The Helvetii

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Between the Jura and the Alps, on the broad plateau that the Rhine bounds to the north and the lake of Geneva closes to the south, lay a country of grassland and lake-edge farms — good land, but a narrow one. Mountains hemmed it on three sides; on the fourth, beyond the river, pressed peoples stronger and more numerous. The people who held this midland called themselves, by the reading philologists give their name, those who are rich in land — and yet, by the one extended account that survives, they came to feel the land too small for them, and resolved to leave it altogether. That resolve, and its undoing, placed the Helvetii at the very opening of the best-documented war the ancient world fought against a Celtic people.

The people of the plateau

The Helvetii were a Gaulish people of the La Tène world, the great iron-using Celtic culture of west-central Europe whose decorated metalwork, hillforts, and burial fields spread across the centuries before Rome. Their heartland was the Swiss plateau — the rolling country between the Jura mountains to the west, the high Alps to the south and east, the Rhine along the north, and, at the southwestern corner, the long water that the Romans named Lacus Lemannus, the lake of Geneva. It was a land of open farmland and large defended hilltop settlements, the oppida that mark the late Celtic centuries across Gaul: walled towns set on heights, centers of trade, coinage, and assembly.

By the testimony of the one writer who described them at length, the people were organized into four divisions — pagi, in his Latin, the cantons or sub-tribes of the touta, the people made one. Two of these are named with some confidence in the ancient record: the Tigurini and the Verbigeni; a third, the Tougeni or Tulingi, appears in the related Greek tradition that drew on the traveler-philosopher Posidonius. The whole stood among the more formidable of the Gaulish peoples, and the same source explains why in a single sentence: the Helvetii surpassed the rest of the Gauls in valor, because they were almost daily in conflict with the Germani across their river-frontier. The phrase is double-edged. It honors them, and it also frames them — a frontier people, perpetually at war, hemmed in.

That framing matters, because nearly everything written of the Helvetii comes from outside, and from a hand that had every reason to shape them a particular way. The decisive text is the Commentarii de Bello Gallico, the war memoir of Gaius Julius Caesar, who as proconsul fought the peoples of Gaul from 58 BC onward and wrote his own running account of it (Commentarii de Bello Gallico). Its famous first words — Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, “All Gaul is divided into three parts” — open the most influential ethnography of the Celts ever composed, and one of the most interested. Caesar was not a neutral observer of the Helvetii; he was the man who destroyed their migration and who needed, before a Roman readership, for that destruction to look necessary. Strabo and Diodorus, drawing on Posidonius, add a little; coins struck in the Helvetii’s own names survive, and so does their land’s archaeology. But the narrative spine is Caesar’s, and the people speak through it only as he lets them.

The great migration and its undoing

The story Caesar tells is the reason the Helvetii are remembered at all, and it is a story of deliberate, total commitment. Around 61 BC, he writes, a noble of the Helvetii named Orgetorix — by far the richest and most distinguished among them — urged his people to leave their narrow country and go out with all their force to seek a wider home in the west of Gaul. They were, in his telling, a people who excelled all others in war and who chafed at being shut between mountain, river, and lake. The proposal was accepted, and the people set themselves to prepare for departure on a fixed day, three years off.

Those three years were spent in method. They bought up draught animals and wagons, sowed the largest possible crops to carry grain for the road, and made peace and alliance with their neighbors. Orgetorix, sent among the surrounding peoples to bind them, went further than the council had asked: he conspired with Casticus among the Sequani and with Dumnorix among the Aedui that each should seize kingship in his own people, the three then to rule Gaul between them. The plot came out. Summoned to trial by his own people — for a man who sought to make himself king violated the order of the touta — Orgetorix appeared at the appointed day with all his household and dependents, some ten thousand, and so escaped judgment by force. He died soon after, in circumstances Caesar leaves dark; the Helvetii themselves, he says, suspected he had taken his own life.

