The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  At Uxellodunum, within an arrow’s range of the Gaulish meridian, Independent Gaul came to an end. Before he left for Aquitania, Caesar wanted to ensure that this would be the last sputtering of rebellion. The solution was made possible by what he saw as his reputation for ‘lenitas’ (‘mildness’ or ‘softness’). No one would accuse him of acting out of ‘natural cruelty’ if he inflicted an ‘exemplary punishment’ on the people who had borne arms against the Romans. He would allow them to stay alive so that they could serve as advertisements of Roman justice: ‘Itaque omnibus qui arma tulerant manus praecidit’. ‘Praecidit’ means ‘cut off’; the noun, ‘manus’, is sometimes translated as ‘the right hand’, perhaps because the fourth-declension accusative plural looks like a singular. The correct translation is ‘the hands’. The legions once again gave proof of their tireless efficiency, perhaps, too, of their frustration at ‘the oppidum-dwellers’ stubborn resistance’. The deliberate spoiling of human merchandise would show that Caesar was in earnest . . . The operation was performed, and, that autumn, the men and women of Uxellodunum saw the sun of southern Gaul ripen what remained of their crops but were unable to reap the harvest, having no hands with which to hold their tools.

  A winter in Gaul, described by Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC:

  And the land, lying as it does for the most part under the Bears, has a frigid climate and is exceedingly cold. For during the winter, on cloudy days, snow falls on the earth instead of rain, and in clear weather, ice and heavy frost are so abundant that the rivers freeze over and are bridged by their own waters. For not only can small bands of travellers who happen to pass that way continue their journey on the ice, but even huge armies with all their beasts of burden and heavily-laden vehicles are able to reach the other side quite safely. . . . And since the natural smoothness of the ice makes the crossing slippery, the Celts scatter chaff on it to make the going more secure.

  In the historical record, the years following the conquest of Gaul are covered with a blanket of snow. We know only that, between 46 and 27 BC, local rebellions broke out among the Bellovaci, the Treveri and the Morini, but a generation of warriors had died, and the legions who camped in the oppida watched over hungry populations of grandparents and children. The archaeological record shows that, with a few exceptions, the old oppida were gradually abandoned for more practical settlements on lower ground. These became the Roman towns whose imperious remains still dominate the muddy scrapings of Iron Age excavations.

  The siting of the new towns was determined, not by the paths of the sun, but by the motions of men. By the mid-first century AD, many of the oppida had fallen into disrepair. Some shrines were still tended; columns of smoke could be seen rising from charcoal-burners’ fires and metalworkers’ forges; but beyond the building-sites and streets of Augustonemeton (Clermont-Ferrand) and Augustodunum (Autun), Gergovia and Bibracte stood on the horizon like memorials to a lost world.

  The short journeys of the oppidum-dwellers from hilltop to plain were the last migrations in the heroic age of the Continental Celts. The tide had been going out since the expedition to Delphi, and it would continue to ebb until Celtic societies lingered only on the shores of the Ocean in countries that the legions would have been happy to leave to the savages. From the siege and destruction of the Celtiberian oppidum of Numantia in 133 BC to the massacre of the Caledonian tribes at the battle of Mons Graupius in AD 83 (here), the history of the Celts in their westward retreat seems to call for the plangent, piped tones of national self-pity that never fail to accompany their filmed adventures.

  The Druidic network seemed to fade like a shadow when a cloud covers the sun. Their teachings had never been inscribed on paper or stone, and the system of solar paths left few material traces on the landscape. Some sections of road followed the paths – the tin route from the north of Paris to the oppidum at Fécamp, or the route from the Alps to the British Ocean through the lands of the Lingones and the Remi. Just as parts of the old Heraklean Way had become sections of the Via Domitia, these routes were incorporated into the Roman road network. They still exist – their solstice alignments unrecognized – like the foundations of pagan temples buried under churches. But apart from these sparse strands of tartan weave, the surveys that produced the Roman network show no evidence of solar orientation.

  52. Principal Roman roads of Gaul

  The thicker lines indicate sections of road on Celtic orientations.

