Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [163]
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.31
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.32
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