The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  When the Gaulish tribes began to bisect their domains with parallels and meridians, the world was already shedding its mythical aura. The fabled Isles of the Blessed, the Elysium of demi-gods and heroes, were increasingly associated with real islands thought to lie somewhere in the Atlantic, a long way west of the inhabited world. There were sailors who claimed to have seen them: perhaps they had sighted or made landfall on the Canaries, Madeira or Cape Verde.

  With the Greek klimata as a guide, it is not hard to mount a virtual expedition, and the directions are easy to follow. Logically, to reach the Elysian Fields, one would sail due west on the latitude of Delphi, the omphalos of the earth, and hold to this bearing, riding the rays of the setting sun, to the place where Zeus released one of the two eagles or crows that met at Delphi. After ten thousand stadia (the distance given to the Roman general Sertorius by some Iberian mariners), the ship would come to a group of islands in the mid-Atlantic three and a half hours of daylight west of Delphi. In 1749, on the island of Corvo in the Azores, a rainstorm washed a black pot out of the foundations of a house. It contained a hoard of ancient coins. The coins have disappeared, and the finding will never be authenticated. But some of them were sent to Lisbon, and drawings were published in a scholarly journal in 1778. Most of the coins were clearly Carthaginian; two others came from the Greek city of Cyrene. They were dated to the late third century BC. The fact that the coins were discovered on the island furthest from Europe was thought to be particularly incredible, but an expedition to the edge of the world would hardly have sailed for home when there was still land to the west.

  As migrants, traders and mercenaries, the Celts, too, belonged to this age of exploration. It was only later that a shadow fell over the shrinking world: when the Romans landed in Britain in 55 BC, in the region called Cantium, there was no trace of Pytheas’s expedition six generations before. ‘Persistent enquiries’ by Caesar produced little useful information and a good deal of misinformation. Tin, he was assured by a local informant, ‘is found in the midland regions’ (‘in mediterraneis regionibus’), whereas Pytheas, along with countless Carthaginian, Greek and Celtic traders, had known that it came from Belerion in the south-west. Caesar asked about the islands where night was said to last for thirty days at the time of the winter solstice, but no one was able to confirm their existence. ‘Accurate measurements’ with water-clocks established the fact that the days were longer than in Gaul, which was hardly an original finding, and a spell of unusually good weather – or a misreading of Pytheas’s account of the effects of the Gulf Stream – produced the surprising observation that ‘the climate is more temperate than in Gaul’.

  21. Caesar’s movements in Gaul and Britain, 58–51 BC

  In Gaul and in Britain, Caesar was entirely dependent on local information, which is why it took him so long to discover the most convenient crossing of the Channel. At any given moment, his mental horizons were those of the visible world. His descriptions of particular sites are accurate enough for his battles to be re-enacted and his tactics analysed, but otherwise, his vision was as foggy as the Oceanus Britannicus. To reach Gaul from the Alps at the start of each campaigning season, he usually travelled in a north-westerly direction, which would have enabled him to believe that his skewed conception (shown in fig. 22) was more or less correct. Luck shielded him from the effects of ignorance. In the seventh year of the war, he decided not to return to the Roman part of Gaul, in part because of ‘the difficult roads leading over the obstacle of the Cévennes’. Any trader could have told him that, from his camp near the river Allier, there was no need to cross the Cévennes. Instead, believing himself to be cut off from Italy, he marched towards the Rhine and set the scene for the final defeat of the Gauls.

  22. Caesar’s conception of the Celtic lands

  Based on De Bello Gallico (58–51 BC).

  One hundred and fifty years after Caesar, in AD 98, the Roman historian Tacitus decided to describe the geography of Britain using ‘ascertained fact’ instead of guesswork. The fleet commanded by his father-in-law, Agricola, had circumnavigated the island, and he was able to describe it as a double-headed axe topped with a huge and shapeless tract of land (Caledonia) tapering to a wedge. To the east, the coast ran parallel to Germania. To the west, if one crossed the island of Hibernia (Ireland), one came to Hispania (Spain), which explained why the Silures of South Wales had ‘swarthy complexions and curly hair’. Tacitus had often heard Agricola say that he could have conquered Ireland with a single legion and trapped the rebellious Britons between Spain and Gaul. But Ireland was never invaded, and the history of exploration was deprived of one of its finest tableaux – a Roman general standing on the Dingle Peninsula, peering at the Atlantic horizon in the hope of catching sight of the Iberian coast.

