Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [131]
What little we know of these wild people stretches much further back. According to hints from history and archaeological clues, the Celts first settled in northern Europe before occupying a wide swath of territory that spread across most of western Europe. Based on what we learned from digs in Austria and Germany, they are first known to have lived in Hallstatt, near Salzburg, where hundreds of Celtic graves have been unearthed, dating from about 700 BCE. At such sites as Hochdorf in Germany, other sets of Celtic graves revealed bodies buried with entire horse-drawn wagons filled with luxury goods—obviously meant for people who thought that they were going somewhere else in the next life. Unfortunately, they did not leave a “Swiss Alps” version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead to help succeeding generations discern just what it was they were thinking.
But around 500 BCE, something happens. Just as Athens entered its Golden Age and the Roman Republic was born, the Celts began to spread across western Europe. Around the same time, or possibly around 350 BCE, groups of them crossed the seas to the British Isles and Ireland, where they established their most enduring societies. The reasons for this mass migration are still unclear—climate changes, famine, and overpopulation are all likely suspects. But the Celts were on the move. And they were fierce, as the Romans and Greeks would learn. In 387 BCE, a group of Celts attacked and burned Rome in its early days. Another group of Celtic raiders ransacked the sacred Greek Temple at Delphi in 279 BCE.*
The Celts were also on a collision course with destiny. While terrifying and not easily subdued, they never achieved true “nation” status, remaining loose collections of tribes led by warlord kings. Plagued by constant warring among themselves, the Celts began falling to the onslaught of more “civilized” opponents between 300 BCE and about 100 BCE. During this time, the Romans conquered much of Celtic Europe, basically wiping out most vestiges of Celtic society on the continent, absorbing some bits and pieces of their myths into Roman worship or merging Roman beliefs and gods with the local deities. When the Celtic leader Vercingetorix managed to unite many of the Celtic tribes in Gaul, it was a last gasp. In 52 BCE, Caesar obliterated them after a hard-fought, eight-year-long campaign. Two thousand survivors of one battle were spared, but Caesar had all of the warriors’ hands cut off. Their leader, Vercingetorix, was later executed in Rome. The only Celts who preserved their own culture for any length of time were those sheltered by the sea, on the British Isles and in Ireland—a Celtic stronghold that never succumbed to the Roman Empire but finally did submit to the Roman Church when St. Patrick converted the Irish Celts to Christianity. That is why so many elements of Celtic myth, belief, and worship are associated with the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and British branches of the Celtic tree.
When we think of the Celts today, the image is one of a fraternity house gone really bad. Loud, boisterous, lots of feasting and drinking—especially before a battle. That impression would be largely correct. According to historian William K. Klingaman in The First Century, “Nothing terrified the common Roman soldier of this age more than the nightmarish prospect of capture, torture and mutilation by the Druidic priests…. Facing civilized Greeks or even the ferocious Parthians was one thing: battling barely human enemies, who according to rumor, drank human blood and roasted human flesh, was quite another.”
But that