Charles Gleyre, Romans Passing under the Yoke (1858): the Helvetian chief Divico over a defeated Roman force in 107 BC. Charles Gleyre, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

His death did not stop the migration; the people held to their resolve. And then they did the thing that fixes them in memory. To make return impossible — so that, with no home to go back to, every man would be readier for the danger ahead — they burned their own country behind them. Caesar gives the count: twelve oppida, their walled towns; some four hundred villages; and the private homesteads besides, with all the grain they could not carry. They kept three months’ milled provision and set fire to the rest. Three allied peoples, the Tulingi, the Latobrigi, and the Rauraci, burned their towns and joined them; so did the Boii, a people pressing west out of the Danube lands. In the year that Caesar came to Gaul, the whole nation set out — men, women, children, wagons, herds — toward the Rhône and the road west.

The figures Caesar reports for that host are extraordinary, and he says they came from captured records: tablets written in Greek letters, found in the abandoned camp, giving the numbers by people. The total was 368,000 souls — 263,000 Helvetii, with the rest made up of the Tulingi, Latobrigi, Rauraci, and Boii — of whom 92,000 were fighting men. Modern historians treat the figures with caution; a count this size strains the land’s known capacity to feed it, and a victorious general had reasons to make the multitude he had broken as vast as possible. But the tablets, if real, are a rare glimpse of a Celtic people counting itself in its own hand, in a script learned from the Greek south.

Caesar’s response was swift and is the matter of his first book. The shortest road west ran through the Roman Province, past Geneva; he reached the Rhône, broke the bridge, and — by his account — raised a wall and ditch some nineteen Roman miles along the river’s south bank to bar the crossing. Turned back, the Helvetii took the harder northern route through the lands of the Sequani and Aedui. Caesar pursued. He caught the rearguard, the canton of the Tigurini, as it was still crossing the river Arar — the Saône — with three parts of the host already over and one part stranded on the near bank; he fell on that quarter and cut it down (Battle of the Arar). The blow had an edge of old grievance: it was the Tigurini who, half a century before, had defeated and killed a Roman consul, and Caesar marks the stroke as vengeance taken in the Republic’s name and his own.

The decisive battle came soon after, near Bibracte, the great hill-town of the Aedui on Mont Beuvray. The migrating host, short of grain and harried, turned and offered battle. Caesar drew up his legions in three lines on a slope, the baggage massed on the height behind a hasty rampart. The Helvetii came on in close order; the Romans hurled their heavy javelins, the pila, whose soft iron shanks bent in the Gaulish shields and fouled them, so that men cast the shields away and fought unprotected. The fight swung when the Boii and Tulingi came up on the Roman flank and rear, and Caesar wheeled his third line to meet them; it lasted from afternoon into the night (Battle of Bibracte). At its end the migration was broken. The survivors fled, were overtaken, and surrendered.

What Caesar did then is as telling as the battle. He did not enslave or scatter the remnant. He ordered the Helvetii — by his own count some 110,000 of the 368,000 who had set out — to return to the country they had burned, and commanded the Allobroges to furnish them grain, and the Helvetii to rebuild their towns and villages. The reason he gives is strategic, and revealing of the whole frontier logic of the war: he did not want the rich land of the Helvetii left empty, lest the Germani beyond the Rhine cross over and settle it, and so bring a more dangerous neighbor against the Province and against Rome’s friends. The people rich in land were sent back to their land precisely because it was too valuable to abandon — sent home to rebuild what they had set fire to, as a living wall against the peoples beyond the river (Helvetii, Britannica).

The sacred frame, and a calendar in the borderland

Of the religion the Helvetii held, the classical record says almost nothing specific. They stood within the general sacred world of the continental Celts, the world Caesar himself sketches a few chapters on from their defeat: a pantheon he names through Roman equivalents — a chief god he calls Mercury, and beside him the powers he renders as Mars, Jupiter, Apollo, and Minerva — and a learned priestly order, the druids, who held the rites, the law, and the teaching (druidism). To that order Caesar attributes the doctrine that struck Roman readers most: that the soul does not perish with the body but passes from one to another, a teaching of the deathless soul (see soul, reincarnation) which he reports the Gauls held as a spur to courage in battle. Whether the Helvetii’s own observance ran exactly so is past recovering from the texts. Their sacred world is to be read, as with the Belgae and the other peoples of Gaul, against the broader frame — the offered weapons of the war-sanctuaries, the venerated head, the healing springs, the sacred grove or nemeton — and against the iconography of the Gallo-Roman centuries that followed the conquest.

