The Galatians

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Some twenty miles southwest of Ancyra, on the high tableland of inner Anatolia, three hundred men gathered in a grove of oaks to judge the murders done among their nation. The grove had a name in their own tongue — Drunemeton, the holy place of oaks — and the language in which the name was spoken was not Greek, nor Phrygian, nor any speech native to that country. It was Celtic, carried two thousand kilometers from the Rhine and the Danube by men who had come there with swords, and it would still be spoken on those uplands seven centuries after the oaks were first consecrated. The Galatians were a piece of Gaul set down in the middle of Asia Minor, and they kept it Gaulish for a very long time.

Genealogy: the Celts who marched east

The Galatians were one current in the great Celtic movement of the early third century before the common era, when war-bands poured south out of central Europe through the Balkan passes against the wealth of the Greek world. In 281 BCE a host descended into Macedonia and broke it; in 279 BCE a part of that host, under a leader the Greeks called Brennus, drove south toward the richest sanctuary in Greece — the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. They were turned back there. The Greeks told the repulse as a miracle of the god, with thunder and landslide and the dead rising from the sacred ground; the plainer record is that they were checked, that Brennus was wounded, and that the invasion broke apart. The World History Encyclopedia account preserves the stages: the assault on Greece, the failure at the sanctuary, and the splintering of the war-bands that followed.

One splinter did not turn home. A body of warriors that had separated from the main host moved into Thrace under two leaders the Greek sources name Leonnorius and Lutarius, and from there they looked across the straits to Asia. In 278 or 277 BCE they crossed — Leonnorius by the Bosphorus, Lutarius by the Hellespont — at the invitation of a king who wanted their swords. Nicomedes I of Bithynia was locked in a dynastic war against his brother, and he hired the newcomers as mercenaries: by the figures that survive, some ten thousand fighting men, with about as many women and children behind them. Having served their employer, they did not leave. For a generation they were a terror across the cities of western Asia Minor, raiding the Greek coast and the kingdoms of the interior, until the Seleucid king Antiochus I checked them in a battle the Greeks remembered for his war-elephants. Pressed eastward, they settled at last in the high center of Anatolia — the country thereafter called Galatia, around the town that the Romans would know as Ancyra and that is now Ankara.

What settled there was not a tribe but a confederation of three. According to the geographer Strabo, writing in the generation of Augustus, the Galatians were three peoples: the Tolistobogii in the west, holding the country about Pessinus; the Tectosages in the center, about Ancyra itself; and the Trocmii in the east, about Tavium. Strabo’s own report, preserved in Book XII of the Geography, describes their order: each of the three was divided into four cantons, each canton under a chief the Greeks called a tetrarch, with a judge and a war-commander under him. The names are Celtic to the root — the Tectosages are the same people as a Gaulish nation of the same name far to the west, near Toulouse — and they mark the Galatians for what they were: not a generic horde but specific touta, specific tribes, broken off the body of the continental Celts and transplanted whole. This is the company the Galatians keep with the Helvetii of the Alps and the Belgae of the north, branches of the same wide family; what distinguishes the Galatians is the sheer distance of the throw. They are the farthest-flung of all the Celtic peoples, the eastern edge of a world whose western edge stood on the Atlantic. The umbrella over all of them is Gaul.

The nation transplanted: tongue, council, and the holy oaks

A people carried that far might have dissolved into the country that received it. The Galatians did not, or not for a long age, and the marks of their holding-fast are precise enough to name.

