The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  To a Druid, this hieroglyphic would have had the luminous logic of a work of art. What Livy and the other historians were unwittingly describing was a solar expedition reminiscent of Hannibal’s march through Iberia and Gaul. With the Druidic map as a guide, we can now retrace the exact route of the Celtic migration led by Bellovesus. The bisecting solstice line from Mediolanum Biturigum (the dotted line on fig. 41) leads past the great temple of Lugh on the Puy de Dôme (here) and across the stony plain of the Crau, where the enemies of Herakles were pelted with boulders from the sky. It ends at the bay of Massalia and the oppida by the inland sea of Mastromela which is now the Étang de Berre. (One of those oppida, Saint-Blaise, is considered the likeliest location of the lost city of Heraklea near the mouth of the Rhone, which had disappeared by the time Pliny heard of it in the first century AD.) (See the map on this page.)

  The Mediolanum line meets the Aquitanian–Armorican line (here) at a point marked on ancient itineraries as ‘Trajectus Rhodani’. Here, at the meeting of roads from Mastromela and the Matrona, was one of the major crossings of the Rhone, where Tarusco (Tarascon) looks over to the oppidum of Ugernum (Beaucaire). In the Middle Ages, Beaucaire was the site of the biggest international fair in Europe, and it was already a trading hub in the fifth century BC, when wine amphorae were arriving from Massalia and Greece. Herakles himself had been there: ‘Tarusco’ recalls the name of the monster Tauriscus who, according to the Druids’ account of Gaulish origins, was defeated by Herakles on his march through Keltika. The line then continues to the bay of Olbia (Hyères), a trading port founded by Massaliots in the fourth century BC.

  Here again, we pick up the trail of the migrants. Olbia is mentioned in a different context by Strabo as one of four Massaliot cities that were ‘fortified against the tribe of the Sallyes and the Ligures who live in the Alps’. The Sallyes are the same as the Salyi, the troublesome tribe that was defeated by the followers of Bellovesus when they came to the aid of the Greek colonists. Olbia was closely linked with a native oppidum on the neighbouring hill, and the excavator of Olbia suggests that in defending themselves against the attacks of Ligurians, the Massaliots cooperated with Celtic tribes who had settled on the coast.

  It now appears that when the Bituriges and their compatriots contemplated the distant Alps from the territory of the Tricastini, they were looking through the eyes of the sun god. On their solar path to the lands of the Salyi and the Massaliots, they would have crossed the river Gard just downstream of the ford where the Roman aqueduct, the Pont-du-Gard, still stands. At that exact spot, they found themselves for the first time on the Via Heraklea. The point of intersection is marked by the oppidum of an unknown tribe. Its crumbling masonry, on the Marduel hill opposite Remoulins, is the oldest known urban enclosure in eastern Languedoc (c. 525 BC). This was one of the three most important towns of the region. It stood at the meeting of two major roads and guarded the ford.

  Fording the river, the travellers turned onto the Via Heraklea and climbed towards the limestone hills. The Heraklean line passes three small oppida33 and then the Dentelles de Montmirail as it heads for the Alps. Since the only way through the mountains was the col forged by Herakles, the migrants would naturally have taken his solstice route across ‘the pass of the Taurini’. This is the pass more commonly known as the Matrona or Montgenèvre. After entering Italy through this Heraklean gateway, they would have followed the river Duria (the Dora), which flows from the Matrona and alongside the Heraklean line to Arona, the cultural crossroads of Iron Age Gaul, Switzerland and Italy (here).

  Picking up the winter solstice line from Alesia, they then travelled south-east to the point at which the river Ticinus (the Ticino) leaves Lake Maggiore. Somewhere near that river (the site is unspecified), the migrants defeated the Tuscans. The battle is thought to have taken place in the river basin between Castelletto sopra Ticino and Golasecca. Both places stand on the solstice line.

  The journey of the first contingent of pioneers is almost over: the Alesia line – a long cord attached to the mother-city of the Celts – at last leads directly to the Mediolanum which is now the city of Milan.

  42. Solstice lines at the Marduel oppidum

  Distances from the intersection are given in kilometres.

