herakles had journeyed throughout Gaul, and his heavenly grasp of the immeasurable earth might have been reflected in other branches and articulations of the Heraklean Way . . . But even four centuries later, in the winter of 218 BC, there was nothing to suggest any such sophistication in the Celtic foot soldiers of Hannibal’s army, trudging over the snow-clogged pass in their rough plaid cloaks and hare’s-wool boots – nothing, that is, except the glint of an arm-ring or a neck torc, the meticulously coordinated orbits of a compass-drawn brooch, or the geometric spirals of a bronze disc attached to a chariot wheel, performing its mysterious circumvolutions like a microcosm of the turning sky.
2
News of the Iron Age
The guide in the horreum was lost in admiration for the Romans. She traced the elegant curve of the vault with a loving gesture, and we peered along a dim passageway at slanting shafts and limestone arches that had braced themselves for centuries against the forum and the market of Roman Narbonne. The buildings above ground had long since crumbled away to form the foundations of later buildings that had disappeared in their turn, but the horreum – if it was indeed a warehouse – had survived until it was the only Roman structure in Narbonne.
‘You’ve got to admire those Roman engineers,’ said the guide, caressing a nicely pointed section of wall that had required only the lightest of repairs.
The Romans had occasionally copied the beautiful stone-and-timber walls of the natives; they had even built some of their own forts using muri gallici; and so it seemed appropriate to put in a word for the guide’s Celtic ancestors.
‘Or,’ I suggested, ‘the Gaulish engineers . . .’
The deathly dungeons suddenly came to life with the sound of laughter. Evidently, this was one of the saving graces of a job in the sunless underworld of sunny Narbonne: tourists sometimes said the most amazing things.
‘Oui!’ she almost shrieked. ‘Les ingénieurs gaulois!’
Stepping out of the horreum into the light of a first-century-BC afternoon, she might have shared the joke with an ancient Roman. To most Greeks and Romans – especially those who had never left home – the typical Celt was a rampaging drunkard who blundered into battle at the side of his brawny, blue-eyed wife, wearing either animal skins or nothing. At home, the Celts festooned themselves with gold jewellery and drank undiluted wine – to which the entire nation was addicted. Their table manners were atrocious: they wore woollen cloaks and trousers instead of togas, and sat on the hides of wolves and dogs instead of reclining on couches. This was in the part of Gaul known as Gallia Bracata (‘Trousered Gaul’). Further north, in Gallia Comata (‘Hairy Gaul’), thing
s were even more exotic. Gaulish aristocrats shaved their cheeks but not their upper lips, so that their pendulous moustaches trailed in the soup and served as strainers when they drank. Sometimes, they showed their appreciation of the meal by fighting to the death over the best cut of meat.
Ever since the sixth century BC, Greek travellers had been returning from Gaul with tales of ludicrous and disgusting practices. Celts who lived by the Rhine tested the legitimacy of their new-born sons by throwing them into the river. Other Celts waded into the sea, brandishing their swords until they were swallowed by the waves. At war councils, punctuality was encouraged by the custom of torturing the last man to arrive and then putting him to death in sight of the whole assembly. In their dealings with strangers, the Gauls were hospitable to the point of insanity: Gaulish men rolled about in bed with other men, ‘raging with outlandish lust’, and it was considered highly offensive if a guest declined to sodomize his host.
It does not take an anthropologist to suspect that what these travellers saw or heard about were baptismal rites, the ceremonial dedication of weapons to gods of the lower world, and the friendly custom of sharing one’s bed with a stranger. The summary execution of late-comers was presumably a ritualized form of punishment like those that were meted out to flabby Celtic youths whose bellies had engulfed their belts, or to people who interrupted a speaker (on the third offence, the heckler’s clothes were slashed to ribbons with a sword). Some practices that were upsetting to outsiders seemed entirely acceptable in context. The Greek philosopher Posidonius, who toured Gaul in the early first century BC, became quite accustomed to seeing human heads preserved in cedar oil nailed to a doorway or stored in a wooden box. The severed head of an enemy killed in battle was considered a priceless trophy and was proudly shown to guests.