The first mark is the tongue. The Galatians kept their Celtic speech as a living language across the centuries while the cities around them spoke Greek and the countryside Phrygian. The most explicit testimony is late and comes from an unexpected quarter: Jerome, the Christian scholar, who had himself traveled in the East, wrote in his commentary on Paul’s letter to the Galatians, composed around 386 CE, that the Galatians had their own language besides the Greek of the eastern world, and that it was almost the same as the speech of the Treveri — the Gaulish people about Trier, on the Moselle near the Rhine. The witness is external and Christian and four centuries after the settlement, and it should be held at that distance; but it is a striking thing for an outsider to notice, and the linguistic record around it, gathered in the survey of the Galatian language, bears it out — the personal names, the place-names, the tribal names are continental Celtic, cousins of the Gaulish known from the western inscriptions. A man of the Rhineland and a man of inner Anatolia, in Jerome’s hearing, could nearly understand one another. The throw across Europe had not severed the line.

The second mark is the council, and here the Galatians’ own institution speaks through Strabo. Above the tetrarchs and their twelve cantons stood a council of three hundred men, drawn from across the three tribes, which met to judge cases of murder. It convened at a place Strabo calls Drynemetum — Drunemeton in the fuller Celtic form, the dru-nemeton, the holy place of oaks. The word is the key. Nemeton is the Celtic name for the sacred grove, the consecrated clearing that across the Celtic world stood in the place of a temple — the same kind of holy ground that the druids of Gaul kept, the open precinct rather than the built house of the god. The Galatians carried the institution east with the word for it intact and named their high court for it: not a hall, but a grove of oaks, holy in the old way. The supreme assembly of a Celtic nation in the heart of Asia Minor met where the oaks stood, and the place kept its Celtic name in the geographer’s Greek.

The third mark is what the grove implies — that the gods came east too. The Galatians did not arrive godless, and the sacred clearing at the center of their political life is the open evidence that the religion of the continental Celts traveled with the warriors who held it: the nemeton, the grove, the powers that dwell in the holy ground. Of the particular Galatian gods almost nothing survives in their own voice, for the Celts of the continent — the Gauls of the west no less than these of the east — left scarcely any sacred writing of their own; what is known of their religion comes filtered through outsiders, the Greek and Roman observers, and through the silent testimony of grove and offering and stone. But the shape of the inheritance is legible. The Galatians settled in the country of the Anatolian Mother, the great goddess Cybele whose chief sanctuary at Pessinus fell within the western Galatian lands of the Tolistobogii — the same Mother of the mountains whose cult belonged to Phrygia and reached, with her consort Attis, across the Anatolian world. In time the Celtic powers borne from the Rhine met the Mother already enthroned on those uplands, and the two religious worlds blended at the edges, the transplanted grove-cult settling into the older sacred geography of the country. The blending is read by scholars from the religious record rather than spoken by the Galatians themselves; the grove, at least, is theirs and named in their own tongue.

There is a wider Celtic teaching that the classical observers report and that bears on a people who would cross a continent to settle among strangers: the conviction, set down by Caesar of the druids of Gaul, that the soul does not perish with the body but passes on — a doctrine of the soul’s continuance and its passage that the Greeks and Romans found both strange and familiar. Whether the Galatians of Anatolia held it in the same form their western kin did is not recorded; it belongs to the religion of the continental Celts as the outside sources describe it, and the Galatians came out of that religion. Their offerings and their rites — the sacrifice and the dedication that the Celtic world made to its gods — are likewise known to us chiefly from the grove and from the practices of their kindred rather than from any Galatian text.

The distance of the sources is the difficulty that runs under everything one can say about the Galatians’ faith. They wrote little of themselves, and what survives was written by Greeks and Romans for whom the Celt was first a danger and then a curiosity — Strabo at the desk of empire, Jerome with a controversialist’s purpose, the Pergamene kings with a monument to raise. The Galatians answer in the things they made and named: the grove called by its Celtic name, the council that met among the oaks, the tribal divisions that carry Gaulish words two thousand kilometers from the Rhine, the warrior on the Capitoline marble with his torc and his limed hair. Between the outside texts and these few hard facts the historian must work, marking which is which — and the grove of oaks, at least, is the Galatians speaking in their own tongue, even if a Greek geographer is the one who wrote the word down.

