The Belgae

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North of the Seine and the Marne, in the country that runs up to the Rhine and the cold sea, the ground keeps a kind of record the rest of Gaul does not. It is not written. It is a square of ditch and palisade with a gate to the east, and in the ditch, laid down over generations, are swords folded back on themselves until they could no longer cut, the bossed centers of shields punched through, the whole carcasses of oxen left to rot in pits, and among them the bones of men. The peoples who dug these enclosures and filled them are the ones a Roman general would name the bravest of the Gauls. They left no books. They left the offerings, in the order in which they gave them, and from that order the religion of the northern Celts can be read in a hand that is their own.

The third part of Gaul

When Julius Caesar opened the account of his conquest, he began with a division that has organized the map of ancient Gaul ever since. “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” he wrote, “one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third.” The three were marked off by rivers and by speech and custom: the Aquitani in the southwest, beyond the Garonne; the Celtae in the broad center; and in the north, between the Seine and the Marne on one side and the lower Rhine on the other, the Belgae. They were not a single people but a cluster of peoples, a confederation rather than a nation — the Bellovaci, the Nervii, the Suessiones, the Remi, the Atrebates, the Ambiani, the Morini, the Menapii, the Veromandui, and others east toward the river. It is the third part of Gaul, and the part that lay farthest from Rome.

Caesar ranked them at once. “Of all these,” he wrote, “the Belgae are the bravest” — horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae — and he gave two reasons, which were really one. They were the bravest because they lived farthest from the refinement and civilization of the Roman Province, were least often visited by the merchants whose imported goods, in his reckoning, soften the spirit of a people, and because they bordered the Germani across the Rhine, with whom they were continually at war. The judgment is famous, and it should be heard at its true distance. It is a conqueror’s appraisal, set down by a man who was at that moment preparing to fight and kill these peoples and who needed his readers in Rome to grasp the scale of what he was undertaking. A frontier people, hardened by perpetual war and untouched by trade, makes a formidable enemy and a glorious conquest. The line is at once an ethnographic observation and a piece of self-promotion. But it is not therefore false, and it places the Belgae precisely: at the far rim of the Celtic world, where Gaul shaded into Germania and where the things that Mediterranean writers counted as the marks of softness had least purchase.

That northern position carried a mixture into the blood and the speech. Caesar reports that several of the Belgic peoples toward the Rhine claimed descent from the Germani, having crossed the river in earlier times and driven out the Gauls who lived there; he groups some of them under the name Germani cisrhenani, the Germans on the near side of the Rhine, with the Eburones the most prominent. Whether these were Germanic-speaking peoples Celticized, or Celtic peoples who took a Germanic name and pedigree, is a question that the spare evidence does not finally settle, and the modern reading leans toward a frontier where the categories the ancients used — Gaul, German — were less tidy than the writers who used them supposed. What is clear is that the Belgae stood where two great barbarian worlds met, partook of both, and were reckoned by Rome the more dangerous for it.

Some of them went farther still. By Caesar’s testimony, peoples bearing Belgic names had crossed the Channel and settled in the south of Britain: the maritime parts of the island, he wrote, had been peopled by those who came over from among the Belgae for the sake of plunder and war, and who, having made the crossing, stayed and tilled the land, keeping the names of the states from which they had come. Down to the Roman conquest of Britain there was a people called the Belgae in the south of the island, with their later capital at Venta Belgarum, the modern Winchester; the British Atrebates next to them carried the same name as a Belgic people of Gaul. The confederation of the north, then, was not contained by the continent. Its peoples and its names reached across the water into another island, the leading edge of the Celtic world thrown out toward the Atlantic.

The religion read from the ground

For most of the peoples whom Greek and Roman writers called barbarians, the historian is at the mercy of those writers. The Belgae are the rare and instructive exception, because in their country, more than anywhere in Gaul, the sacred places survive in a form that can be excavated and read. They built no temples of stone and carved few inscriptions before the Romans came. What they built were enclosures — bounded patches of ground, squared off by a ditch and a palisade, with a single gate, usually opening to the east — and into these enclosures they made offerings, and the offerings stayed in the ground. The cult that no Belgic text describes can be reconstructed from its own deposits, layer by layer, in the order in which the worshipers laid them down. This is a thing one can almost never do for the religion of a people without a literature, and it is the distinctive gift of the Belgic north.