  The roads of the Romans were centred on the town of Colonia Copia Felix Munatia, later renamed Lugdunum (Lyon). Like the three Gaulish Mediolana that became important junctions in the network (Châteaumeillant, Évreux and Saintes), ‘Lugh’s hill fort’ might have been chosen as a place of religious significance to the natives: it lay ten minutes to the east of the Gaulish meridian and one quarter of a klima to the south of Châteaumeillant. But its location at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saône was above all a matter of commercial and administrative expediency.

  With Lugdunum as its capital, Gaul was divided into provinces in 27 BC. The gods played no part in this reorganization. A single province encompassed the foothills of the Alps and the ports that faced Britannia, while the chilly coasts of Armorica came under the same jurisdiction as the sunny vineyards of Lugdunum. The shape of early Roman Gaul has become so familiar that its bizarre configuration is never questioned or explained. To the Romans, no explanation would have been necessary. The new boundaries accurately reflected Gaul as seen by a Roman geographer. This was the shapeless earth of mortals, charted without the guidance of a sun god.

  53. The provinces of Gaul

  The provinces of Gaul after the Augustan Settlement of 27 BC, and the Roman logic of their borders. The dotted line represents the earlier western border of Gallia Narbonensis.

  In the Roman capital that is now Lyon, the magnificent though slightly outdated Musée de la Civilisation Gallo-Romaine appears to have been taken over by Celtophile exponents of counterfactual history. If Vercingetorix had defeated Caesar at Alesia, and if Lucterius had crossed the borders of the province and reclaimed the Heraklean Way, this is what one might expect to see: the monumental plinths of marble statues carved in the first century AD with the names of important Gauls, publicly declaring their pride in their Celtic heritage:

  To Lucius Lentulius Censorinus of the PICTAVI,45 amongst whom he has held every post of honour, commissioner of the BITURIGES VIVISCI . . .

  To Quintus Julius Severinus of the SEQUANI . . . patron of the most splendid corporation of boatmen of the Rhone and the Saône, twice honoured by the Council of decurions of his city with statues bearing witness to his integrity.

  To Caius Servilius Martianus, ARVERNIAN, son of Caius Servilius Domitus, priest of the temple of Roma and Augustus, the three provinces of Gaul.

  The names of warlike tribes whose homelands had been ravaged by Caesar are displayed with all the pomp of a victorious nation. Elsewhere in the museum, a bronze tablet discovered in Lyon reproduces Emperor Claudius’s speech to the Senate in AD 48. Claudius proposed that loyal and wealthy citizens of Gallia Comata be allowed to sit in the Senate. ‘Hairy Gaul’ was no longer beyond the pale. Soon, the tribes of Gaul would rename their principal towns, replacing the Roman name with that of the tribe, which is why metropolitan France is one of the most visibly Celtic countries in Europe. The Remi live in Reims, the Bellovaci in Beauvais, and the Turones in Tours; Auvergne is the province of the Arverni; the Bituriges, who were nearly exterminated by Caesar, still inhabit Bourges, and the Parisii still have a capital on the Seine.

  Gaul recovered from the war, psychologically and materially, within two or three generations. Unlike other vanquished civilizations, the Gaulish Celts did not punish or deny their gods. They continued to worship them under the Romans. A year or so after Claudius’s speech, the Arverni commissioned a colossal statue of Mercury (the avatar of Lugh) from a famous sculptor for their temple on the Puy de Dôme. It cost forty million sesterces and was the largest stat
ue in the world until the same sculptor was ordered to produce an even larger statue of Nero.

  Though it was built of stone instead of wood, the temple of Mercury on the summit of the Puy de Dôme has the traditional, deceptive shape of Celtic shrines. Its corners look like right angles, but one axis is oriented on the local summer solstice, the other on the solar path from Châteaumeillant. Like so much else in Celtic Gaul, these details have slipped into oblivion, but they show that Lugh was still a living presence in the Roman empire. His power was acknowledged by the Romans when it was decided that the birthday of Emperor Claudius, who was born in Lugdunum, should fall on the feast day of Lugh (1 August).

  At Alesia and Uxellodunum, the gods’ will had been done. According to Caesar, the Druids sacrificed large numbers of people ‘for state purposes’. They preferred to use convicted criminals, but ‘when there [was] a shortage of such people’, they sacrificed the innocent. The eight-year-long war in which so many warriors and civilians had passed into the other world had been a heavy harvest. Usually, the sacrificial victims were packed into gigantic dolls in the image of gods with wicker limbs, which were then set on fire. The besieged oppida, crammed with thousands of people, had performed the same religious function. This holocaust can hardly have been the original objective of the Gauls, but it was not the final disaster that it would have been for other nations. The gods had been propitiated, and the Druids were vindicated by the subsequent prosperity of Gaul.

