The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  It was a brilliant solution to the problem of disorganized labour and a population reluctant to change its ways. For a modern equivalent, one would have to imagine the development of urban settlements around Stonehenge or Glastonbury Tor – which is, in effect, what happens every year at the time of the summer solstice and the Glastonbury Festival. Religious fervour is entirely compatible with commerce. A similar phenomenon could be seen in France until quite recently. Once a year, remote places where angels or the Virgin Mary had performed miracles were transformed overnight into lively fairs to which pilgrims flocked from miles around.

  The Druidic network was vital to this reorganization of Celtic society. There was already a geomantic system onto which the new, economic system could be grafted. Just as the great migrations to the east had been ordered by the paths of the sun, the chief oppidum of each tribe was selected for its auspicious solar coordinates. The movement of the rural population to the oppidum was itself a form of internal migration controlled by the ultimate authority in the sky.

  The fact that the first towns in barbarian Europe, like the temple-cities of Egypt and the solstice-oriented towns of the Etruscans, were placed under the aegis of the sun god is not the sign of a backward, theocratic society. Having already fashioned a religion out of a thousand local cults, the Druids of the late Iron Age now combined tribal tradition with economic development. Yet material prosperity was not an end in itself. In coordinating the new tribal centres of Gaul, the Druids were creating something that no other European civilization ever attempted on such a scale. As Eratosthenes and other ancient geographers knew, the world of humans showed a distressing disregard for the eternal truths of astronomy and mathematics. The meridian drawn through Alexandria, Rhodes, Byzantium and other prestigious places was wildly erratic (here). The obvious though apparently insane solution to this incongruence of terrestrial reality and the upper world was to modify the reality, and this is what the Druids did when they laid the foundations of modern Europe. It was as though the creator of a medieval mappa mundi had set out to reorganize the physical world so that when he returned to the scriptorium, everything from Paradise to the Pillars of Hercules could be drawn in exactly the right place.

  This was the state of Independent Gaul when the province of Gallia Transalpina acquired a new governor in 61 BC. He was a man of thirty-nine years whose family claimed descent from the goddess Venus. He had sailed on the Western Ocean with a Roman army, massacred the Celtic tribes of the Iberian coast, and reached Brigantium (A Coruña) in the north, from where it was said that one could sail to Hibernia and the tin-rich Cassiterides islands. His ambitions were vast and required correspondingly enormous sums of money. When this Herakles of the modern world crossed the Matrona and journeyed to the province along the old Heraklean Way, he knew that a land far bigger than Italy lay to the north. Like all Romans, he had heard of the treasure of Tolosa, the gold torcs that had been stripped from the bodies of the defeated Arverni, and the slabs of gold as large as a hand that lay just beneath the surface in the lands of the Tarbelli of Aquitania. At Aquae Sextiae, in 102 BC, his uncle Marius had won a famous victory against the Germanic tribes who had rampaged through Gaul for seven years. It was a connection of more immediate use to him than his divine ancestry and one of the reasons why Gaius Julius Caesar would enjoy the unwavering loyalty of the legions when he began to enshroud the land of the Druids in darkness.

  12

  The Gods Victorious

  In the autumn of 57 BC, fifty-three thousand men, women and children, comprising the entire surviving population of the Aduatuci tribe, were crammed into a small oppidum in what is now southern Belgium. The exact site is unknown – it might have been the citadel of Namur – but the number is certainly accurate since it was given to Caesar by the traders who bought the Aduatuci as slaves. The Gallic War was nearing the end of its second year, and it was already proving astonishingly lucrative. In only a few months of campaigning, the Romans had driven the Helvetii and their allies back to their homelands – reducing their population by about two-thirds – and conquered practically every northern tribe between the Rhine and the Atlantic. That autumn, Caesar reported to the Senate that ‘all of Gaul has been pacified’. When he came to write up his annual reports for his Commentaries on the Gallic War, he would be able to add a triumphant postscript to Book Two: ‘Upon receipt of Caesar’s letters, fifteen days of thanksgiving were decreed, which had never happened before.’