  In the Highlands of Scotland, ‘where earth and nature end’, Agricola is supposed to have said to his troops, ‘We do not have our enemy’s knowledge of the country.’ This would have been something of an understatement. A more accurate assessment of the Roman position is provided, in Tacitus’s account, by the British leader, Calgacus, pointing at the Romans: ‘a scanty band, dismayed by their ignorance, staring blankly at the unfamiliar sky, sea and forests around them.’

  23. Strabo’s conception of the Celtic lands

  Based on Strabo’s Geography (c. 7 BC). Massilia was the Roman name of Massalia (Marseille).

  Long before Agricola imagined himself reaching Spain by way of Ireland, traders, fishermen and adventurers had been sailing the unmapped seas, following the coasts of Spain and Gaul or, by observing the stars, the flight of birds and clouds rising over warm land, steering a diagonal course from northern Spain across the Bay of Biscay. They rounded the Armorican Peninsula (Brittany) and put in at international ports on the south coast of Britain – Mount Batten in Plymouth Sound, Poole Harbour and Hengistbury Head in Dorset. Before any Roman had set foot in Britain, the great navy of the Celtic Veneti tribe, ‘whose knowledge and experience of all things nautical are second to none’, according to Caesar, patrolled the Atlantic seaboard in their high-prowed ships with stretched-skin sails. They levied a tax on all who sailed in their territorial waters, which implies not only registration procedures and written records but also accurate knowledge of tides, currents and sea lanes.

  The information was still there, but it was locked away in separate disciplines and professions, where it might as well have existed in different dimensions. A Roman surveyor in Agricola’s army would scarcely have recognized the mental geography of his commander. No trader who had followed the rivers of Gaul would have believed, as Strabo did, that the Seine had its source in the Alps. Maps did exist: Tacitus, Pliny and Strabo were obviously thinking of particular maps when they described Britain as ‘a double-headed axe’, Italy as ‘an oak-leaf’ and Spain as ‘an ox-hide’, but they were describing the maps themselves rather than the reality they depicted, as though expecting the painting of a pudding to serve as a recipe.

  The essential problem was practical rather than theoretical. In order to obtain accurate working measurements using the technology of his time, Eratosthenes would have had to assemble a team of intelligent, well-educated observers and station them at more or less regular intervals over a large part of the world. The observers would have been thoroughly trained in the sciences of measuring, surveying and astronomy. They would have had at their disposal a reliable communications system for transmitting the data. So that their results could be cross-checked and coordinated, they would have remained in position like parish priests for many years. The map-making expeditions of the Cassini family in the eighteenth century used ninety-five geometers to cover most of the area of modern France, but they had telescopes, magnetic compasses and sextants: at the very least, an expedition which lacked such technological refinements would have had one fixed observer for each triangulation point.

  Ideally, the scientific body that collated the results would have had access to older, precisely dated records of eclipse
s. The organization would have been centralized or able to meet at regular intervals in a central location. It would have adhered to a strict code of scientific conduct that prevented it from allowing the temporary prestige of a tribe or a city from influencing the eternal truth of the survey. It would have operated in a period of relative political stability, or been able to call upon military protection. Above all, unlike the Cassini expeditions, it would have enjoyed an uninterrupted source of funding. With all this, a wonderfully accurate map of vast regions might have been created. For someone in Eratosthenes’ position, such magnificent efficiency would have been the dream of a madman.

