The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  11

  Cities of Middle Earth

  The expedition to Delphi in 279 BC marked the high-water point of the Celtic tide. Less than a century later, the Celts of northern Italy were defeated by the Romans, who then advanced along the Mediterranean into southern Gaul. In 125 and 124 BC, Roman armies crossed the Matrona in the footsteps of Herakles. The ostensible aim was to defend their old allies, the Massaliots, against the troublesome tribes of the hinterland. In exchange, the Romans were granted a narrow strip of land running all the way from Italy to Hispania. In 123 BC, a Roman garrison was established below the oppidum of the Salyi at a place where hot springs bubbled up from the limestone. The place was named Aquae Sextiae after the Roman consul, Gaius Sextius Calvinus. Its modern name is Aix-en-Provence.

  A glance at a modern road map shows what a crucial position it occupies: a day’s march north of Massalia, the Salyi’s oppidum in the hills above Aix-en-Provence is one of the noisiest Iron Age sites in France. The nearby autoroutes lead to Italy by the coast, to the Alps by the valley of the Durance, and to the Pyrenees by the plain of the Crau and the Via Domitia. Two years after the creation of Aquae Sextiae, in 121 BC, all these arterial routes were controlled by Rome. A coalition of Allobroges and Arverni, led by the Arvernian king Bituitos, fought a Roman army near the town of Biturrita (Bédarrides): the name is Celtic and means ‘ford of Bituitos’.

  The site of the battle was probably chosen by the Gauls, since this is where the Heraklean Way crosses the Rhone. (This policy of fighting battles on solar paths was to have spectacular consequences in the Gallic War: here.) According to a legend recounted by Orosius in his History Against the Pagans (c.AD 420), Bituitos was confident of victory: ‘Seeing such small numbers of Roman soldiers, he boasted that they would scarce feed the dogs that he had with his army’. But the sun god failed to shine on the Celts, and the war dogs were rewarded with an unexpected feast of one hundred and fifty thousand Celtic corpses.

  46. Southern Gaul in 106 BC

  That year, the new Roman province of Gallia Transalpina was founded. The ancient path of Herakles was converted into a high-speed road – the Via Domitia – along which slaves and other vital necessities were rushed from Spain to Italy. Independent Gaul was now cut off from the Mediterranean and forced to deal directly with the Romans. No one, apart from the Druids, could have suspected that, even as the shadow of Rome fell over Western Europe, Celtic science and the sun god were creating their own heavenly masterpiece of social engineering.

  A generation or two after the founding of Gallia Transalpina, most of the territory that had belonged to Gaulish aristocrats was owned by Roman businessmen and veterans. Their names are dotted all over the map of southern France as though an enormous auction had taken place – which, in some parts, is what actually happened. The lands that Herakles had made safe for his sons and daughters were confiscated and privatized. A few Celtic place names survive. Most of them refer to gods and geographical features – Lodève, from luto (‘marsh’), Cers, from Circius the wind god – but they are greatly outnumbered by the names of Roman individuals: Loupian from Lupianus, Thézan from Titianus, Valras from Valerianus.

  47. The Romanization of southern Gaul

  With what remained of their estates, the natives were obliged to supply the conquerors with corn, cavalry and money. In some respects, little had changed: tolls and taxes had been collected long before the Romans, and there is no evidence that the Celts of Gallia Transalpina sank into the despondency of the vanquished. Some of them learned to speak Latin and to add water to their wine. Quite a few of those ‘Roman’ estates belonged to Gauls who acquired a new name when they became Roman citizens. Those who lived along the former Heraklean Way enjoyed the benefits of Roman enterprise as never before. In Narbonne, near a beautifully paved, slave-built section of the Via Domitia, the vaulted cellars of the horreum stored the grain, the wine and the olive oil that the new economy produced.

