The ruthlessness of an ancient superpower was brutally evident in its relations with a neighbouring culture, argues Sean Ledwith

One of the most familiar viewpoints regarding the study of the past is that history is written by the victors. The cultural, military and political clash between the Celts and Romans spanning a period of about four centuries in ancient history is one of the clearest examples of the ongoing validity of this statement. The former are generally perceived as the great romantic losers of antiquity, charging semi-naked into futile battles covered in blue-paint and being urged on by deranged Druids, their weapons dripping with the blood of human sacrifices.

In contrast, the Romans are seen as the ultimate civilising force of the Western world, bringing their gleaming marble architecture, straight roads and aqueducts to the edge of the barbarian world. The last stand of the Celts under the charismatic leadership of the warrior-queen Boudica in 61 CE is regarded by many historians are the inevitable outcome of a clash between two contrasting social formations with her forces representing a historical dead end and the victorious Romans as the agents of progress.

Demons

The Roman historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, spoke for many of his compatriots in his disapproving description of the Celts who at that time resided mainly in the unconquered north-west parts of Europe: ‘They look like wood demons, their hair thick and shaggy like a horse’s mane. Some of them are clean -shaven but others – especially those of high rank – shave their cheeks but leave a moustache that covers the whole mouth and, when they eat and drink, acts like a sieve, trapping parts of food.’ Likewise, the Roman geographer Strabo noted psychological flaws in the collective psyche of the Celts that he claimed were responsible for their eclipse by his supposedly superior civilisation: ‘This lightness of character makes them intolerable when they conquer and fills them with panic when things go wrong.’

The suspicion and distrust of the civilisation of one of Rome’s great rivals in certain quarters has been transmitted down the centuries, especially in the light of the revival of nationalism since the nineteenth century in what is sometimes termed as ‘the Celtic fringe’ of the British Isles. Counter-hegemonic political movements of varying intensity in Ireland, Scotland and Wales have led to a conflation of the struggles of the peoples described by Diodorus and Strabo in the ancient world, with resistance to English domination of the UK in modern history spearheaded by parties such as Sinn Fein, the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

There is indubitably a link between the two epochs in the minds of many who mobilise for the break-up of the UK in organisations such as those above, but for the purposes of historical analysis, it is better to see them as distinct waves of struggle that are only loosely related. JRR Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, in the following passage seemed to express some of the deep-rooted prejudice of elements in the British ruling class who are wary of the connotations of Celtic civilisation, but was also cavilling at the imprecision with which scholars dumped anything mysterious in the distant past into the category ‘Celtic’, writing:

‘Celtic is a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come … Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason. I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh) and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact “mad” as your reader says—but I don’t believe I am.’

The Dying Gaul

This fatalistic conception of the Celts is also visible in one of the most famous surviving pieces of classical sculpture known as The Dying Gaul, which is on display today in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. The life-size statue shows a young, well-muscled Celtic warrior with a golden torque around his neck. The warrior has a defiant expression but is also clearly in a posture of defeat, as if he is awaiting the final blow from the Roman enemy. The intentions of the anonymous classical sculptor are forever unknown, but most modern viewers would be more inclined to empathise with the prostrate Celt than the imperial system which had brought him to his knees. The image is perhaps the most evocative one we have of the predatory nature of Roman imperialism.

Assessing the relationship between these clashing civilisations therefore has to be based on an awareness that all our written sources on the Celts are the products of their Roman antagonists. Writers such as Diodorus, Strabo, Polybius and particularly Caesar represent the voice of the victors, whose political agenda is the diminution of Celtic culture. Modern archaeology, however, has provided a quite different picture to that generated by the hostile propaganda of the Romans, as noted by Alice Roberts who become the face of the subject on the BBC:

‘When we read Greek and Roman accounts of the Celts, we come away with a caricature of uncouth barbarians who wear trousers and drink undiluted wine, who go naked into battle and who are terrified by an eclipse. But archaeology reveals a different story and we glimpse the Celts’ love of art and design, where exquisite jewellery symbolised power and where horse-riding warriors carried beautifully decorated swords and scabbards. We also discover how the Celtic-speaking tribes inhabiting the islands in the far north-west corner of Europe were culturally and technologically linked to their neighbours on the continent.’

Similarly, Mairead Sullivan highlights that the dominant narrative regarding the Celtic-Roman rivalry in antiquity needs re-adjusting in light of new archaeological and historical research:

‘While Romulus and Remus were still pups and the seven hills of Rome were outside the city limits, the Celts were Kings of Europe. For hundreds of years before the Roman Empire, the Celts dominated Europe and the British Isles – through their trade, technologies and travels – until the spread of the Roman Empire.’