  A few weeks or several years later, the reliability of the system having been tested and proved, other tribes follow the same Druidic route-map, pushing further into north-eastern Italy and founding Celtic towns along the route of what became the Via Aemilia. ‘South of the Padus, in the Apennine district, beginning from the west, the Ananes [an unknown tribe] and then the Boii settled. Next to them, on the coast of the Adriatic, the Lingones, and south of them, still on the sea-coast, the Senones’ (Polybius). The Libui and the Saluvii settle in the vicinity of the Ticinus near the site of the battle (Livy).

  The Lingones, whose Gaulish capital stands on the line from Alesia, seem to have been offered a shortcut by the Druid augurs. The account recorded by Livy says that the Lingones crossed the Alps by the Poenina, which is now the Great St Bernard. Since the Poenina was impassable for wheeled vehicles (according to Strabo), one of Livy’s editors suggests that this was a mistake for the Matrona, but the map of Middle Earth shows that a crossing by the Great St Bernard, though arduous for humans, would have been perfectly acceptable to the gods: for the Lingones, as for the Remi and the Catalauni, the most direct solar route to the Heraklean Way passes over the Great St Bernard.

  The final episode of the great migration, reported by Diodorus, involved the Senones, who came from the area of Sens, a hundred kilometres south of Paris. For some reason, the Senones had been assigned the territory furthest from the Alps. Coming as they did from the chillier part of Burgundy, they found the Adriatic intolerable: ‘Because the region was scorching hot, they were distressed and eager to move, and so they armed their younger men and sent them out to seek a land where they might settle.’ Several thousand young Senonians then marched off to Clusium (Chiusi).

  Meteorologically, it was a bizarre choice by the sweltering Senones: Clusium lies more than half a degree of latitude to the south, but it also lies on a solstice line that reaches the coast directly between the two Senonian settlements of Ancona and Senigallia. From Clusium, the young Senones set off for Rome.

  This took place in 387 BC, about ten years after the likely date of departure from Mediolanum Biturigum. Perhaps the silent procession of Celtic warriors into Rome, along the streets lined with old bearded noblemen, had been part of the original plan, just as Delphi was the target of one of the later groups (here). For the Romans, the invasion was a punitive raid provoked by the killing of a Gaulish chieftain at Clusium by a Roman ambassador. But from the vantage-point of the Druids and the sun god, Rome was a logical terminus of the labyrinthine route. Diviciacus may have known this when he stayed there with Cicero in 63 BC: the winter solstice line from Mediolanum Biturigum, with an imperceptible variation of eight-hundredths of a degree or 1/4500 of a circle, leads to the Palatine Hill. To be absolutely precise, it leads to the site of the future Vatican City.

  The precision of the Druidic system is quite amazing. The capitals of the tribes that took part in the great migration appear as though by magic on the grid of solstice lines: the Aedui, the Arverni, the Aulerci, the Bituriges (represented by Mediolanum Biturigum), the Lingones and the Senones. Not all the pre-Roman capitals are known, but the oppidum of Vindocinum (Vendôme) on the Mediolanum Biturigum line and the oppidum-like site of Châteauneuf-sur-Loire on the meridian might now be considered possible early tribal centres of the Cenomani and the Carnutes.34

  The weirdly accurate projection of the upper world onto Middle Earth confirms what several historians have suspected: that many tribes other than those mentioned by Livy and Polybius took part in the migration. No fewer than thirty-seven tribal centres occur on the lines, which implies a coordination of the population on a huge scale. Some of those tribes may have joined their neighbours or assisted the migrants who passed throug
h their territories. The Ambiani or their fourth-century predecessors, for instance – whom Livy may have confused with the Ambarri – clearly belong to the same network: the bisecting solstice line from Alesia passes within a few metres of the thatched Gaulish house at Parc Samara and leads exactly to the western entrance of the oppidum.

  This beautifully choreographed diaspora is a stunning example of the Druids’ belief in ‘the power and majesty of the immortal gods’ (here). First came the myth, and then, by a deliberate process of religious and scientific observance, the reality. It proves that the migration legend was not a retrospective fantasy, a heroic tale told after the event. The legend was a faithful record of the original plan. This is not such an unusual pattern of collective behaviour: wars and migrations are often inspired by myths and national legends. But the sheer scope and accuracy of the Celtic enterprise are unparalleled.