  As swiftly as meltwater from the Cévennes rushes over the dry riverbeds and covers the garrigue with flowers, some of this new wealth found its way into the Gaulish hinterland. Fifteen kilometres north-east of Narbonne, the pine-scented terraces of the oppidum of Anseduna38 look down on the coastal plain where a meticulous surveyor seems to have scored the Heraklean diagonal across the compliant fields. The place had been destroyed in the late third century BC, probably at the time of Hannibal’s invasion. When the Romans arrived, it was a ruin, but with the creation of the province, the old town was plumbed into the system of Mediterranean trade, and it sprang to life again. Oil lamps, glass bottles and imported tableware were suddenly everyday items. The finds displayed in the small museum at Ensérune paint a sunny picture of life in Roman Gaul – a hand-held sundial etched on a piece of Samian ware; round counters used in a game; clay legs, with holes for the threads, on which a child’s puppet danced to places that can only be imagined. One inhabitant of Anseduna had the daily pleasure, when she scooped up the last ladleful of food, of finding a three-dimensional ceramic frog grinning up from the base of the dish.

  The proconsul who stole the Delphic treasure in 106 BC did not find a cowed, colonial population: he had been sent to Tolosa to quell a revolt, and there were many other signs of lively resentment in Gallia Transalpina. The natives had to endure the thievery of corrupt officials, but some of them were educated and self-confident enough to take their complaints to Rome. One of the officials who had been lining his own pockets was Marcus Fonteius, governor of the province from 74 to 72 BC. He was tried in Rome and defended by no less an orator than Cicero. The Celts had evidently made a good case. Cicero felt it necessary to frighten the jury with the old clichés:

  Do you think that, in their military cloaks and trousers, they come to us in a humble and submissive spirit? . . . Far from it! They go strolling about all over the forum in high spirits and with their heads held high, using threatening expressions and terrorising people with their barbaric and inhuman language. . . .

  These are the nations that once marched so far from their homes, all the way to Delphi, to attack and plunder the Pythian Apollo, the oracle of the earth . . . These are the people who pollute their altars and temples with human victims. . . .

  Other nations, when they wage war, beg the immortal gods for their favour and indulgence; these nations waged war against the immortal gods themselves.

  The Roman colonization of southern Gaul was not a sign of inherent weakness in Celtic society. Until recently, French historians saw the dawn of Gallic civilization in the gleam of Roman armour coming over the Alpine passes; now, they stress the continuity of Celtic culture by referring to the imperial age of Gaul as ‘the Roman interlude’. The economic and social changes wrought by the Romans – or, indirectly, by the expansion of their empire – were incalculable. In Gallia Transalpina, there was a revolution in livestock breeding, irrigation and mining. This was partly the result of Roman expertise, but it was also a native response to new conditions. The best farmland had been taken by the Romans. The poorer soils had to be improved and turned to profit: there were taxes to be paid and wine to be bought.

  Some changes were already taking place when the Romans arrived. In the old days, material wealth had served primarily to enhance the prestige of kings: the Arvernian Bituitos had invested heavily in military equipment made of precious metals, while his father Louernios (‘the Fox’) had earned the gratitude of his subjects by marking out a banqueting zone larger than a city and laying on a public feast that lasted several days. Now, the coins that were minted by Gaulish tribes were tokens rather than treasures. Half a century before the rest of Gaul was conquered by the Romans, the most powerful tribes established a monetary union. This ancestor of the Eurozone should count as one of the most impressive achievements of what looked increasingly like a Celtic nation: the barbarian Celts had generated the political will, coordinated the tribal mints, and set exchange rates within Gaul and with the trading empires of Massalia and Rome.

  Con
quest and enslavement were not the inevitable prelude to civilization. The biggest change of all, which transformed the lives of millions of people from the Danube to the British Ocean, owed far more to the Celtic sun god and Druidic science than to Roman sophistication.

  The system of solar paths may have expressed the Druids’ love of mysterious patterns, but it survived and grew because it served several practical purposes. Its usefulness as a navigational aide-mémoire is obvious: by memorizing a few key locations and their place in the system, a Druid geographer (or any reader of this book) could function quite effectively as a talking table d’orientation. As a political and administrative tool, it could be used to organize territorial divisions and large-scale migrations, and because it was based on simple equations and celestial geometry, it gave the Druids’ judgements the irrefutable authority of cosmic truth. It had the solidity of a religious conviction: by imposing a graceful harmony on the physical geography of western Europe, it made it easy to believe that Middle Earth was not a chaotic arrangement of elements but a deliberate, divine creation.