Keltoi

The Celts are first referenced in classical sources around 600 BCE, when Greek colonists and explorers moving into the Western Mediterranean encountered a people they called the Keltoi (meaning ‘the tall ones’) based in what we call Marseilles in southern France. The Greek historians Hecataeus and Herodotus both refer to the distinctive traditions of inhabitants of the far West of Europe. By the fourth century BCE, the term ‘Celts’ had become an established one in the classical world for the communities residing along the Atlantic coast of Europe, and much of Western and Central Europe. As Rome expanded northwards in the first century BCE, the term was used generically for all the peoples the legions came into contact with, and began its association with anti-imperial resistance, especially in locations such as Gaul, Brittania and Hispania.

The traditional view of the deeper roots of the Celts was that they originated in central Europe late in the second millennium BCE and then fanned out westwards overland, eventually reaching the British Isles and the Atlantic coast a few centuries later. More recent archaeology and linguistic analysis, however, suggests the Celts of the western fringes of Europe were the indigenous inhabitants of the region and any kinship there may have been with other peoples in Central Europe was based on the extensive networks of trade and cultural transmission, which developed primarily along maritime routes as the Bronze Age evolved into the Iron Age around 1000 BCE. Barry Cunliffe, one of the world’s leading academic experts on the Celts, notes:

‘There was no great movement of peoples towards the Atlantic because they were already there. Only recently have we begun to discover that these people were far more advanced than those around the Mediterranean. We have underestimated dramatically the complexity of these people.’

Wrong way round

Excavations of Celtic sites have also revealed a level of social and economic sophistication that was not recognised by the writers working on behalf of the Roman enemy. At Bibracte in central France, archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a substantial settlement in existence from about the third to the first centuries BCE with workshops and shops on a high street, selling decorative items such as beads and bracelets, and based on the exchange of coins minted from nearby gold and silver mines. A similar conurbation has become apparent after digs in southern Germany at a location called Heunenberg, near the mouth of Danube. Objects discovered here, such Greek terracotta pots and Etruscan drinking cups, point to the site being a commercial hub for contacts between north European and Mediterranean civilisations.

These two locations clearly indicate an embryonic urban culture was underway in the Celtic world prior to its fatal contact with Rome. These societies were clearly far from the savages usually depicted by the classical authors. Barry Cunliffe underlines how the ultimate victory of the Caesars over their northern neighbours distorted the relationship of the two civilisations by subsequent generations:

‘For all these years we have been looking at Europe the wrong way round, and the idea that civilisation flowed out from the Mediterranean out to the barbarian edges of Europe has clouded our view that it flowed the other way too.’

The events that led to Rome ultimately winning this clash of civilisations was triggering by economic developments towards the end of the second century BCE. Up till that point, Celts and Romans had co-existed relatively peacefully, developing trade networks between each other, especially in the sale of wine across Gaul and Italy. The relationship would be fundamentally altered, however, by an intensification of the predatory nature of Roman imperialism. The massive territorial expansion of the empire following the crushing of its North African rival in Carthage in the previous century was accompanied by the enslavement of huge numbers of conquered peoples. The influx to Italy of vast armies of slave workers was exploited by the land-owning patrician elite in Rome to buy out smaller farmers and create bigger estates known as latifundia. A class of super-rich Roman aristocrats emerged who were able to use their enormous wealth to fund and manipulate the careers of ambitious generals and politicians, most notably Julius Caesar.

In 59 BCE, having served his term as Roman consul and accumulated huge debts, Caesar needed a military commission that would enable him to acquire enough booty to settle his financial difficulties. He forced through a law that gave him the command of Roman forces north of Italy and then used the pretext of migrating Germanic tribes to launch a massive and totally illegal invasion of Gaul. Caesar’s reputation as one of the great generals of world history was actually founded on what some historians view as a Celtic holocaust in which two-thirds of an estimated Gallic population of three million were either massacred or enslaved. Stories of Druidic human sacrifice or other reports of Celtic savagery are dwarfed by the scale of Caesar’s genocidal atrocities in the campaigns of 58-50 BCE, most of the victims inevitably being non-combatants. One historian, Ernst Badian, even suggests:  ‘Requisitions of food and punitive devastations completed a human, economic, and ecological disaster probably unequalled until the conquest of the Americas.‘

Robbers of the world

Following Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, the Romans continued their predatory destruction of Celtic civilisation, including the suppression of the Boudiccan revolt in 61 – also triggered by the rapacious greed of plutocratic patricians and involving massive loss of lives. The final upsurge of anti-imperial resistance in antiquity in the British Isles can be heard in the famous words the Roman historian Tacitus attributed to the Gaelic chieftain, Calgacus. In a defiant speech to his warriors before a battle in Scotland around 83 BCE, Calgacus is described as denouncing the venality of his Roman enemy in a manner that stands as a verdict on all subsequent imperial plunderers, equipped with multiple uniforms and pretexts. These words still resonate as one of the greatest anti-war speeches of all time:

‘Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they create a desolation and call it peace.’