These tales from the fringes of the empire are not just a sign of imperial hauteur. The Celts’ unfathomable riddles, the faces that appear and disappear in their complex designs, and the geomantic mysteries of the Druids were forms of sophistication to which the Romans were blind. Educated Celts clearly enjoyed bamboozling foreigners. When Caesar was collecting material on the Hercynian Forest for his book on the Gallic War, a native informant told him of a creature called the ‘alces’ (elk) which, having no joints in its legs, was forced to spend its entire life standing up. Caesar recorded the information as he heard it: to sleep, the alces leant on a tree, so that hunters simply sawed through most of a tree-trunk in a glade where the animal was known to rest, and then returned to collect their prostrate prey.
To the mirthless conqueror of the Gauls, the Celtic mind was a closed book. He knew that the Gauls made fun of the Romans ‘because of our short stature compared to their great size’, but his attempt to explain the taunts of the Aduatuci tribe when they saw the legionaries building a siege-tower is so clumsy that it takes a while to realize that what the Gauls were shouting from the ramparts was, ‘You’re so short, you need a tower to see over the wall!’ If practical jokes are a sign of civilization, the Celts were one of the most advanced societies of the ancient world. Many years after visiting Gaul in his youth, St Jerome still shuddered to recall the Celts from northern Britain who had assured him that the favourite delicacy of their tribe was shepherd’s buttock and breast of shepherd’s wife.
It is a shame that so much of what remains of ancient Gaulish is the linguistic equivalent of a spoil heap. Even the dozen words that entered English by various routes seem to confirm the Roman view of a downwardly mobile race of simpletons and trouble-makers: ‘bucket’, ‘car’, ‘crock’, ‘crockery’, ‘dad’, ‘flannel’, ‘gaol’, ‘gob’, ‘noggin’, ‘peat’, ‘slogan’ and ‘truant’. The only complete sentences of Gaulish to have survived are inscriptions on lead curse-tablets (‘May the magic of the infernal gods pursue them!’), phrases in a medical textbook (‘Let Marcos take this thing out of my eye!’), graffiti on plates and bottles (‘Drink this and you’ll be good company!’), and words of endearment etched on spindle-whorls. These circular discs, which were used to weight spindles, were given to girls as love-tokens. The suitor expressed his desire by identifying his principal attribute with the spindle. Some of the phrases are cunningly suggestive, but, as the largest surviving corpus of Gaulish literature, it hardly evokes a civilization to rival Greece or Rome:
moni gnatha gabi – buđđuton imon (‘Come, my girl, take my spindle!’)
impleme sicuersame (in Latin) (‘Cover me up and spin me round!’)
marcosior – maternia (‘Ride me like a horse, Materna!’)
matta dagomota baline enata (‘A girl can get a good fuck from this penis.’)
nata uimpi – curmi da (‘Pretty girl, give me some beer!’)
Even a dispassionate observer might have asked: what evidence is there that the trousered savages were capable of organizing any sort of infrastructure? The only Iron Age road surfaces to have been identified so far are causeways preserved by the bogs they traversed, a rubbish-strewn shopping street in a hill fort and a few sections of rutted limestone. The Gauls are presumed to have transported their precious wine on tracks that wandered about like barbarians returning from a feast. Schoolchildren and museum-visitors are told that the Romans brought with them, not only Latin, bureaucracy and underfloor heating, but also roads, which they rolled out ahead of the invading armies with the speed of a modern paving machine. Since the Roman builders obliterated the traces of earlier carriageways, the Celtic world appears to have been practically roadless. In the view of one archaeologist, the late-Bronze Age wheelwright of Blair Drummond in Perthshire who made a remarkably narrow-rimmed wheel of ash wood for a cart that would have weighed several hundred kilograms might as well have been manufacturing rolling stock for a railway: the vehicles ‘would all too easily have become bogged down in mud, and it is unlikely that they travelled very far or very fast’ . . .