  7

  The Druidic Syllabus, I: Elementary

  They had all heard about Druids but never seen one before. Diviciacus the Aeduan stood before the Roman Senate, leaning on his shield, and uttered the outlandish words with such eloquence that the interpreter was probably a distraction. Five years later, in 58 BC, in the midst of a savage war, Diviciacus would embrace his friend Julius Caesar with tears in his eyes, pleading for the life of his rebellious brother. Caesar would take the Druid’s right hand and, comforting him, accede to his request. This was a man who possessed the art of inspiring an audience. The senators listened to what they already knew: somewhere beyond the Alps, great movements of tribes were disturbing the delicate peace. Wild Germans – ‘whose way of life’, said the speaker, ‘cannot be compared to that of the Gauls’ – had been hired by the Aedui’s rivals, the Sequani and the Arverni. Now, the German mercenaries had turned on their employers and were threatening to bring hordes of ‘untamed, barbaric men’ across the Rhine. The Aedui feared a massacre.

  As ‘friends and kinsmen of the Roman people’, the Aedui were important allies. Their name was familiar to most educated Romans. They were the ‘Fiery Folk’ or the ‘People of the Hearth’, who lived in a river port on the Arar (the Saône) and in a mountain fastness girt with a wall twice the height of a Celtic man – or three times the height of a Roman – and six kilometres long. Like the Romans, the Aedui claimed Trojan descent, and there was something of the purity of the age of heroes in the orator’s braided hair, the lavish gold ornaments pinned to his woollen cloak, and his archaic pronunciation of place names. The quaint designs on his oblong shield might have been the faces of small animals tempted by an enchanter out of the wood and metal and fixed to the surface. The Senate would seriously consider granting the Aedui military assistance. Diviciacus was a barbarian and a Druid, but he, too, had a wife and children. He did not appear to be the kind of man who (as rumour suggested) would thrust his sword into a prisoner’s bowels and then studiously observe the pattern of his writhings to discern the will of the gods, and it was hard to imagine that tall and stately figure shinning up a tree under a six-day-old moon, the crescent of a gold sickle glinting, to cut the sacred mistletoe from the oak.

  Quintus Cicero had met Diviciacus at his older brother’s house on the Palatine Hill. ‘If there really are Druids in Gaul . . .’ Quintus had said. ‘Well, there are – because I know one!’ His brother Marcus was interested in divination – one day, he would write a book on the subject, from a sceptical, modern point of view – and what better house-guest could he have? The Druid claimed to know the art of looking into the future (he was after all a diplomat), but he used a combination of augury and ‘conjectura’, which suggested some rational inspection of the dubious evidence. Disappointingly, he had no tales to tell of human sacrifice. The practice must have died out in the olden days. The Druid, mirabile dictu, was a civilized, erudite man who could happily eat exotic food in a villa above the Roman Forum and write a eulogy of his host. He could discuss politics and law. He was an astronomer and a student of what the Greeks called ‘physiologia’ – the scientific study of nature. Few Romans could boast such a panoply of accomplishments. His only obvious fault, apart from his ignorance of Latin, was his younger brother, Dumnorix, who had married their widowed mother to a rich and powerful Biturigan, taken a Helvetian bride for himself, and was flirting with any tribe that might help him to the supreme command of the Gauls.

  Diviciacus, ‘the Avenger’; Dumnorix, ‘King of the Lower World’ . . . These Gauls had names that seemed to speak of the distant dawn of the Roman empire, when an army of Celtic warriors entered Rome and walked in silent parade through the streets beneath the Palatine Hill. On that day in 387 BC, the Eternal City had been abandoned by all but the old noblemen who sat motionless in their doorways. To the barbarian Celts, they seemed the living statues of gods, until one warrior, more foolhardy than the rest, reached out and stroked one of the long white beards. The old man retaliated with his ivory stick; the spell was broken, and the massacre continued until every Roman nobleman was dead. Even in the modern metropolis, more than three hundred years later, the old fears glowed like embers; there was something reassuringly farcical about those tales of Druidic practices. Later, the Romans would learn to fear the Druids – not the riddling, white-robed priests of a ridiculous cult, but the philosopher-politicians who could conjure vast armies out of the mist.