  The paths of the sun joined the source of the Rhone to its delta, the Alps to the Pyrenees, and the Mediterranean to the Ocean. They coordinated the four principal gateways to the east (the Matrona, the Poenina, the pass of the Mediomatrici and the Col de Tende), the four headlands at the ends of the earth (the Sacred Promontory, Fisterra, the Île de Sein and Belerion), and the sources of fifteen major rivers.39 The whole system might have been the plan that Herakles had carried with him on his travels when he was reorganizing the landscape of western Europe. (See fig. 41.)

  But when Druid theologians contemplated this vast concurrence of terrestrial geography and celestial mathematics, they must have wondered: was this a proof of divine providence or an intellectual dream that could never quite come true? As artists and scientists, they knew that every product of the human mind is an approximation, that for every radiant coincidence there are a thousand dull discrepancies, and that, in the world of mortal beings, physical reality would always have the last word.

  Some of the points of intersection are geographically significant – the tidal island of Loon Plage, the ford at the Marduel hill, the crossings of the Rhone at Tarusco and Biturrita. More often, the lines meet at a point where geography shows no particular inclination to commemorate the path of a sun god. The line from Châteaumeillant to the Rhone delta passes by the sacred mountain of the Arverni, the Puy de Dôme, but without bisecting the summit; instead, it crosses a spring called ‘Source de l’Enfer’, which, despite its name (‘Hell’s Spring’), is just a trickle of water. Châteaumeillant itself is hardly the most spectacular omphalos, and although Alesia stands on a hill, there are, as Caesar observed, several ‘other hills of a similar height’ all around it. Even from the window of the slow train from Dijon to Paris, it is easy to miss the mother-city of the Celts. The system of solar paths could never be a flawless reflection of the upper world, because, after all, one might suppose, even the Druids couldn’t move mountains . . .

  Despite their unobstructed view of one of the most important historical sites in France, the inhabitants of the middle section of the Rue des Remparts in Châteaumeillant keep their west-facing shutters closed, even in the daytime. On the other side of the narrow street, a steep bank of turf scalped by a mowing machine rises to the height of a second storey. On top of the bank, a motionless tidal wave of vegetation looms over the rooftops. The whole monstrosity, including the hedge, is almost fourteen metres high.

  This gargantuan earthwork is the surviving eastern edge of one of the first towns or oppida to appear in Europe north of the Alps. About two hundred oppida have so far been identified, from Britain to the Danube Basin. Some were the size of a small field, a few were larger than Hyde Park or Central Park, but most are so distinctive that they can occasionally be detected on a relief map or spotted in a landscape without prior knowledge of the archaeological record. A typical Celtic oppidum occupies a flattish area of high ground which seems to have been designed by nature as a world apart. A river, a ravine or the sea almost surrounds the plateau; the remaining side is barricaded by a geometrically regular ditch and a bank of earth. Sometimes, there are heaps of tumbled stones that once formed a decorative rather than defensive wall.

  48. Oppida of Bohemia

  Only a few oppida have been excavated. They were divided roughly into residential, industrial and religious districts. Unlike the smaller, sporadically occupied hill forts which served as places of refuge, the oppida were densely populated throughout the year. For some reason, towards the end of the second century BC, people whose ancestors had always lived in open settlements and isolated farms began to come together and live like town-dwellers. The process of proto-urbanization may have started in the east, after the expulsion of the Celts from northern Italy (c. 180 BC): it was then that the Boii developed a system of oppida to the north of the Danube (fig. 48). The historical evidence tells a slightly different tale. In Italy, the Romans were able to defeat an entire tribe by capturing a single, central place, which suggests that previously un-nucleated populations were already coalescing and, in the literal sense, becoming civilized. In areas such as northern France, Wales and northern Britain, where older, rural ways of life persisted, military conquest was slower and more costly, requiring the destruction of farmland and the felling of entire forests.