The clearest of these places is the sanctuary at Gournay-sur-Aronde, in the old country of the Bellovaci, where a square of ditch some forty-five meters on a side received, across roughly two centuries from the third to the first century before the common era, on the order of two thousand pieces of iron. They were not lost or abandoned. They were ruined before they were given: long swords heated and folded back on themselves, scabbards twisted apart, the iron bosses of shields hammered flat or punched through. The logic is that of the war-offering carried to its end. The arm of battle is killed as a body is killed, put beyond all use and all reclaiming, and in that ruin passed wholly out of the world of the living and into the keeping of the powers. A sword that could still cut would be a sacrifice withheld. Among the ruined weapons lay the bones of cattle, great oxen above all, killed and laid whole into pits at the heart of the enclosure and left for months to decompose in the open air — food surrendered, not shared at any feast — and, harder to read and to be held at its distance, the bones of men, set about the eastern gate where the arms and the ox-skulls were raised on a wooden porch for those who approached to see.

A second sanctuary, at Ribemont-sur-Ancre in the valley of the Ancre, carries the same grammar to a more drastic pitch. There, on a permanent ritual site laid out at the end of the fourth or the beginning of the third century before the common era, the excavators found a quadrangular enclosure with sunken altars at its corners and, set into and around the precinct, the remains of close to a thousand men, with thousands of weapons among them. In the corners stood open-topped ossuary structures, square boxes built up, on their outer faces, of the long bones of the dead, crisscrossed into the very fabric of the monument. The bodies seem to have been those of warriors, headless, gathered with their arms from a field of battle and given over wholesale to the gods of war. Jean-Louis Brunaux, who excavated both Gournay and Ribemont, read the place as a sanctuary of victory, where a defeated enemy host was offered entire — bodies, weapons, and all — to the powers that grant the upper hand in war. Others have hesitated, asking whether the dead are slain enemies or the community’s own war-fallen honored in death, and whether so elaborate and so permanent a precinct would be raised merely to dispose of a foe. The seam is a real one, and a careful reader should keep it visible: the bones are certain, the meaning is argued.

What the bones do not allow is the easy reach for savagery. Set the deposits beside the head-sanctuaries of the Gaulish south — the portico of Roquepertuse, with its niches cut to hold human skulls, and the seated stone heroes and pierced crania of the oppidum of Entremont — and a single conviction comes into view across the whole Celtic world: that the head is the seat of the person and its power, and that the dead, rightly kept, hold something the living need. In the south the power was gathered into the displayed and bracketed skull; in the north the object that carried the offering was the arm itself, the sword and the shield and the whole body of the slain, surrendered at a boundary that the enclosure made deliberately thin. The gesture is the same in either case: a thing of full value, put beyond recovery, given across the line that the bounded ground keeps open between this world and the other.

Standing behind these rites were gods whose own names the Belgae did not write, and who reach us mostly in the Roman dress that the conquerors fitted to them. By the practice the Romans called the interpretatio Romana, a Gaulish power was identified with whichever member of the Roman pantheon it most resembled, and the war-god foremost in a people of warriors came over as a Mars — not the single Mars of Rome but a Mars of the tribe, attached to a particular people and bearing a Gaulish surname. Behind that Latin mask stood the older idea the inscriptions only half disclose: the god who is the people itself made divine and armed, the protector who holds the touta, the tribe, in his keeping. This is the conception named in Teutates, the god of the tribe, whom the Roman writers fitted now to Mars and now to Mercury, inconsistently, because the Gaulish power did not map onto any one of theirs. The thunderer Taranis, whose wheel turns up across Gaul, and the woodcutter Esus belong to the same world of powers that the literary sources name and the archaeology can only sometimes reach. What the Belgic enclosures show is less the faces of these gods than the shape of the worship owed them: the boundary marked and held sacred, the weapon and the beast and the body given over entire, the sanctuary a place where the powers of war were as present, within that world, as the iron in the ditch.