  Defeat and subjugation are supposed to be defining characteristics of the Celts. Archaeology has muddled that simple, romantic tale. The exodus from the oppida was not necessarily a trail of tears. The process had begun before the war and it continued long after the conquest. Little is known about the early stages of Roman urbanization in Gaul. In the oppida that became Roman towns, the thatched huts of the natives were swept away and replaced with stone buildings. Architects and engineers imposed a simple street-plan based on two axes – the cardo maximus, which ran approximately north–south, and a bisecting decumanus maximus. These axes frequently followed the alignment of the main roads that led to the town, but the overriding criterion was convenience. Solar orientation in Roman towns and forts is extremely rare. The road that enters Amiens from the south-east on a Celtic solstice bearing was ignored by the Roman town-planners, who matched their street-grid to the course of the river Somme.

  There is, however, some compelling evidence that the Druidic system was not immediately abandoned. It may even have been adapted to the new world. The streets of Reims are aligned on the solstice line that joins the Great St Bernard Pass to the British Ocean. The same phenomenon can be seen in the Roman towns of Autun, Metz and Limoges. These alignments, which have kept their secret until now, may reflect the special favour that was shown to certain tribes: the Remi had always been allies of the Romans; the Mediomatrici of Metz and the Lemovices of Limoges sent soldiers to Alesia but were involved in no other battles; the Aedui had rebelled only at the very end of the war, and soon regained their status as ‘Friends of the Roman People’.

  Unbeknownst to their modern inhabitants, the streets of these Gallo-Roman towns are the aisles of a temple dedicated to an ancient sun god. Perhaps this materialization of solar paths was to have been the next stage in the development of the system. If Gaul had remained independent, the upper world might have been more comprehensively mapped onto Middle Earth, but many of the priestly planners who would have masterminded the operation had left the country after the Gallic War.

  ‘Non interire, sed transire . . .’: ‘Souls do not perish but pass after death from one body into another, and this they see as an inducement to valour, for the dread of death is thereby negated’ (here). At the end of the war, many living souls had passed over from Gaul to Britannia, where, as Caesar was told, Druidism had been ‘discovered’. In earlier days, Belgic tribes had migrated to the island that Pytheas had known as Prettanike. Perhaps older traditions of Druidism had been preserved there: ‘Those who wish to make a more assiduous study of the matter generally go to Britain in order to learn’, said Caesar. Some of the Druids who crossed the Channel in the autumn of 51 BC would have been revisiting places and people they had known as students.

  Merchants and fishermen putting out from Portus Itius or one of the smaller Channel ports might have carried fare-paying passengers fleeing from the Romans. Even after the battle of Uxellodunum, there had been cavalry skirmishes in the north of Gaul. A leader of the Atrebates called Commios, whom Caesar had used as an ambassador to Britain in 55 BC, having turned against the Romans, had been ‘infesting the roads and intercepting convoys’. But even if the Channel ports were placed under surveillance, no one would have paid much attention, for instance, to an elderly Druid boarding a slave ship or a fishing vessel. It was only much later that the Romans learned to fear the political power of the Druids and outlawed their order.

  The Romans would hear of Commios again. Twenty years on, he was installed as king of the British Atrebates: coins bearing his name were issued from a town called Calleva (Silchester). Precisely when and where he escaped from the Romans, no one knows. In the late 70s AD, the Roman governor of Britain, Frontinus, heard a cheerful tale of a Gaulish refugee outwitting his Roman pursuers:

  Defeated by the deified Caesar, Commius the Atrebatan was fleeing from Gaul to Britannia. He happened to reach the Ocean when the wind was fair but the tide was out. Though his ships were stranded on the shore, he nonetheless ordered the sails to be unfurled. Caesar, who was pursuing, saw the billowing of the sails in a full breeze. Imagining Commius to be making good his escape, he abandoned the pursuit.