  The first oppida in Gaul emerged about half a century after the Bohemian oppida. The earliest, which include Bibracte and Châteaumeillant, were practically unoccupied until the end of the second century BC (c. 110). Some were founded just a few years before the Roman invasion of 58 BC, which is why they were once thought to have been built as fortresses. But most of the oppida were far too large to be defended, and their walls were designed for visual impact rather than solidity. They were not thrown up in a panic but developed in a leisurely fashion over a generation or more. It was only after seven years of fighting Roman armies that the Gauls, ‘for the first time’, says Caesar, defended a position by building fortifications.

  The oppidum-planners seem to have designed their new towns with religious rather than military criteria in mind. They built them around ancient, pre-Celtic shrines that dated back to the Bronze Age or even to the Neolithic. Perched on their promontories and plateaux, the loftiest oppida have the impressively impractical appearance of alien settlements drawn by science-fiction illustrators. They are, in fact, as mysterious as they look. Anyone who has clambered up an artificially steepened hill to see the site of an Iron Age town will have asked the question that archaeologists have been trying to answer for several decades: why did Celtic people of the late Iron Age make their towns so absurdly inconvenient when they were supposed to function as markets rather than citadels? The impetus for their creation was apparently economic: the first Gaulish oppida coincided with the creation of a Gaulish currency, and from the very beginning they were used as centres of trade and mass-production (fig. 49). Why, then, did they abandon the earlier settlements at river confluences and road junctions, and force themselves to negotiate enormous physical obstacles in order to import their raw materials and export their products?

  Another puzzle can now be added to the mystery of the inconvenient oppida. The Druidic network, which incorporates the chief oppida of about forty tribes, dates back to the fourth century BC: the solar paths match the migrations to Italy and reflect the power structure in Gaul at that time. Yet the oppida barely existed before 110 BC. Paradoxically, the solar paths are at least three hundred years older than the oppida they bisect.

  In 2004, a French archaeologist proposed a theory to explain the impracticality of the Gaulish oppida. This theory also happens to provide a solution to the second puzzle, and it should now be considered the likeliest explanation. When the oppidum-dwellers moved to their new homes, they were moving to sites that already had a history. The shrines that lie at the heart of the oppida were many centuries old. The history-loving Celts would have told stories about
these hallowed sites, just as the evocative ruins of their own oppida later became the subjects of medieval legends which attributed their construction to Caesar, Attila or the Devil.

  49. Coins found on the plateau of Gergovia

  The provenance of coins found on the plateau of Gergovia suggests the commercial sphere of a major oppidum.

  The island-worlds that looked down on the surrounding land had been sacred to the ancestors of the oppidum-dwellers. There were thousands of such places, marked by standing stones, burials or derelict wells. Some of those charismatic sites may still have served their ancient purpose in the darkest days of the Gallic War, when the oppida lay in ruins or were occupied by Roman troops. As the tribes were plotting the great uprising of 52 BC, Caesar learned that ‘the leaders of the Gauls were convening councils in woods and remote places’.

  With the founding of the Roman province of Gallia Transalpina and the sudden surge in trade, it became essential to bring together the artisans and skilled labourers who were scattered about the countryside like weavers and blacksmiths before the Industrial Revolution. Some of the ancient holy places were chosen – no doubt by divination and astronomical measurement – to be the sites of the new towns. In this way, instead of being forced to congregate in the Iron Age equivalent of a soulless ‘new town’, the workers would be induced to follow the same steep paths as their pious ancestors. At first, the new workshops and foundries were devoted to the building of the oppidum – the temple and houses, the looming, lavish wall of carved beams and iron spikes – but when the oppidum was completed, the factories would be turned over to the manufacture of tools, weapons, textiles and jewellery that would be traded and sold all over Gaul. By then, the rural population would have discovered the delights of civilization. Within a few years, the streets of the oppidum would be paved with the sherds of wine amphorae that visitors still trample underfoot today.