It might have happened on almost any day in the late Iron Age. A shepherd of the Sequani tribe stands on one of the routes that connect Italy and the Alps to the Oceanus Britannicus. Looking to the south, he sees a billowing cloud of dust, hears the targeted crescendo of hooves and wheels, and hurries his flock to one side as a missile of oak and iron speeds past, piloted by a man with his mind on something distant. Long before the age of steam, Gaulish charioteers had seen the landscape change into a reeling panorama as they travelled far enough north in a short enough space of time to notice the days grow longer, the morning mists thicken and the sky turn a more delicate shade of blue. Before the advent of the Romans, carters employed by Greek merchants were racing by land from Marseille to Boulogne in thirty days. Two thousand years later, in the reign of Louis XV, modern coaches pulled by teams of horses twice the size of Gaulish nags completed the same journey in just a few days less.
Along those trans-Gallic trade routes, in Burgundy, Champagne and the Rhineland, chariots have been found in graves, dismantled and displayed like exploded diagrams. They were delicately sprung and showed an inventor’s love of intricate devices: axle-pins with coral discs and enamel inlays, rein-guides and mountings that looked like foliage or the faces of gods. These vehicles assembled by teams of specialists were not designed to be run on rubbly, winding tracks. When the Gauls settled in northern Italy in the fourth century BC, their technology amazed the Romans, whose cumbrous conveyances seemed to belong to an earlier stage of history. Faced with the new machines, the Romans borrowed a whole vocabulary of vehicular transport: carros (wagon); cission (cabriolet); couinnos and essedon (two-wheeled chariots); petruroton (four-wheeled carriage); carbanton (covered carriage); reda (four-wheeled coach). Nearly all the Latin words for wheeled vehicles came from Gaulish.
One of those modern chariots was found in the region of Alesia, where Celtine met Herakles. Since the chariot dates from the late sixth century BC, Celtine herself might have owned a similar model. She had a neighbour who lived forty kilometres to the north in a vaulted palace overlooking a valley where the Sequana begins to broaden into a navigable riv
er. The archaeologists who discovered her called her ‘la Dame de Vix’, which is the name of the local village, near Châtillon-sur-Seine. Her real name might have been Uxouna, Excinga, Rosmerta or, more likely, Elvissa, which means ‘very rich’. She had beads of blue glass and amber, bracelets of bronze for her ankles and arms, and a microscopically detailed, twenty-four-carat gold torc that would have been almost too heavy to wear. Objects from all over the known world had been delivered safely to her home: the beads came from the Baltic and the Mediterranean, the torc from the Black Sea; her tableware was Etruscan and Greek, and she owned a comprehensive range of imported wine paraphernalia.
The largest vessel ever found in the ancient world is her beautiful bronze krater (a wine-mixing urn) from southern Italy: it held eleven hundred litres – enough for a week-long banquet or a god’s aperitif. When she died in her early thirties, she was laid out on her state-of-the-art chariot. It had wide-angle steering, and the wooden coachwork was suspended above the chassis by tiny, twisted metal colonnettes that seemed to flaunt their gravity-defying frailty. This was a vehicle fit for a journey to another world. It may never have run on the open roads of Middle Earth, but it proves that the technology existed, and that the beauties of mechanical efficiency were appreciated, four hundred years before the Romans brought their civilization to Gaul.
Like a detective story with an unreliable narrator, Caesar’s Gallic War contains the clues that disprove its self-serving theories. Caesar knew that, in the comfort of their heated villas, his readers would imagine impenetrable, rain-soaked realms ravaged by mudslides and torrents, obstructed by swamps and trackless swathes of tangled oak forest. (Northern oak-woods always looked wild to a Mediterranean eye.) He knew that, as they blessed him for bringing gold and slaves from Gaul, they would marvel at his bridge-building exploits and his lightning marches from one end of the wild land to the other.