  The port of Leuconaus (Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme) lies at the end of the solstice-oriented route from Samarobriva (fig. 16). At low tide, the ocean recedes by as much as fourteen kilometres. On the open horizon of the Bay of the Somme, a sail can be seen at a great distance, out as far as the point where the sand-flats merge with the sea. It might have been from there that Commios sailed for Britain. The legend credits him with the glorious deception, but there is something unmistakably Druidic in that beautiful and magical illusion serving a vital purpose.

  When the tide came in, a fair wind would have carried the refugees across the Channel in a single night. At dawn, along the coast that was ‘guarded with wondrous walls of massive rock’, as Caesar had told Cicero, there were many safe harbours; some of them were busy international ports. The hinterland of Britannia was beginning to prosper, and it would be left in peace by the Romans for the next ninety-four years.

  The home of Druidism was not quite as uncivilized as Cicero had supposed. The British king who was defeated by Caesar spoke Latin, and despite what Roman historians believed, Herakles himself had set foot on the island. One version of the legend of Celtic origins identifies the father of Celtine as a certain Bretannos. The name is otherwise unrecorded and resembles no word other than Prettanike or Britannia. Somewhere in that cold and foggy land, perhaps along its southern coast, there had once lived a princess sufficiently well endowed, in person and in larder, to seduce a sun god from the Mediterranean.

  PART FOUR

  13

  The Poetic Isles

  This book was to have ended here, with the defeat of the Gauls and the exodus of Druids to Britain. ‘Their science crossed the ocean’, said Pliny, ‘and reached the void of Nature’ (by which he meant Britannia). It was in this cul-de-sac of the north that Druidism or some of its religious traditions had been ‘discovered’, according to Caesar. He, or his Druid informant, called it a ‘disciplina’, which suggests an institution capable of organizing a body of knowledge into a curriculum. But where were the schools of Iron Age Britain? And where, for that matter, were the towns? ‘The Britanni’, said Caesar, ‘fortify their tangled woods with a ditch and a rampart and call it a town’. The British king, Cassivellaunus, spoke Latin, but he must have learnt it on the Continent, just as the sons of Highland chiefs in seventeenth-century Scotland left their glens to go and study at the
Sorbonne in Paris.

  The sorcery of received ideas covers the British Isles with a coarse and heavy cloak. It is hard to picture a system of solar paths stretching so far from its Mediterranean origin and easy to believe that, after the conquest of Gaul, Britannia waited in its primeval squalor for the Roman landlords to come and install the plumbing and the central heating. Not until AD 43 would a beacon fire be lit on top of a watchtower on the Kentish coast to announce to the Continent that Britannia belonged to the Roman empire.

  But if Britannia truly was a homeland of Druidism, and if, as Caesar was informed, ‘those who wish to make a more assiduous study of it generally go there to learn’, it can hardly have been such a backwater. There is, in fact, a trace of Druidry in the Celtic name of the islands, though its meaning has been lost for almost two thousand years. ‘Prettanike’ was the name heard by Pytheas in the fourth century BC; ‘Britannia’ was the form familiar to Caesar. The inhabitants would originally have been the ‘Pritani’ or ‘Pret(t)anoi’. The name belongs to a group of words whose Indo-European root means ‘to cut’, ‘to form’, ‘to shape’. In early medieval Ireland, the ‘figured folk’ of Britain were assimilated to the ‘painted’ or ‘tattooed’ Picts of Scotland. Convention has sealed the interpretation, and the accepted history of Britain now begins with a population of barbarians who smeared themselves with the blue dye of woad.

  Some Celtic tribes, like the ‘painted’ Pictones or Pictavi of Gaul, were named for their visible attributes. Many others had names that referred to religious ritual: the People of the Dance (Lingones), of the Sanctuary (Nemetes), of the Cauldron (Parisii); the Shining Ones (Leuci), the Bright Ones (Glanici). The Pritani of Britannia probably belonged to the latter group. The name is often found, as Prito, Pritto, Pritillius or Pritmanus, on fragments of Iron Age and Gallo-Roman pottery from Gaul and northern Germania. Like ‘Mason’ or ‘Smith’, the name was the mark of a profession. In ancient Celtic, ‘pritios’ had the same dual meaning as the Greek ‘poietes’: a creator, a craftsman, an enchanter and a poet.