One object, though, belongs to the borderland of the Helvetii and to the whole Celtic year. At Coligny, in the department of Ain in eastern France — in the Gaulish country near the Helvetii’s western edge, not strictly within their land — a great bronze tablet was unearthed in 1897, broken into scores of fragments and recovered to perhaps two-fifths of its original face. It is the Coligny calendar: a lunisolar reckoning of five years, inscribed in the Gaulish language but in Latin letters, naming twelve lunar months — Samonios, Dumannios, Rivros, and the rest — and inserting an extra, intercalary month to hold the moon and the sun in step (Coligny calendar). Its days are marked good or ill — MAT for the auspicious, ANM for the rest — by a logic philologists read against the later Welsh and Irish. The bronze itself dates to about the 2nd century AD, well into the Roman period; but its errors of copying betray an older system behind it, a native Celtic ordering of the year set down in a borrowed script. It is now held in the Gallo-Roman museum at Lyon.

The Coligny calendar, a Gaulish lunisolar bronze inscribed in Latin letters, found in 1897 at Coligny in the Ain. Gozitano, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The calendar’s findspot is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to claim too much. Coligny lies in Gaul to the west of the Helvetii, not within their territory; the calendar is a monument of the wider Gaulish world, not a Helvetian relic. But it stands, in its broken precision, for the thing the literary sources almost never give — the Celts of this country thinking and reckoning in their own language, on their own terms, by their own measure of the sacred and ordinary days. Against Caesar’s account of a people known chiefly for how they were conquered, the bronze from Coligny is a fragment of how they ordered their own time.

Reception: the war’s first page, and a country’s name

The Helvetii owe their long afterlife to two accidents of position. The first is their place in Caesar’s book. Because their migration set the war in motion — because the Aedui and other peoples appealed to Rome against the moving host, and because Caesar found in that appeal the occasion he needed — the Helvetii are the first people the Gallic War describes at any length. They are the army on the opening page, the movement that drew Caesar across the Province and began the conquest of all Gaul. For as long as Latin was the schoolroom language of Europe, generations of students met the Celts first through the Helvetii: the burned towns, the tablets in Greek letters, the wall along the Rhône, the long fight near Bibracte. No other Celtic people’s history is so fully written; and none is written so entirely by the man who ended it.

The second accident is their name. After the conquest the plateau became Roman, the people Gallo-Roman, the territory in time a province; and the Latin name of the land, formed from theirs, was Helvetia. It outlived the empire and the people both. When the Swiss cantons sought, in the seventeenth century and again in the founding of the federal state in 1848, a name above the rivalries of language and region, they reached for the old Roman word for the country and its lost Celtic people. Helvetia became the personified figure of the nation, set on the coinage from the mid-nineteenth century; the official Latin title of the state is Confoederatio Helvetica, the Helvetic Confederation — which is why the abbreviation struck on Swiss stamps and stamped on Swiss cars is the neutral, language-blind CH (Helvetia, Wikipedia). The people Caesar broke and sent home are now the antique name of one of the most stable states in Europe, and a woman with a shield and a spear on its small change.

There is an irony in it that the sources never intended. The Helvetii are remembered, above all peoples of Gaul, for an exodus that failed — for the one great act they did not complete, recorded by the enemy who undid it. And yet the failure made them permanent. Their kindred who went east, the Galatians, are known by the country they seized and the epistle written to it; the northern peoples by the war-deposits dug from their own sanctuaries. The Helvetii are known by their leaving, and by the country they could not leave — the land rich in land, which would not let them go, and which keeps their name still.

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