Reception: the dying Celt, the province, and the letter

For all that they held fast within, the Galatians were known to the outer world first as a danger and then as a defeated foe, and the chief monument to them was raised by their enemies.

The kings of Pergamon, the Attalid dynasty that ruled the rich kingdom on the Aegean coast, made their reputation by breaking the Galatian power. Attalus I, who reigned at the end of the third century, won a decisive victory over them — placed by the sources at the river Caïcus, around 233 BCE — and took from it the title of king and the standing of a Greek deliverer who had turned back the Celtic terror. To mark the victory he commissioned a monument, and from that monument descend the most famous images of a Celt that the ancient world produced. The original bronzes are lost; what survives are later marble copies, chief among them the figure now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome that the modern world calls the Dying Gaul — a naked warrior sunk on his shield, the torc at his throat, his hair limed into the stiff Celtic manner, dying with a terrible composure as the blood runs from the wound in his side. Its companion, the Ludovisi group, shows a Celtic chief driving his sword into his own breast as he holds up the body of his wife, whom he has killed rather than let her be taken. The sculptor of the originals is held to have been Epigonus, court artist of the Attalids.

The Dying Gaul, a Roman marble copy of the lost Hellenistic bronze, Capitoline Museums, Rome — a Celtic warrior dying on his shield, the torc at his throat. antmoose, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0. The figures were made to proclaim a Pergamene triumph — the conquered barbarian, dignified in defeat so that the conqueror’s victory should be the more glorious — and they are, in that sense, hostile witnesses, the image of the Galatian shaped by the hand of the king who beat him. Yet what they record is unmistakable: the torc, the lime-stiffened hair, the bare-fighting courage, and the choice of death before capture. The enemies of the Galatians, meaning to celebrate themselves, left the most enduring portrait of who the Galatians were.

Rome came after Pergamon. In 189 BCE a Roman consul, Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, marched into the Galatian highlands and beat the three tribes in their own country, and from that point the Galatians moved within the Roman orbit — first as a power Rome alternately fought and used, then as a client kingdom under chieftains the Romans recognized, Deiotarus among them, and Amyntas after him. When Amyntas died in 25 BCE, the emperor Augustus took the territory directly into the empire as the province of Galatia, with Ancyra as its capital. The Celtic nation had become a Roman province; the grove of oaks and the council of three hundred gave way to the apparatus of imperial administration. But the name held, and the people held their identity within it long enough for Jerome, four centuries on, to still hear the Rhineland in their speech.

It is by way of Rome’s province that the Galatians enter the scripture of the Christians and carry their name into a book read across the world. In the first century of the common era the apostle Paul addressed a letter to the assemblies of Christians in Galatia — the Epistle to the Galatians, one of the earliest and most consequential documents of the new faith, a furious argument over law and freedom and the terms on which the gentiles might be received. The recipients were the descendants, or the heirs in that country, of the Celtic war-bands who had marched on Delphi; the man who wrote to them perhaps knew them, in the commonplace of the age, as a people quick to passion and quick to change, “O foolish Galatians” being the letter’s most quoted line. Whatever Paul meant by the country, the address fixed the Celtic name into the canon, and Galatians has been a word in the mouths of readers who never heard of Brennus or the grove of oaks.

So the eastern Celts pass into memory along three channels, and the channels do not agree. The marble dying warrior of Pergamon is the Galatian as his Greek conqueror chose to show him — noble, doomed, barbarian in the conqueror’s sense. The Roman province is the Galatian absorbed, his land surveyed and taxed and his capital made a Roman city. The epistle is the Galatian as a Christian congregation, a name on a letter. Behind all three stands the thing the sources can only gesture at: a confederation of Celtic tribes that crossed a continent, kept its tongue and its council and its holy oaks among the cities of Asia, and stood for centuries as the strangest outpost of the Celtic world — Gaul transplanted to the heart of Anatolia, judging its murders in a grove of oaks it had named in a language brought from the Rhine.

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