  Until now, it has been impossible to show exactly how divinatory calculations determined historical events. The Druids who directed the tribes were not fraudulent conjurers who made a nation’s destiny depend on the twitch of an entrail or the parabola of a bird’s flight. They were the coordinators of an immense work of art that was one of the most ingenious and effective federal systems ever devised. It gave the tribes a view of Middle Earth that had once been the prerogative of the gods and that would not be seen again by earth-bound mortals until the cartographic marvels of the Renaissance.

  The standing stones of ‘Celtic’ Brittany, which belong to a much earlier civilization, represent a more localized form of organization. At Carnac, prehistoric menhirs march towards the solstice sun in approximately aligned avenues hundreds of metres long. But the Druidic alignments were something quite different from those lumbering, labour-intensive sun-paths. Though some sections of the lines, like parts of the Via Heraklea, would eventually be materialized as roads (here), they existed primarily as intellectual abstractions, created by mind instead of muscle. They were the avenues and henges of a new age in which science and technology were the means of discovering the designs of the living gods.

  ‘Hi terrae mundique magnitudinem et formam, motus caeli ac siderum et quid dii velint, scire profitentur.’35 Under the scientific direction of the Druids, history became the visible expression of the gods’ will. But the will of the gods is not identical with the desires of human beings. The coordinated colonization of northern Italy and the capture of Rome – the city that lay at the end of the winter solstice line from Mediolanum Biturigum – were the catalysts that stimulated the expansion of a Roman empire. Perhaps the Druid augurs knew that, some time in the distant future, Alesia the mother-city would be the site of a great battle. They believed that one day, the sky would fall and the earth be destroyed by fire and water. When they brought the heavens down to earth, they made the Celts the servants of the gods and the agents of their own destruction.

  10

  The Forest and Beyond

  We left Segovesus and his band of migrants marching glumly towards the enormous Hercynian Forest. While the tribes led by his brother Bellovesus were basking in the vineyards of northern Italy, a more obscure but even grander odyssey was under way. It covered such a vast area that the Druidic calculations were inevitably less precise. Yet the trajectories of this other mass migration show the same adherence to the sun’s course, even two hours of daylight east of Mediolanum Biturigum, to the centre of the classical world and the shores of another continent.

  The name of the Hercynian Forest, first recorded by Aristotle in 350 BC, is Celtic – ‘Ercunia’, or, in the very old days, before the language had changed, ‘Perkwunia’, meaning ‘oak’. The other word for ‘oak’ was ‘dru-’, as in ‘Druid’. Ancient Celtic seems not to have distinguished different species of quercus, and so the two words must have referred to the tree in different guises. The Ercunian was the wild, uncultivated oak, the centenarian giant that had never spread its lattice shade in a Druid’s grove and whose acorns fed animals that had never seen a human being. Its domain was larger than an empire. The breadth of the forest, Caesar learned, was nine days for someone travelling without baggage, but its length was a matter of conjecture – sixty days, according to Pomponius Mela, more if Caesar’s information was correct. The forest began in the lands of the Nemetes, the Helvetii and the Rauraci who lived along the Rhine. Some people from that part of Germania had trekked through the tangled gloom for sixty days but had never reached the other side, nor even found a creature who could tell them where it ended.

  ‘Impervious to the passage of time’, the Hercynian Forest was thought to be as old as the world itself. Remnants of what was once the largest natural feature in Europe survive in patches of woodland and forest. The town of Pforzheim, which is now the northern gateway to the Black Forest, was once Porta Hercyniae. Some of the migrants led by Segovesus would have passed through the Bavarian or Bohemian Forest which marks the borders of Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. The names, ‘Bavaria’ and ‘Bohemia’, are mementos of the restless Boii tribe, who took part in so many Celtic migrations that no one knew for sure – perhaps not even the Boii themselves – where their homeland had been.