  Roman businessmen might have feared that Gaul would be a logistical nightmare, but they had every reason to be delighted with the Gaulish infrastructure. The land of the Druids had been turned into an enormous emporium and distribution centre. Huge quantities of booty and endless caravans of human merchandise headed for Rome, while horses, provisions, naval armaments and other military equipment flooded into northern Gaul from Italy, Spain and the province of Gallia Transalpina. Compared to the intense activity of the private companies with contracts to supply the Roman army, fighting took up only a small part of the war: between 58 and 51 BC, there were fewer than four battles a year. On a map, the itineraries of the legions look like a tangle, but through the eyes of an import-export manager, the commercial rationale of the Roman campaigns is obvious. In the more prosaic passages of his Commentaries, Caesar himself sometimes makes the business plan explicit. While the fifty-three thousand Aduatuci were being marched off towards Italy, the Twelfth Legion was sent to guard the Upper Rhone in order to liberate Roman traders from ‘the very great dangers and very great customs duties’ that had hampered them in the past.

  By the end of 57 BC, the Gallic War was practically over. Most of the remaining six years were devoted to mopping-up operations, the quelling of revolts and the installation of puppet kings and tribal governments friendly to the Romans. In 55 and 54 BC, Gaul was still sufficiently ‘pacified’ to allow Caesar to burnish his reputation with an abbreviated ‘conquest’ of the land at the end of the earth. Eight hundred ships made the trip from Portus Itius (near or at Boulogne) to somewhere north of Portus Dubris (Dover). The flotilla included several private vessels chartered by merchants who were eager to prospect the new market.

  The expeditionary force to Britannia travelled eighty miles inland and crossed a river called the Tamesis, ‘which can be forded – with some difficulty – in only one place’. Roman dignitas usually demanded a bridge, but with British shock troops suddenly appearing along the roads on their high-speed chariots, the soldiers, according to Caesar, waded across the river with only their heads above water. A poet called Varro Atacinus, who was a native of Gallia Transalpina, had already written an epic poem about the first year of the war.40 The amphibious crossing of the Thames was exactly the kind of material that would enable poets to celebrate Caesar’s exploits. (A popular historian was unlikely to wonder why the roads of the Britons ended when they came to a river.) Cicero himself had written to request some colourful details that he could use to describe the conquest of Britannia, and Caesar had obliged with ‘a copious letter’: ‘the approaches to the island are known to be guarded with wondrous walls of massive rock’. Unfortunately, the pickings were poor, Cicero reported to a friend:

  It is also now ascertained that there isn’t a speck of silver on the island, nor any prospect of booty apart from captives, and I fancy you won’t expect any of them to be highly qualified in literature or music!

  Shortly after the defeat of Cassivellaunus, the warlord who had been chosen to lead the British resistance, Caesar was sitting in a room paved with mosaics and marble somewhere in southern Britain near Verlamion (St Albans). A soldier with a drawn sword stood behind him while he dictated letters to a slave. Caesar was said to be capable of composing several letters at the same time, even on horseback. The previous spring (55 BC), while crossing the Alps to rejoin the army in Gaul, he had written a grammatical treatise on the subject of analogy. The room in which he sat had not been furnished for his personal comfort. His baggage train always included a supply o
f mosaic squares and marble veneer so that important guests such as Roman merchants and foreign kings could be properly entertained. He wrote to Cicero: Britain had been ‘dealt with’ (which was to say, the four kings of Cantium and the warlord Cassivellaunus had surrendered): ‘Hostages taken, but no booty. Tribute, however, exacted.’