  Diviciacus, one of the few Druids known to us by name until the Hibernian magicians and Gaulish university professors of the fifth century AD, had endured a long journey to Rome. The shortest routes from Aeduan territory lay through the lands now controlled by German warriors. But Diviciacus knew the geography of Keltika like the plan of a temple. In 58 BC, he would devise for his friend Caesar ‘a circuitous itinerary of more than fifty miles’ through the difficult country between Vesontio (Besançon) and Mons Vosegus (the Vosges). To reach Rome in 63 BC, he would have travelled south along the valley of the Rhodanus, entering the Roman province in southern Gaul somewhere near Arausio (Orange). Turning to the north-east, he had climbed towards the snowy horizon on roads that ran alongside the rivers fleeing from the Alps, to Brigantium, and from there, in the footsteps of Herakles, to the Matrona Pass. As he descended into the land of vineyards, Diviciacus contemplated an uncertain future, but perhaps, as he thought of the wife he had left behind, the paths of his conjecturing also led him back in time, to the days when he had embarked on the first great journey of his life.

  Boys and girls who left for Druid school had already reached the age of reason. Some young people, said Caesar, go to the Druids of their own accord (‘sua sponte’). Others were sent by parents and relatives (‘parentibus propinquisque’): the phrase implies that several members of the clan, not just the immediate family, clubbed together to provide a scholarship. Some went to the Druids for a general education; others remained under Druidic tuition for twenty years before becoming Druids themselves. Roman writers assumed that the education was reserved for children of the aristocracy, but a protégé of Diviciacus called Viridomarus had ‘humble origins’, according to Caesar, as did the three generations of Druids mentioned by the poet Ausonius in the fourth century AD. No doubt it was an advantage to come from a good family, but the essential qualification was intelligence. With such a comprehensive syllabus, the Druidic education system was necessarily meritocratic.

  Those diligent, ambitious children of the Iron Age who ‘[flocked] to the Druids in great numbers’, said Caesar, subjected themselves to the longest education in the ancient world. A Greek education began when the boy was seven, and usually lasted no more than eleven years. A pupil of the Druids remained in full-time education for as long as it takes a modern student to progress from nursery school to a doctoral degree. The family would lose a useful, intelligent child, but the advantages were enormous: not only were Druids exempt from tax and military service, they also settled disputes concerning inheritances and property boundaries, and they had the power to excommunicate offenders by banning them from sacrifices, which was the worst of all punishments.

  No Druid school has ever been identified, perhaps because no one has looked for one. In AD 43, the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela claimed that ‘the noblest of the Gauls’ received their twenty years of Druidic education ‘in caves and secret woods’. This was
the civilized person’s fantasy of hermits’ glades and wizards’ glens accessible only by some Celtic equivalent of Platform 9¾. Apprentice Druids who required writing tablets, measuring equipment and medical instruments, not to mention board and lodging, would not have spent twenty years in a dank cavern or a sylvan hut, though some part of the syllabus may have involved a contemplative retreat or a spell of enforced intimacy with nature. The Druids were said by several ancient writers to follow the precepts of Pythagoras. One of those writers, Hippolytus of Rome, observed that ‘Pythagoras himself taught his disciples to be silent, and obliged the student to remain quietly in rooms underneath the earth’.

  Some remarkably early evidence of a school has survived. It was in the Aeduan town of Augustodunum (Autun), between the oppida of Cabillonum (Châlon-sur-Saône) and Bibracte (Mont Beuvray). An analysis of the roads around Autun has shown that the dunum was already an important hub before the Romans named it after Augustus. It was there, in AD 21, that ‘the noblest progeny of the Gauls devoted themselves to a liberal education’. Tacitus mentions this in passing in his account of the Gaulish revolt of that year. Since the Druids were considered a subversive political force and were subsequently outlawed by imperial decrees, it can hardly be a coincidence that the revolt began in a town where the ‘noblest progeny of the Gauls’ were receiving a liberal education.