The literary record adds what the ground cannot, at a cost the reader must keep in mind. The Greek and Roman ethnographers who described the religion of the Gauls — Caesar above all, and behind him the lost work of Posidonius, on which Strabo and Diodorus drew — wrote as outsiders, travelers and conquerors, and their reports run quickly to the formulaic. From them comes the report of the Druids, the learned priesthood who, by Caesar’s account, presided over the public and private rites, kept the calendar and the law, and taught that the soul did not perish with the body but passed into another — a doctrine of the soul’s continuance that he found among the Gauls and thought made them readier to risk death in battle. From the same writers comes the topos of Gaulish human sacrifice, the great images of woven wicker filled with living men and burned. That charge must be handled soberly and at its full distance: it is a Greco-Roman commonplace applied to barbarian peoples generally, set down by hostile observers, and where the spade has tested it — at Ribemont, at Gournay — what it finds is the offering of the dead and the ruined arm, a religion of the boundary and the gift, not the lurid theater the texts describe. The deposits and the texts must be read together, and read for their distance: the one made by the worshipers, the other by their enemies.

Conquest and afterlife

The bravery Caesar credited to the Belgae they spent, in large part, against him. In the winter of 58 and the spring of 57 before the common era, hearing that the Belgic peoples were binding themselves together in fear of Rome, he marched north. The Remi, nearest to the advancing legions, came over to him and became his allies and his informants; the Suessiones and the powerful Bellovaci, the most numerous of the confederation, submitted before the campaign was far advanced. The hardest fighting came against the Nervii. At the river the Romans called the Sabis, in 57 before the common era, the Nervii and their allies the Atrebates and the Veromandui fell on Caesar’s army as it was making camp and came near to destroying it; the legions formed and held only with difficulty, and Caesar’s own account dwells on the Nervii fighting to the last man over the bodies of their dead, a people who would not treat for peace and were all but annihilated rather than yield. The Ambiani told Caesar the Nervii were the most hostile of all the Belgae to Roman rule, a fierce people who would not allow the import of wine and the other goods of the south, holding that such things unmanned a people — the very softness Caesar had named, refused as a matter of principle.

The end of Belgic independence came in 51 before the common era, the last year of the conquest, with a rising of the Bellovaci under their chief Correus, joined by the Atrebatian Commius and by other northern peoples. They fought, by the account that comes down, a war of ambush and withdrawal, trapping Roman foragers in the woods and refusing the pitched battle that would have cost them everything at once, and they held Caesar in check long enough that he called for reinforcement. Correus died in a last stand; Commius escaped across the Rhine into Germania. With the breaking of the Bellovaci the long resistance of the northern Gauls was over, and the country between the Seine and the Rhine passed under Rome, in time to be organized as the province of Gallia Belgica, which kept the old confederation’s name.

The name proved more durable than the freedom. It survives today in Belgium, the modern state carved across the heart of the old Belgic country, whose Latin name preserves the people Caesar fought; and it survived, for centuries after the conquest, across the Channel in the southern British Belgae and their town of Venta Belgarum, until the English came and Venta became Winchester. The sanctuaries, by contrast, were lost. Gournay was burned and leveled in the decades around the conquest; Ribemont fell out of use; the squared ditches filled in and the country forgot them, and the religion they held passed out of memory along with the peoples who made it.

It came back through the spade. The recovery of Gournay in the campaigns of the late 1970s and the 1980s, and of Ribemont alongside it, gave archaeology its first full reading of a Belgic war-sanctuary — the ditched enclosure with its eastern gate, its pit-altars, its offered and deliberately ruined weapons, its whole beasts left to rot, its trophy of arms and bones at the threshold — and made of these northern sites a type against which the others could be measured. The bent swords of Gournay now fill cases in the museum at Compiègne; the ossuaries of Ribemont are studied bone by bone. Where the religion of most ancient peoples without writing must be guessed at through the prejudices of those who conquered them, the Belgae are met halfway by their own deposits. The conqueror called them the bravest of the Gauls and meant it as a measure of how hard they were to beat. The ditches they dug measure something the conqueror could not see: how, and to whom, and at what cost, this farthest people of the Celtic north gave the iron and the ox and the dead.

A long iron sword from the Belgic sanctuary of Gournay-sur-Aronde, in the old country of the Bellovaci, dating between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE and deliberately bent before it was given to the gods and laid in the sanctuary ditch. Musée Antoine Vivenel, Compiègne. Zetrollhebus, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

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