  The letter was dated ‘Shores of Nearer Britain, 26 September’. The wooden tablets were tied with string and sealed with wax. They would reach Cicero in Rome on 24 October, two days after a letter from Cicero’s brother Quintus, who had joined Caesar as legatus. The adventure had been largely fruitless though not on the whole unpleasant. Quintus had written five plays in his spare time. The fact seems to have slipped between the floorboards of history: the first literary works known to have been composed in the British Isles were four Greek tragedies and a play called Erigone (lost in the post between Britain and Rome). In the fabled land beyond the edge of the known world, Roman soldiers had staged a theatrical performance – probably of Erigone: the mythical subject would have provided light relief and a chance to laugh at the barbarians. Erigone’s father introduces his compatriots to wine. Mistaking their intoxication for a fatal illness, they stone him to death. It was a joke among the Romans that the Celts had started adding water to their wine because they thought it might be poisoned.

  That September, just before the equinox, the army and all the travelling negotiatores set sail after dark with a cargo of British prisoners and reached Gaul at daybreak. From Portus Itius, Caesar returned to Samarobriva. After the summer droughts, there was a shortage of grain, exacerbated by the Roman policy of destroying the enemy’s wheat fields. A population already weakened by war would have to suffer the horrors of famine. The minimum daily requirement of the Roman army in Gaul – without counting fodder – has been estimated at one hundred tons of wheat. In assigning their winter quarters to the legions, Caesar spread them over a wider area than before ‘in order to remedy the lack of corn’. In the autumn, tribes from Armorica (Brittany) and the Rhineland rose up against the Romans, and ‘throughout that winter, there was barely a moment when Caesar was not receiving intelligence of the councils and commotions of the Gauls’. But the disciplined legions prevailed, and ‘not long after those events, Caesar had a more peaceful time of it in Gaul’.

  The sun god of the Celts is practically invisible until the end of the Gallic War, which is hardly surprising since the only accounts of the war are the seven books of Caesar’s Commentaries, the eighth book, written by his lieutenant Aulus Hirtius, and various historical fragments and anecdotes, none of which is Celtic. Apart from conventional references to ‘Fortuna’, Caesar says nothing of the actions of gods and never mentions the divinatory powers of his friend, Diviciacus the Druid. Yet the Druid augurs, who ‘settle nearly all disputes, whether public or private’, and who frequently used their influence to stop battles, certainly played a major role in coordinating Gaulish military strategy.

  Hirtius mentions a certain ‘Gutuater’ or ‘Gutuatrus’ who was accused of masterminding the great uprising of 52 BC. The word ‘gutuater’ has been found on several inscriptions: it was not, as Hirtius supposed, a man’s name, but a title – ‘master of invocations’. Later, when the Druids had been outlawed, the word was used as a generic term for ‘priest’. The gutuater who instigated the rebellion in 52 BC was a predecessor of Sacrovir (‘holy man’), who led the revolt of AD 21 in the university town of Augustodunum (Autun), and of the Druids of Anglesey, who were ‘the power that fed the rebellion’.

  These powerful, priestly figures – Gutuater, Sacrovir and the Anglesey Druids – remained undetected until their final defeat. Many more must have fled after the Gallic War and vanished into Britannia. They are little more than ghosts in the historical record. Yet evidence can be found of their conduct of the war. A consistent strategy bears the marks of Druidic computation. Whenever the site of a battle was chosen by the Celts, it lay somewhere on the solar network. Bituitos of the Arverni, like Hannibal before him, had fought the Romans where the Via Heraklea crosses the Rhone. Sixty years later, the Gauls placed themselves whenever possible in auspicious solar locations. Caesar himself diplomatically followed ‘the custom of the Gauls’ when convening general councils of the pro-Roman tribes, though he certainly had no idea how those places of assembly had been chosen, and just as he had been unable to discover even the most basic facts about Britain, he had only the faintest inkling of Druidic warcraft. The closest he came to a perception of Celtic strategy was in his dealings with the Suebi.