  The forest followed the north bank of the Danube, and then, in the lands of the Dacians, near the western edge of the Carpathian mountains, it ‘turned left’, according to Caesar’s information, away from the river. It stretched so far that it ‘[touched] the fines [‘territories’ or ‘borders’] of a great many nations’. (The word ‘fines’ suggests that, like other forests, it served as a buffer between tribal groups.) There is only one other shred of evidence: a tribe that settled near the bend of the Danube in the Roman province of Pannonia (western Hungary) was called the Hercuniates. The ‘Folk of the Hercynian Forest’ are described by Pliny and Ptolemy as a ‘civitas peregrina’, a wandering tribe that had come from foreign parts. Three sites have been identified as oppida of the Hercuniates in the region of Lake Balaton, but it would be as hard to retrace their footsteps through the forest as it is for an archaeologist to distinguish an Iron Age settlement from mounds raised by fallen trees and rocks assembled by their clawing roots.

  Into this sunless expanse the Druids sent Segovesus and his followers, condemning them and their descendants to a diet of berries and beer. Sailors adrift on the ocean are surrounded by clues to their whereabouts; a traveller in a forest the size of half a world is confined to small dark spaces that endlessly recur like the scene of a nightmare. The guiding stars are eclipsed by branches and blurred by the breath of the forest. A stranger in Hercynia could navigate only by the soft cloak of mosses on the north face of oak trunks and by the diffuse glow of the dawn. Sometimes, there was a hill from which to take a sighting, or a moonlit clearing where sawn trunks showed where hunters had tried to catch the jointless elk. According to Caesar, there were ‘vague and secret paths’ through the forest, but Pomponius Mela described it as ‘invia’ (‘trackless’). Beyond the Rhine, the solar route-map seems to be of little help, though it is hard to believe that the Biturigan Druids sent a royal prince and thousands of migrants blundering off into totally uncharted territory.

  From Mediolanum Biturigum, the solar direction assigned to Segovesus would have taken him to the east-north-east. Recounting the same legend, Plutarch says that a group consisting of ‘many myriads of warriors and a still greater number of women and children’ ‘crossed the Rhipaean mountains, streamed off towards the Northern Ocean, and occupied the remotest parts of Europe’. The mythical Rhipaean range lay somewhere to the north in whichever inhospitable clime ancient writers chose to place it. The crucial detail is that Segovesus, like his brother, crossed a range of mountains. The east-north-easterly solstice line from Mediolanum would have taken him to Alesia and across the Vosges by the pass of the Mediomatrici, mirroring Bellovesus’s crossing of the Matrona. From there, it was a short distance to the land of the Nemetes (‘The People of the Sky Sanctuary’), who, in Caesar’s day, lived on the western edge of the forest. (These routes are shown in
fig. 43.)

  The Mediolanum–Alesia solstice line passes within five kilometres of Speyer (the Roman Noviomagus Nemetum). Crossing the Rhine, the migrants would then have entered the Odenwald south of Heidelberg. Unless they journeyed on to the north and vanished into parts of Europe that were never Celtic, they would have turned to face the rising sun of the winter solstice: the line that runs exactly one hour of daylight to the north of the Alesia line passes through the Bohemian Forest. After an age that was only a short time in legend and the life of the forest, a group of migrants led by a descendant of Segovesus arrived at the place which is now the capital of Slovakia. In the second century BC, on the hill where Bratislava Castle looks down on the Danube, an oppidum was built by the wandering tribe of Boii who had already colonized part of northern Italy.

  This far to the east, where the Danube begins to leave the trackless forest for the Great Hungarian Plain, there is only the faintest hope of finding any solar evidence of tribal movements. The earlier system of Mediolana, from which the Druidic system evolved, was almost exclusively Gaulish. Before the period of expansion, ‘Middle Earth’ may have been conceived of as the part of the European isthmus bounded by the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This was the Gaulish homeland of well-ordered rivers and mountains which Strabo described in a passage that seems to echo a lost Celtic legend: ‘The harmonious arrangement of the country appears to offer evidence of the workings of Providence, since the regions are laid out, not haphazardly, but as though in accordance with some calculated plan.’ Beyond Gaul, there are just a few outlying Mediolana, some separated from the others by hundreds of kilometres. The northernmost of these latter-day Mediolana is Metelen near the Dutch-German border. In all of Europe east of Switzerland, only two Mediolana are known: the town of Wolkersdorf north of Vienna, and a staging post near Ruse in Bulgaria on the Romanian border. To find traces of the Celtic network of ‘sacred centres’ in the Hercynian Forest and beyond is surprising. To find three of those rare sites on the same Hercynian trajectory is entirely unexpected.36