Book Description

There are peoples whose existence in the past only reveals itself by certain brilliant apparitions, unequivocal proofs of an energy which had been previously unknown. During the interval their history is involved in obscurity, and they resemble those long-silent volcanoes, which we should take to be extinct but for the eruptions which, at periods far apart, occur and expose to view the fire which smoulders in their bosom. Such had been the Gauls. The accounts of their ancient expeditions bear witness to an organisation already powerful, and to an ardent spirit of enterprise. Not to speak of migrations which date back perhaps nine or ten centuries before our era, we see, at the moment when Rome was beginning to aim at greatness, the Celts spreading themselves beyond their frontiers. In the time of Tarquin the Elder (Years of Rome, 138 to 176), two expeditions started from Celtic Gaul: one proceeded across the Rhine and Southern Germany, to descend upon Illyria and Pannonia (nowWestern Hungary); the other, scaling the Alps, established itself in Italy, in the country lying between those mountains and the Po. The invaders soon transferred themselves to the right bank of that river, and nearly the whole of the territory comprised between the Alps and the Apennines took the name of Cisalpine Gaul. More than two centuries afterwards, the descendants of those Gauls marched upon Rome, and burnt it all but the Capitol. Still a century later (475), we see new bands issuing from Gaul, reaching Thrace by the valley of the Danube, ravaging Northern Greece, and bringing back to Toulouse the gold plundered from the Temple of Delphi. Others, arriving at Byzantium, pass into Asia, establish their dominion over the whole region on this side Mount Taurus, since called Gallo-Græcia, or Galatia, and maintain in it a sort of military feudalism until the time of the war of Antiochus....