  The Suebi, according to their custom, had called a council and given orders . . . that all who could bear arms should assemble in one place. The place thus selected was near the centre [‘medium fere’] of their territories, and they resolved to await there the arrival of the Romans and to do battle on that spot.41

  From a modern military point of view, the stubbornness of the Celtic armies seems tragically self-defeating. In eight years, their tactics barely changed. When the Gaulish leader Vercingetorix urged the adoption of Roman practices (scorched earth and fortifications), he was treated as a young upstart by the Gaulish nobles. But he, too, would follow the directions of the Druids. To expect the Celts to have learned practical lessons from the Romans would be to misunderstand the nature of religious thought. In fighting their battles where the gods decreed, they were fulfilling a divine purpose. The earth that the Romans were devastating was not the only world. The thousands who died on the paths of the sun god would be reincarnated. At a certain moment in his battle with the Nervii, Caesar came very close to seeing this mysterious process with his own eyes:42

  50. The Gallic War and Gaulish strategy

  But the enemy, even in the last hope of salvation, showed such great courage that, when those in the front rank fell, the men behind stepped onto their prostrate forms and fought on from their corpses.

  Almost every one of those battles was won by the Romans. Not all were military triumphs. Some were not even battles, unless fleeing children can be counted as enemy combatants:

  The rest of the multitude, consisting of boys and women (for they had left their homes and crossed the Rhine with all their families), began to flee in all directions, and Caesar sent the cavalry in pursuit. Hearing the noise in their rear, the Germans saw their families being slain; they threw away their arms and abandoned their standards.

  Caesar’s report to the Senate on the German massacre appalled Cato, who thought that it brought shame on the Roman people. Pliny later described Caesar’s career total of ‘one million one hundred and ninety-two thousand men’ killed as a ‘crime against the human race’ (‘humani generis iniuria’), but he acknowledged that circumstances had forced Caesar’s hand: to the imperial mind, Caesar was avenging ‘insults’ to Rome and consolidating the frontiers of the empire, and if the buffer zone eventually stretched to the ends of the earth, that was all to the good.

  Within eight years, a large percentage of the population of Gaul was wiped out. The pre-war population can be roughly estimated at eight million. Caesar’s figures suggest a total military force of two million: the Helvetian census (here) implies that combatants, who included women, made up a quarter of the total population. Eight million people could easily have been supported by Gaulish agriculture in its pre-Roman state. The death count is obviously hard to establish. ‘A great number’ is Caesar’s usual indication of the tally – he uses the phrase ‘magnus numerus’ twelve times, coupled with verbs meaning ‘to kill’ – but there are enough statistical details to give a sense of scale:

  Helvetii and allies: reduced from 368,000 to 110,000.

  Nervii: reduced from 60,000 men to fewer than 500; of 600 senators, only 3 survived.

  Aduatuci: about 4000 killed; 53,000 sold into slavery.

  Seduni: over 10,000 killed.

  Veneti: most of the tribe killed in battle, the remainder sold into slavery, and the entire senate put to death.

  Aquitanian and Cantabrian tribes: ‘barely a quart
er’ of 50,000 left alive.

  Bituriges (at Avaricum): reduced from 40,000 to 800.

  These figures refer to civilian as well as military casualties. The 39,200 killed at Avaricum (Bourges) included ‘women, children and those weakened by age’. People who died later on as a result of famine and disease are, of course, missing from the figures. Taking only the war years into account, an average death toll applied to all the tribes that were slaughtered ‘in great numbers’ suggests total figures in the region of one million dead and one million enslaved, which is the estimate given by Plutarch in his Life of Caesar. The number of Gauls and Germans sold into slavery probably exceeds the number of slaves shipped to the American colonies in the eighteenth century.

  The wholesale massacre of Celts was not just a result of the fortunes of war and the circumstances of particular battles. On three occasions, Caesar applies the verb ‘depopulari’ to Roman operations. This is usually translated as ‘ravage’ or ‘plunder’, but at least once, it has its literal sense: ‘depopulate’. The comprehensive extermination of tribes was a deliberate strategy, made possible, in part, by the Gauls’ mobilization of entire populations. (Celtic soldiers went to war with their families in tow.) After the battle with the Nervii in 57 BC, Caesar noted that ‘the race and name of the Nervii were nearly annihilated’. Four years later, it was the turn of the Eburones to have ‘their name and stirps [current generations and all future descendants] obliterated’.