Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

But there is no direct linguistic evidence for any of this at the moment: as to the spread of Gaulish across most of Europe, 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.

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. [451]

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. [451]

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’. [843]) 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.

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: (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’. [451]We must ask how this spread of the conqueror’s language could fail to occur.

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?